Joshua Ginsberg 0:00
To come talk about snakes, and snakes was one of those topics. I'm gonna make sure I look at my notes. John is a research scientist and a zoologist at the New York State Natural Heritage Program, which is a part of SUNY ESF; SUNY Environmental Science...Forestry--I was gonna get it--up in Syracuse, and it's funded as well by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. So I'd like to tip my hat to DEC.
John is a snake expert, but he is a broadly trained naturalist with tremendous interest in nature in all the places that occurs. He is a bona fide urban ecologist, having done his PhD in urban ecology. But as we were talking before, he said, it's nice to be back out in the wild with critters that you don't see in cities. But he brings in a remarkable run of research to this evening; his PhD was focused on urban issues, his master's work worked on the eastern hognose snake, so he had a real passion for snakes from an early time. And I think my favorite job--I always like to look at people see these--my favorite job was John briefly served as a nuisance wildlife control and management specialist at JFK airport. I assume that means getting the geese off the runway? And other things? Nice way of putting it, okay. But also, you know, science communication relies on being able to summarize things very quickly and in a way that people understand without dumbing them down. And so my favorite title of a paper John was an author on was, "The Only Good Snake is an Identified Snake: The Power of Collective Knowledge". So with that, I will say, John, thank you for coming. And I very much look forward to hearing about both individual and collective knowledge tonight. So thank you very much.
John Vanek 2:00
All right. Thanks so much for having...is that on? We're good. All right. Thank you so much for having me. Today, we're going to talk about snakes of the Catskills. Let's see if I have this. There we go. So yeah, I'm a zoologist with the New York Natural Heritage Program. And even though we are a program of the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, which has the longest name of any university in the United States, according to Wikipedia, we're actually based in Albany, so it's a quick drive down to the Catskills, where we're able to focus on understanding where rare species and natural communities occur, and then providing conservation and management recommendations to agencies who can enact those conservation measures.
And so I just wanted to start off with two quotes from a book I really liked called "Snakes, Ecology and Conservation". The first one is by a psychologist. And he said that, "The conservation of snakes is more difficult than any other vertebrate group owing to the general bad reputation that snakes have in many regions of the world. They are loathed in ways that render rational discourse insufficient for their conservation...Perhaps we need a more aggressive approach in our outreach." And then later on in the book, the main editor said that, "Indeed, any field researcher working with snakes can verify the observation of Burghardt et al. that the public is at once fascinated and repelled by snakes, at least judging by the number of people who attend snake talks at local study sites." And I think those are two really great summaries of the problems associated with snake conservation. And the conservation of snakes is probably a broader topic than I can delve into today. But it's something we'll touch on as we go through each individual species that occurs in the Catskills and kind of summarize at the end. And one more quote that I always like, and I know it's this has been attributed to many different authors; I'm not sure exactly who the first person to say it was, but, "In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught."
And so I really appreciate that everyone is here today, or listening in online. Snakes are just amazing creatures. They're very misunderstood. And the more we learn about them, the more we can explain to our friends, you don't have to kill them every time you see them. And then we can pass it on to the younger generation. So this first picture here is me with much longer hair, with a very large timber rattlesnake that was part of a research study. So I studied timber rattlesnakes for an entire year from when they came out of their holes in the ground in April to the time they went back in those holes in October. And the way we did that was in the second picture. You see we have a snake that we brought to a veterinarian, and the veterinarian actually used anesthesia to put the snake under and put a radio transmitter inside the body cavity, sewed it up, painkillers antibiotics, let it heal up and then we can follow them or on for the entire year, tracking them every day to see what they're doing, what they're eating, where they're going. And you learn so much about these animals that you would never...it's hard to comprehend what they're doing when you're not watching them every single day. And we had radios in about 30 snakes. And so we got a real nice picture of what these snakes were doing. And I highlight that too, because, you know, they, we knocked them out, and we gave them painkillers. And that's because snakes are not worms, right, they're vertebrates like us; just because they don't have eyelids or external ears doesn't mean they can't feel pain. They can think, they have personalities that you can measure in laboratory. And research, which I'll kind of briefly cover at the end, is shown that they even can form kinship with other snakes, and that some of them are good mothers. And anyone who's had a pet snake knows they can absolutely be tamed and recognize their owner or caretaker.
