FORT WAYNE NEWS SENTINEL (Indiana) 08 September 03 Nothing rattles student researcher as she tracks snakes (Joey Holleman)
Garnett, S.C. (Krt): The rattlesnakes are out there, and Jayme Waldron knows where they are.
Or at least she knows where 10 of them were one day at the Webb Wildlife Center in Hampton County, S.C. With a lot of sweat and skill, and a little help from high-tech gizmos, she will find them again today. And most days for the next few months.
Waldron, a 27-year-old graduate student at Clemson, has committed three years of her life to a rattlesnake-tracking project designed to increase knowledge about the shy, mysterious creatures.
From March through November, the West Virginia native tromps through bug-infested swamps and briar-clogged forests listening for the telltale beeps on her radio receiver. She squints into shaded brambles and under rotting logs and rejoices when she spots what many folks have nightmares about - a coiled rattlesnake.
Waldron hopes to answer questions about how canebrake and Eastern diamondback rattlesnakes live, what types of vegetation they prefer to live in, under what conditions they are most active, and where and how far they go.
But the question most people might have for Waldron is why - why in the world - would you want to spend your time chasing rattlesnakes?
"They're awesome creatures," Waldron said, using an adjective that comes up often in her speech. "They're not vicious. They're very docile. You just have to respect them."
Through the years, rattlesnakes haven't gotten much respect. Even the state workers who managed the 5,866-acre Webb Center complex routinely killed every rattlesnake they spotted for decades. That changed in 1994 after Steve Bennett, a herpetology expert with the Department of Natural Resources, convinced his supervisors of the need to study the creatures.
The project started with catch-and-release work to get basic information on the species. The radio-telemetry tracking began in 1997 under Wade Kalinowsky, a Department of Natural Resources employee stationed at the Webb Center. Waldron came aboard as a summer technician in 2001 and fit in right away.
"She's one of the guys," Bennett said. "If you want to wade into the swamp, she jumps in the swamp with you."
Bennett had dreamed of taking the project to the next level with somebody devoting his full attention to the snakes. (Kalinowsky has other duties at the Webb Center, including helping with a similar project tracking gopher tortoises.) Bennett hooked up Waldron through a federal wildlife grant that pays her a student-research stipend through Clemson. Riverbanks Zoo helps pay for supplies.
Waldron jumped at the opportunity. A graduate of the University of West Virginia, she did her masters work on green salamanders at Marshall University. Reptiles fascinate her.
"My parents had a huge pond in their yard," Waldron said. "I grew up in that pond, catching tadpoles and salamanders."
Butch and Edna Waldron suspected their daughter would find a job that dealt with reptiles. Edna helped Jayme with her master's work gathering green salamanders not far from their home in Coalton, W.Va.
But when they first heard about the rattlesnake project, they had typical parental concerns.
"It was frightening in the beginning," Edna Waldron said. "But she has taught me so much about reptiles that I'm not frightened now."
She even traveled to Hampton County to tag along with her daughter on a tracking trip, though she admits she stayed several steps behind Jayme.
Most of the people Waldron works with on reptile projects are male, but that doesn't seem to affect her, or her co-workers.
"I don't feel like I'm the only woman out there," she said. "They don't treat me any differently."
It would be hard not to respect anybody who can put up with these work conditions. The mosquitoes swarm so thick in some areas that you have to cover your mouth to keep from inhaling them. Waldron figures the only reason she hasn't come down with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever is because the frequent tick bites have built up her immunity as booster shots would. She jokes that she has so many chigger bites she looks as if she has leprosy.
"Rattlesnakes tend to congregate in areas that aren't fun to walk through," she said.
Waldron's also allergic to some of the grasses and actually would prefer to track through a tick- and chigger-infested forest than a field of high grass. And she'd take grasses over yellow jackets or bees, which scare her witless. On days they track together, Kalinowsky playfully taunts her with yellow jacket references.
Waldron and Kalinowsky said the rattlesnakes at the Webb Center are relatively docile, and they have a Darwinian theory to explain that. For nearly 50 years, the managers of the property killed every rattlesnake they found. That meant snakes easily sparked to aggressive behavior - such as rattling when someone walked near - were killed. Those more inclined to hunker down and wait for people to leave survived.
In his years of tracking, Kalinowsky has been rattled at only twice. Waldron only once. Neither has been bitten.
Like Waldron, Kalinowsky thinks highly of the snakes. Most scientists will tell you snakes don't think; they simply react to the environment around them. Kalinowsky isn't so sure.
He tells the story of tracking a big rattler that killed three rabbits in a field in one day. It gorged on the kill and looked so fat it would explode.
The snake's range covered several miles that season. When it came out of hibernation the next spring, the snake headed back to the same field where it had killed the rabbits. Kalinowsky thinks it was a learned response to finding the rabbits in that field the previous year.
