It's watch-your-step time once again in Arkansas, where the poisonous serpents are slithering about from border to border.
Among the state's venomous reptiles commonly subject to fear and loathing, the timber rattler ranks at the top.
Big snake, big bite, big venom, big trouble. The timber rattler's proper Latin designation, "horridus," pretty much says it.
Or maybe not. What if the timber rattler gets a bad rap?
A contrarian clue can be gleaned from the snakebites tallied by the Arkansas Poison Control Center in Little Rock, where bites, stings and poisonings are recorded from reports filed across the state. Last year, 128 Arkansans were bitten by snakes, according to Howell Foster, the center's director.
One victim probably shouldn't count because he was bitten while on a vacation in Baja, Calif.
Of the rest, Foster noted, 36 were bitten by nonpoisonous snakes. Big snakes of any species can be ornery -- they don't have to pack venom in their bites.
The larger number, however, were bites by the poisonous kind.
In all, 92 bites were attributed to pit vipers, Foster said, identifying the vipers found in Arkansas as copperheads, cottonmouths, pygmy rattlers and diamondback and timber rattlesnakes.
Of those 92 venomous bites, 63 involved copperheads, the state's most numerous and widespread pit viper. "About two-thirds of all bites each year involve copperheads," Foster noted.
Next in numbers were cottonmouths, which accounted for 16 bites. They are also numerous and common along waterways and around lakes. They are thought to be a sort of stand-your-ground kind of snake, unwilling to flee from threat. And yes, they can bite while underwater.
The most amazing statistic Howell revealed was about how these victims were bitten. Did the snakes chase the people? Jump out of brush at them? Pursue them through the forest?
"In any given year, about half of the bites happen to people who were handling the snakes," Foster said.
The victims tend to be young men, with alcohol consumption being a common contributing factor. It gives credence to the joke about a redneck's last words: "Here, Honey, hold my beer and watch this!"
The most unusual bite recorded last year happened to a man who had climbed into a tree, which proves that some poisonous snakes are good climbers.
As for rattlesnake bites in the state last year, the number was three, with Foster noting that rattlesnake bites commonly involve the small pygmy rattler. Due to its size and black splotchy markings, it doesn't look like a rattlesnake and is easily mistaken for a nonpoisonous species.
Considering the countless times Arkansas' 2.7 million residents venture into reptiles' terrain each year, the overall snakebite numbers suggest the odds of being bitten by any sort of snake are astronomically small -- stupid handling notwithstanding.
THE BIG BAD BOY
But what about the fearsome timber rattlers?
Their bites last year totaled ... one.
Foster said the low number was not unusual, even though these rattlers are relatively widespread in the state.
They are scattered throughout the Ozarks and are even more abundant throughout the Ouachita Mountains. Some have adapted to living in the lowlands of eastern Arkansas where they once were commonly known as "canebrake" rattlers and mistakenly thought to be a separate rattlesnake species.
The low incidence of timber rattler bites says much about the snake's shy and secretive nature. It brought to mind my own first encounter with the species about 15 years ago.
EYE-OPENER
The occasion came in the Madison County Wildlife Management Area where I met up with Steve Beaupre, a herpetologist with the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville who was in the midst of conducting a long-term research study of timber rattlers. With the species in decline in much of their native range, the study had been funded by the Natural Science Foundation and considered to have national importance.
At the time, Beaupre had captured about two dozen of the snakes and implanted them with radio transmitters to allow them to be tracked and monitored. He wanted to see how they survive, grow and reproduce from season to season and year to year.
Entering the woods on this spring outing, Beaupre employed an antenna hooked up to an electronic device that could pick up beeps from the transmitters in his research subjects.
It didn't take long for Beaupre's magic wand to pinpoint a rattler, albeit an invisible one in the leaf litter of a rocky hillside.
"I'm looking at a snake right now," he said.
"Where, uh, is he?" I asked.
"Right between us," Beaupre said, gesturing to the scant 3 feet of leaf-littered ground separating us.
I leaned down to peer and peer into the leaves for what Beaupre assured me was a male timber rattler about 30 inches long. Finally, I spied the vanilla-and-tan snout of the motionless snake poking from beneath the curl of a leaf -- no more than 2 feet in front of my face.