But so these are fascinating animals. They're actually nestled in the lizard evolutionary tree, right. So they're more closely related to some species of lizards than other species of lizards are to other lizards, which is really, really interesting. And that's beyond the topic of this talk, as well. But hopefully you'll get a better appreciation for snakes after this talk and maybe you'll go check some of these cool books out at the library. And then the last picture, that's my daughter last year holding a northern water snake at a workshop I was hosting in Allegheny State Park. And what is just fascinating to me is that humans and snakes have millions of years of evolutionary history, almost as antagonists. You know, our ancestors, our primate ancestors, have an ingrained fear of snakes. And that's because we evolved in areas where there are lots of dangerous snakes, not just snakes that could bite you, but snakes that could swallow you whole. And we don't have that issue here in the United States, to the same extent, and in New York, much less than other places like the Southwest. So where we can I like to foster that appreciation for these amazing species. And what I've learned through many years of education programs, the younger you start kids with snakes, the easier it is to get them to hold it and touch it and say, "Oh, it's not slimy, it's smooth," or, you know, it's "They have hard scales, and they're not actually squishy." And then every single grade you go up, you get fewer and fewer kids who are willing to touch a snake for the first time. And so, yes, we haven't, we're evolutionarily hardwired to have that. That hesitation. But with education, you know, we--that's part of being human, right?--we overcome our evolutionary urges.
So, in the Catskill region, which I'll define briefly what I mean by that, we have 13 species of snake out of the 17 species that occur in New York. So almost all of them here, which is pretty cool. The only species we're lacking are the queen snake; the massasauga rattlesnake, which is a little pygmy rattlesnake that lives in the swamps of Syracuse and Rochester; the worm snake, which looks like a worm and lives on Long Island and a little further south in the Hudson Highlands; and a weird Midwestern garter snake species that just peeks into the Allegheny region. But other than that, we have 13 of these amazing species: we have the common garter snake, the ring-necked snake, the rat snake, the black racer, we have the milksnake, the ribbonsnake, the watersnake, the brown snake, the red-bellied snake, the greensnake, the hog-nosed snake, and then those first 11 are harmless to us. And then only two of them actually have the potential to, you know, hurt us with their venom. And that's the copperhead and the timber rattlesnake. And so I'm going to cover the biology and the range of each of these species. And we'll spend a little more time on the two dangerous species. Later on, we'll go through how to hike safely in snake country and what we can do with our dogs in snake country.
And so this is the region that I kind of artificially created for this talk. So I'm calling this the Catskill region. And so we have the blue line, the Catskill Park in center, and that's what we're really interested in. So we have the counties Delaware County, Greene County, Columbia County, Dutchess, Ulster, Sullivan, we're here down in the Cary Institute, down to the south the Catskills, Minnewaska State Park along the Shawangunk Ridge, Poughkeepsie and New Paltz down here. I think this is called Lake Superior State Park, which is an interesting name. And then we have Lake Taghkanic and Taconic State Park. So this is what I'm kind of defining as the Catskill region. And the reason I'm including a little bit more than the Catskills is, the Catskills are actually not particularly good snake habitat, due to their high peaks and kind of harsh environment. But I think this kind of covers the general region and most of these species you can find further south along the Hudson, along in the Hudson Highlands, and a little farther north. So as long as you're kind of near this area, this, these are the snakes you're going to be interested in.
And so the data I'm going to be talking about, first, in the 1990s, we had what was called a Reptile and Amphibian Atlas, sponsored by the DEC. And that was from 1990 to 1999. And it was basically people went out and if they saw a reptile or amphibian, they wrote it down on an index card and mailed it to Al Breisch, if you know him, and there was no real photo verification; oftentimes, there wasn't a GPS coordinate, it was the nearest street corner or the nearest landmark. And so some intrepid technician had to geolocate that and put it on a map. And then they were assigned to these seven-and-a-half-minute USGS quadrangles, which are about 24 square miles. And so it's kind of a coarse look at where snakes were. But we have some really nice historic information. And then we have the modern iNaturalist citizen science platform: have people have heard of that before? Show of hands...some of you; it's basically a website or an app on your phone where you snap a picture and then your phone automatically says where it is. And it can even identify the species for you with its AI. But then experts can correct that identification. And so that's kind of like the modern global citizen science or community science dataset. And that's how we're kind of collecting information on where snakes are today, because there isn't a formal state-sponsored effort right now. So this is what that iNaturalist data looks like. These are all of the points starting in about 2015 is when it started picking up steam. And about 1,200 people so far have submitted observations, which means a picture and a location of a snake. And that's what these yellow dots are. So this is what we know about snakes in the Catskills today.
