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ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE (Fayetteville) 31 July 06 Marion County snakes convene for second year (Julie Stewart)
Yellville: People in the know watch their step when evening falls at Chuck Miller’s place.
For the second summer in a row, Miller’s remote mountaintop home in Marion County has become a gathering place for copperhead snakes. He has counted roughly 40 copperheads since the first few appeared July 13, almost a year to the day of the snakes’ arrival last summer.
Their modus operandi is the same, too. The snakes mass beneath the same cedar tree as last year. They arrive suddenly about 8 p. m., stay for an hour or so, and then disappear.
“It’s just like they’re on a clockwork,” Miller said last week.
Also, once again, Professor Stanley E. Trauth is on the case.
Copperheads come together in the fall as they head to winter hibernation sites. They also congregate in the spring. But such group behavior in the heat of summer is quite odd, said Trauth, a professor of zoology and director of the Electron Microscope Facility at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro.
Nearly all the snakes on Miller’s property are males, Trauth said, “which is really unusual.”
“Those females are going elsewhere, utilizing a different region of the mountainside. That in itself is interesting, the lack of adult and juvenile females.”
Last summer, Trauth speculated that the snakes under Miller’s cedar tree might have been following scent trails left by other copperheads.
This year, he’s developing a new idea based on temperature differences in the area.
Temperature loggers placed on Miller’s property this summer by an ASU graduate student are producing interesting readings.
“There is a difference, a major difference, between certain areas of the habitat as far as temperature goes. So there may be a temperature cue taking place here, where the snakes are following a temperature gradient of some sort,” Trauth said.
“But we still don’t know,” he added, declining to be more specific about the various readings.
Miller, 36, moved to Marion County six years ago from Illinois, settling on a rugged, remote mountaintop between Flippin and Yellville.
The cedar tree where the snakes gather is about 150 feet from his two-story, cedar-shingled house.
An avid outdoorsman who has kept snakes as pets, Miller limits the nighttime movements of his 8-year-old son, Chase; his daughter, Paige, 9; and his dogs since the snakes began appearing again.
He has spent many evenings rounding up the copperheads and placing them in a barrel for Trauth’s graduate student to collect and take to ASU for more study.
“My boy just turned 8, and he’s helping us catch them. He mainly just holds the flashlight, but he’s out there with us,” Miller said.
Radio transmitters have been placed in the body cavities of two snakes, allowing Miller and the graduate student to track them. When one snake stayed in a brush pile for a considerable time, they investigated and found the copperhead and its transmitter inside a speckled kingsnake that had been lounging in the brush. The kingsnake had eaten the copperhead.
Copperheads are pit vipers, venomous snakes with a heatsensitive pit on their snouts that they use to sniff out prey. Rattlesnakes and cottonmouths are also pit vipers.
Trauth is an expert on Arkansas snakes. He co-authored The Amphibians and Reptiles of Arkansas (University of Arkansas Press, 2004) with biology professors Michael Plummer of Harding University in Searcy and Henry W. Robison of Southern Arkansas University in Magnolia.
Copperheads range throughout Arkansas. Known as “sitand-wait” predators, they stay in one spot and wait for their prey to come by. Copperheads also are responsible for most of the snakebites in the United States, according to Trauth’s book, but their bites are rarely fatal — with a death rate estimated at 0. 01 percent. The most frequent symptoms are pain, swelling, breathing difficulty and swelling.
Miller said he wished the general public had a better appreciation of snakes.
“I am not a tree hugger,” he said, adding that he would kill a venomous snake that threatened to harm him or others.
Still, Miller said: “Not all snakes are bad. If you don’t like the poisonous ones, at least let the ones that are not poisonous live.”
Trauth, meanwhile, expressed confidence that he and his students will solve the mystery.
“We’re following this event, and we’ll continue to follow it in the future, too. So we’ll know more and eventually, I’ll be able to saying something, I hope, for certainty about what’s going on.”
Marion County snakes convene for second year

BAXTER BULLETIN (Mountain Home, Arkansas) 04 August 06 Dozens of the snakes gather again in Yellville man's yard (Joanne Bratton)
Yellville : Each night, dozens of slithering copperhead snakes make their way to Chuck Miller's yard.
It's a phenomena that, as of yet, has no explanation.
This summer marks at least the second year that the copperheads have gathered in areas of Miller's remote property outside the Yellville city limits.
The gathering of snakes is something that doesn't surprise or bother Miller. He built a house in the middle of woods on a mountain and expects to be surrounded by nature, he said Thursday.
"All day they are all hidden," Miller said. "At night it's like someone let them out of a bucket."
The unusual situation has caught the attention of Stanley E. Trauth, a zoology professor with the University of Arkansas. This year, he and an ASU graduate student are tracking the movements of the snakes with tiny tracking devices.
"There's got to be a good reason," Trauth said. "We can hypothesize, but we don't know why."
The scenario is similar to last year.
After nightfall, the snakes began to congregate near a cedar tree and another clump of trees in Miller's yard, staying for a few hours. The snakes began gathering about mid-July, appearing every night for about one month until they hibernate.
At the last count, 20 copperheads have been tagged, although about 100 showed up on Miller's property last summer, Trauth said. Some snakes that were tagged last year have returned to the same area, he added.
A possible reason why the snakes gather in the area may be due to temperature, he said. Temperature loggers have been set around the property.
"We're keeping up with the temperature in a 24-hour cycle," Trauth said.
After Miller catches the snakes with a long-handled device, a graduate student takes them back to ASU, where a tracking device about the size of a grain of rice is inserted under the snakes' skin. The animals are then released back on Miller's property.
This year, something even more unusual happened.
A speckled king snake ate a copperhead that was tagged with a tracking device, Miller said. He found out the snake ate the copperhead when the graduate student used a transmitter and found the device inside the king snake, he said.
By observation, Miller has learned the snakes are not gathering to feed or to mate, he said. Almost all of the snakes that appear are males, Miller said.
Although Miller spends the majority of his time outside, he has never been bitten by a poisonous snake, he said. Still, catching the snakes for the research project gives Miller a charge.
"There's a chance of getting bit," Miller said. "You've got to have a little adrenaline rush."
Copperheads are venomous snakes in the pit viper family and thrive in a rocky, rugged habitat. The snakes' brown and tan markings help it blend in with the leaves and rocks of the Ozark region.
In the meantime, Trauth plans to continue researching the site to determine the reasons behind the unique circumstance.
"We're keeping up with this," Trauth said. "We're still studying the site and coming up with innovative ideas to record data."
Dozens of the snakes gather again in Yellville man's yard