Using his snake-catching tool, Beaupre began uncovering the snake leaf by leaf until it was fully exposed. It never moved a muscle. Not even when Beaupre got his face down to ground level and only inches from the coiled snake.
"See how ornery they are," he said facetiously. "They are docile like this all the time, even in the warm months. I've stepped on them in the leaf litter and they don't do anything."
Even exposed, the snake was difficult to see with its perfectly camouflaged colors.
"This time of year, they are like little ghosts in the leaves," Beaupre said. "But even when one is coiled in the open, most people can look right at it and not recognize it for what it is."
Nevertheless, the exposed rattler was a beautiful sight to behold with its satiny hues of yellow and tan banded with dark saddles of chocolate. Its tail, however, was a distinctive velvety black, which explained why some old-timers referred to them as "velvet-tailed rattlesnakes."
A few years after that first encounter (while I was covering the outdoors beat for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Northwest Arkansas), I joined Beaupre on another snake-finding outing, and over the years have talked to him several times about his research.
When contacted recently, he was still at it, coming up on 20 years of studying the rattlers since 1995.
The facts he has learned over the years reveal that timber rattlers deserve more sympathy than loathing.
BELEAGUERED LIVES
Although predators themselves, timber rattlers are also prey for a lot of enemies besides man and machinery. Their natural predators include coyotes, bobcats, foxes and owls. The young, small ones are especially easy pickings when they are nearly immobilized by cool weather (reptiles gather the energy they need for movement from outside their bodies).
What the snakes do best is lie hidden and motionless for long periods of time. Deaf and nearly blind, the horridus members of the pit viper family rely on heat-sensitive pits on the sides of their heads to help detect their warm-blooded prey like mice, chipmunks and squirrels.
They can also use their forked tongues to chemically "taste" the presence of prey or where prey has recently passed. In addition, they are very sensitive to vibrations to alert them to the approach of a meal or possible danger. Accordingly, they are more apt to become agitated by the approach of a four-legged animal than a two-legged human.
Once a timber rattler has chosen a likely location beside a log or small game trail where a rodent or squirrel might pass, it coils up, goes still and waits with amazing patience, sometimes for days or even weeks. Beaupre has known snakes to starve to death waiting for a meal that never comes.
Fortunately, they don't need to eat often. "We had one male that met his energy requirements for an entire year on a meal of a single gray squirrel," the researcher noted.
Although timber rattlers can reach lengths up to 5 feet and may live as long as 30 years, not many get the chance to become big and old. The mortality of baby rattlers averages between 50 percent and 75 percent the first year, and the ones who survive grow very slowly thereafter.
As an example, Beaupre mentioned the recent recapture of two rattlers that were first captured and marked as babies 15 and 16 years ago. "One was a large male that had grown to 3 ½ feet during that time," he said.
If you did see a 5-foot timber rattler, you would be looking at a seasoned survivor.
Breeding normally takes place in July, which is when the males are most apt to be seen crossing roads or out in the open as they search for mates. The snakes are far from prolific breeders. It takes a female six to seven years to reach reproductive maturity and even then she will only reproduce every three years or so.
Beaupre has learned many other facts about the lives of timber rattlers, but the big picture is that their fate rises and falls with the abundance of rodents and squirrels, which in turn is dependent on the annual crops of acorns and other seed-producing plants.
Some years of the past decade were not kind to the snakes and their prey because of ice storms, a severe spring freeze and severely hot and dry summers.
During one bad year, Beaupre conducted an experiment: He fed rats to one group of snakes while letting another group fend for themselves. The fed snakes all survived, the others all starved to death.
WHAT TO DO
But back to those snakebites and a bit of first-aid advice from Foster about what he has learned from monitoring snakebite victims reported to the poison center:
"The No. 1 device for snakebite treatment is your car key," Foster advises. "Don't cut or suck on the bite, don't ice it or use a tourniquet -- just get medical attention as soon as possible."
And of course, to start with, don't attempt to be a hands-on snake charmer.
ActiveStyle on 07/21/2014