Jackie's Garden
Copperhead Telemetry
7/4/2024 - A little over two months ago, I began working as a seasonal lab assistant for my state university. My one task is to find snakes. I work under a phd student who is doing a habitat study on copperhead snakes to see how electrical lines (which needed to be placed in mowed areas of forest habitat) effect the movements and behaviors of the snakes. Not to dox myself too much but where I live, copperheads are about to have their conservation status elevated to threatened. In my part of the study, there are 20 individual snakes currently being tracked. Each has a radio transmitter surgically implanted in its back which transmits a repeating radio signal using very low amounts of power. These signals are recieved by someone who knows their frequencies (me) and who has a small radio reciever, an antenna, and hiking boots. I go out 4 times a week to track these 20 snakes across the 4 active sites. Maybe I'll write a little step by step here - I wake up early as I live an hour and half away from the snakes, sometimes I pick up an intern who helps me take more intense data, either way I stop to pick up food on the way. I get to a snake site, put on my boots, extend my antenna, plug in the frequency of the first snake I want to track, and start hiking. If I'm lucky, I get the signal where I expect the snake to be (if not, I have to search semi randomly until I pick something up), from there I narrow down the location of the snake until I am a few feet away, then I look for it (sometimes it's visible, sometimes it's under a rock). I then take data - time, coordinates, temperature, humidity, etc... then it is on to the next snake. Usually I do half the snakes each day, so every week I track each snake twice. The work is extremely physically demanding. Each of the 4 sites is a mountain (well, one is an old quarry but it feels like a mountain) and hiking two of them each day in temperatures that can reach well into the nineties (f) with high humidities while carrying equipment is tough to say the least. One intern had to request to no longer help on the project because the repeated stress of the hiking was making an old back injury flair up. I myself feel like I am being pushed to my limits daily. But still I march on. I can complain a lot but I also do love it. It feels good to think that maybe this project can influence how future electrical lines are placed. Maybe it can save copperhead lives for future generations. I love the snakes, they really come in such a variety of colors despite each being clearly a copperhead. I feel as though each has it's own personality that me and my friend are deciphering as we track them each week. I see a lot of great wildlife and get to eat wild blueberries. I hope I'm doing a good job but I worry that my limitations are effecting the study. It honestly feels like too much work. Time will tell I guess. If you have a question about anything regarding the snakes, you can leave it in my guestbook. BTW, did you know copperheads give live birth? That they prefer an internal body temp of around 78 degrees (f)? That they can co-habitate in dens with other species of snakes like black racers? I love them.
