By Nick Bowman, Gainesville-Tmes 6/22/17
There’s a den of snakes in Tiger, and all the South should be happy about it.
North
Georgia’s Orianne Society is dedicated to the conservation of reptiles,
amphibians and their habitat in the South and the nation, working to
preserve a rich natural history of the region’s less-loved but no less
important creatures.
Among
them is the eastern indigo snake, the largest snake in North America
and a threatened species throughout its range, now mostly limited to
southeastern Georgia and Florida.
Through
a combination of working with landowners, habitat restoration and
reintroduction, the society is hoping to create sustainable populations
of the animals in northern Florida and southern Alabama and Mississippi,
areas where it’s functionally extinct.
Eastern
indigos live for about 12 years in the wild. The black snakes with
burnt orange faces are unique to the American South and can travel large
areas in the summer in their search for food.
In
the winter, they group together in the burrows of the gopher tortoise
to survive the cold. To save the eastern indigo, The Orianne Society,
the largest reptile conservation organization in the United States and a
global leader in the work, is trying to preserve the tortoise.
That
work happens in the field, the longleaf pine forests and sandhills of
the Deep South and the Eastern Seaboard, but is headquartered in an
unsuspecting white house on Old Fruit Stand Lane in the little Rabun
County community of Tiger.
Visitors
to the wooden home are met with the slap of loose screen doors, the
tired creak of wooden floors and the angry shake of rattlesnakes. There
are eastern diamondbacks, canebrakes and pygmy rattlesnakes, venomous
critters native to the South, sitting in their enclosures against the
walls of the main room. And they’re loud.
Elsewhere in the building are the odd copperhead, king snakes, corn snakes and tortoises.
They
sit right outside, and in the case of the copperhead, inside the office
of Chris Jenkins, CEO and founder of The Orianne Society, who leads the
14-member organization working to preserve the eastern indigo snake in
the South.
“We
don’t do advocacy, lobbying, litigation, any of that,” Jenkins said in
early June. “We do boots-on-the-ground, get-your-hands-dirty type of
conservation.”
Usually that means starting fires.
In
the pre-European South, wildfires were routine in the brush underneath
the tall pines — so routine that the pines themselves are fire
resistant, according to the Alabama-based Longleaf Alliance, another
group dedicated to preserving the unique habitat.
With
homes, roads and other infrastructure in place, residents of the South
are less interested in letting fires sweep through their backyards and
across interstates. Jenkins and his employees use “prescribed fires” to
get “the most bang for the buck” in specific areas to restore longleaf
pine forests by clearing underbrush and consuming non-pine trees.
“Really
what we’re doing is managing that habitat for gopher tortoises,”
Jenkins said. “We’re improving the habitat; we’re trying to turn as much
as that habitat back to what it was pre-European.”
That
looks like savannah: open grasslands on sand with a low density of
large pine trees. Gopher tortoises survive on the grass and use the
nutrient-poor soil to dig their burrows.
“The
place that the snakes need – they absolutely need these tortoise
burrows or they cannot survive in Georgia — those animals are declining
and becoming more rare in their own right,” Jenkins said.
Habitat
restoration for the tortoise and work for the indigo snake are
happening side-by-side. Through a center in Florida, the society is
hatching indigo snakes for reintroduction in restored habitats in
Alabama and Mississippi. More than 100 snakes have been released in the
past eight years.
There
are between 40 and 70 snakes in captivity depending on when eggs are
hatching and when the snakes are being released back into the wild.
For now, the snakes are concentrated in the peninsula of Florida and in southern Georgia.
“You
could draw a line south of I-16 and east of I-75,” Jenkins said of
southeast Georgia, “and the majority of the remaining indigo snakes in
Georgia are within that southeastern block.”
Through
reintroduction and habitat restoration, the society is hoping to push
their range back across Georgia, through Alabama and into western
Mississippi.
They’re spending so much time on the two species because of how they affect the rest of the food chain in the South.
Tortoises
create shelter critical to a huge number of other animals. About 350
other species, from owls to snakes, use the burrows throughout the year,
according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
And Jenkins said the indigo snake acts as an “umbrella species” because of its tendency to cover large distances.
Because
other snakes make up half of its diet — eastern indigos eat anything
from other indigo snakes, copperheads and eastern diamondbacks — the
animal is a “predator of predators,” he said. They’re at the top of the
food chain, and to stay there they have to cover a huge area, sometimes
up to 3,000 acres.
“Just
imagine a tiger in India. A mouse in India is going to have a
relatively small home range,” Jenkins said. “Tigers, you can imagine,
are covering hundreds and hundreds and maybe thousands of square miles.”
That
travel moves them through different kinds of habitat and eating
different kinds of prey. A traveler that high on the food chain has
plenty of opportunities to be killed. If they’re still around, it means
the environment is in relatively good shape.
“Because
indigo snakes use such big areas, because they use different types of
habitats – they use these sandhills and then they leave the sandhills
and they go into the swamps — so to adequately protect and indigo snake
you need to protect its prey resources. You need to protect relatively
large areas and you need to protect different types of habitat,” Jenkins
said. “If you can effectively do that using this umbrella concept,
you’re just going to protect a lot of other things.”
Beyond
habitat destruction, many of the snakes are simply being killed by
people — gassed in burrows by hunters looking for rattlesnakes, run over
by cars or met in the backyard with a shovel.
Indigo
snakes, as with all snakes, are an important part of the Southern
ecosystem, and eat many of the nuisance animals people hate.
“You
wouldn’t go out in your backyard and shoot every songbird that you see.
People have this innate fear of snakes, but if you see a snake in your
backyard it’s no different than that songbird. It’s just another
animal,” Jenkins said, adding that “indigo snakes are snake predators.
(They) eat venomous snakes; they eat copperheads; they eat diamondbacks.
They eat all types of snakes. Oftentimes people are more concerned
about venomous snakes ... that is one value that oftentimes people put
on indigo snakes.”
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