"They know what's here," he said. "They know every nook and cranny out here."
Hampton County and neighboring Jasper County are the rattlesnake hot spots in South Carolina. The rest of the snake-intrigued world found out about them in 1957 with the release of former Staten Island Zoo reptile curator Carl Kauffeld's seminal book "Snakes and Snake Hunting," which included a section on Jasper County. Suddenly, people flocked to the area from all over the country and world.
"It was recreational snake hunting," said Kalinowsky, who grew up in the area. "Hundreds of people would show up every spring."
The visitors loved rattlesnakes, maybe too much. They captured lots of them and took them home to private collections or herpetariums. Others ended up as the covering for boots and handbags. Kalinowsky is convinced the rattlesnake population is way down from the 1950s and '60s.
But it's hard to prove because nobody had done scientific studies of the local population before 1994. The data is growing quickly now.
Though it's too early in the study to draw conclusions on populations, there's no doubt the researchers are finding many more canebrakes than diamondbacks.
The Webb Center study is driving home the contention that diamondbacks are specialists and canebrakes are generalists. Diamondbacks prefer natural long-leaf forests. During the past century, much of the state's forestland has been converted to loblolly pines planted in rows to be harvested for the pulp and paper industry. Canebrakes don't mind the change; Diamondbacks do, Bennett said.
A group of scientists/snake wranglers helping with the study catch rattlesnakes in the early spring, when the snakes are less active and portions of the forest have been burned. The snakes, still groggy from months of inactivity, come out of their hiding places in stumps to bask in the spring sun, making it easy to catch them.
They are taken to the Webb Center office, where veterinarian Terry Norton inserts a radio transmitter about the size of a Tootsie Roll. Then they are set free where they had been captured. Waldron can find them by tuning a hand-held receiver to the snake's particular frequency and waving a wand antenna to pick up the signal.
The signal carries up to half a mile. If somebody doesn't track the snakes every day or two, they could move so far that finding them would be extremely difficult. That's why Waldron spends little time at her home in Clemson from March through November. (A big football fan, she attended only one Clemson game last season.) When she's away, Kalinowsky or others helping with the project will track the snakes.
Most mornings, Waldron straps on the chaps that protect her lower legs from possible bites, hops into her truck and pops in a bluegrass tape. A banjo picker, she imagines playing the tunes as the truck bounces down the Webb Center's system of dirt roads.
She stops near the spot where she tracked a snake the day before. Pulls the transmitter out of the rear of the truck and turns it to the proper frequency. If she's lucky, it beeps and she takes off into the woods. The beep grows sharper as she nears the snake, and the last few yards prove tricky.
Sometimes the snakes hide in bushes so thick it would be dangerous to clear the brush away. Sometimes they're under logs. Waldron tries to get visual verification of the snake's location at least every few days.
One day in mid-June, a female canebrake was found in the same bunch of downed scrub pines where she had been the previous nine days. She's likely pregnant, which prompts the females to hunker down. They will stay in one spot for as long as 40 days.
In addition to tracking the snake's movement, Waldron shines a laser device at it to determine its body temperature and the temperature of the surrounding vegetation. She also notes the air temperature and humidity, and she goes back after the snake moves on to register the types of vegetation in the area. Theoretically, that will help determine the best environment to ensure a healthy snake population.
One of the nine canebrakes Waldron is tracking this year is particularly large, more than four feet.
"He's so pretty - large and healthy," she said. "It's nice to know that there are big canebrakes out there that haven't been killed off."
Waldron has developed a fondness for the big guy.
"It breaks my heart when I can't hear his signal," she said. And sometimes she can't because the snake can cover a lot of ground in 24 hours. Then she has to drive a circle about a quarter of a mile around the latest spot where she found the snake. If that doesn't work, the circle moves out another quarter mile.
"He takes me some interesting places," she said of the big canebrake.
The big guy took up residence in a swamp in mid-June. That forced Waldron, who shrugs off mosquitoes most of the time, to don a bug shirt complete with hood and face cover. It's hard to hold the receiver steady when you're swatting at bugs, and even harder when you're breathing them.
About 20 yards into the swamp, she surprises the big guy as he slithers deeper into the swamp. She decides she already has disturbed him too much and doesn't chase him into the brush to get a temperature reading.
After five hours of tracking, Waldron has found seven of the 10 snakes. She decides to take a late lunch during the heat of the day and return to find the other two, including one that has moved so far Waldron couldn't pick up a signal anywhere near its last known hangout. Finding that wandering canebrake could keep her out in the swamp until early evening, when it's like happy hour for mosquitoes. Waldron doesn't dread the thought.
"I've got a great job," she said as she scratched the chiggers on her arm and neck. "This is awesome. I couldn't stand to work indoors."
Nothing rattles student researcher as she tracks snakes