And if we compare that to the Atlas in the '90s, there was about half the observations, just over 1,000. And only 170 people submitted those index cards for this part of the state. And I did a little math, and they say that about 1.7 million people visit the Catskill Park every year. And so over the last couple years, if you add that all together, and then divide that by the 2,300 snakes people have submitted, that's only that's only about 0.03% of all people who have visited the Catskills have submitted a photo of a snake. So there's a lot we don't know, but we still know a lot. And if you compare that to the number of birds: 20,000 observations of birds have been submitted. And raise your hand if you use eBird. Anyone here? Can anyone guess how many eBird checklists have been submitted for just Ulster County in the same time period? 88,000. So we know comparatively a lot less about snakes than we do for birds, for obvious reasons, right? Snakes are hard to find. People don't know a lot about them. Every time you go hiking, you see a bird or you hear a bird. How many, how often do you see a snake? Sometimes, but not all the time.
So the first species we're going to start off with is the majority of those 12; you know, 2,300 points, and that is the common garter snake. The scientific name is Thamnophis sirtalis, which basically means shrub snake; they only get about two to three feet long, on average, but they can get a little bit bigger, and the females are going to be larger than males. And this is pretty typical of most of the or a lot of our snake species, especially those that give birth to live young. And so these snakes don't lay eggs, they actually give birth to sometimes 30, 40 baby snakes at a given time. And these are a generalist species; they're eating pretty much anything they can overpower, but they love worms. They love amphibians, like frogs, and salamanders. And they'll even eat small mammals like baby rabbits or baby mice. And this is my daughter, again, holding a garter snake. So she's kind of showing the correct way to hold the snake, right? Two hand support the body, you're not crushing it, you're not strangling it, but you're also not letting it flail around because they have vertebrate just like us. And you don't want them, you know, the same way you wouldn't hold a toddler by its foot upside down, right? You're not going to hold a snake by the tip of its tail and let it flail around. This is where people have seen common garter snakes. And so what I'm going to show you now are maps for each species that I think are the first representation of range maps for snakes in the Catskill area. So what I did was I took the data from the Herp Atlas in the '90s which are these...did exactly what was said would happen hit the black button...so if iNaturalist points superimposed on these '90s Atlas blocks, and so what you see here is that almost the entire region had observations of common garter snakes in the '90s. There were 285 observations, in fact, on iNaturalist, so now we have four times as many, we have 880 observations, and we filled every single one of these empty spots where no one reported a common garter snake. And this is the species that I think almost everyone has probably seen. This is the species that is often known as a gardener snake, or a garden snake, or even a grass snake. This is a snake that you can find in a suburban backyard or even a city lot. And they're just kind of dark with two yellow stripes, but they come in a wide variety of colors. And you can see they're pretty much everywhere. And they make up the majority of those observations of snakes. Now, what's really interesting about the common garter snake is that while they have a general motif of that dark background with two yellow stripes, they don't have to be dark, they can kind of be mahogany. They can have these checkerboard patterns, they can be brownish or reddish with spots. This is more of the standard look, here's a baby, you can see they have these kind of dark stripes on their lips. And then here's a particularly large one shows you how thick they can get.
And my point in showing you all of these is that I'm not going to try to teach you how to identify all 13 species of snakes today, because it's just not going to work. But I what I'd like you to do is, if you're interested in knowing what snakes occur is, when you go home and get a book from the library, or you look it up online, you learn the few common species, you learn the dangerous species. And then when you find something that doesn't make sense, because you know what the common ones look like, and you know what the important ones look like, then you can kind of fill in the gaps. So we're not going to go over the field characteristics, we're not going to say, you know, they have that stripe on their seventh lateral scale. You can learn that on your own, you wouldn't learn it today, even if I told you. This is one of my favorite species. This is a species that your kids are going to catch, your grandkids catch, you caught growing up. It can be a little feisty, it might give you a little nip, but it's harmless to humans. And this species is also notorious for musking and that's they release a smelly secretion from their cloaca. And the cloaca is the fancy word for snakes' common urogenital openings, so they poop, essentially urinate, and then have young out of the same opening. And so that's the common garter snake.
The second most common species reported in the Catskill region is the northern watersnake, Nerodia sipedon. They get bigger than garter snakes, and they kind of have this broad, kind of drab, brownish color. They'll sometimes have reddish markings on them, the juveniles are more brightly colored, with whiter patches. And this is a species, this is the quintessential watersnake that you would see swimming across a stream or a river. This is the species that's going to steal your bluegill when you're fishing in a pond. They don't really eat trout, they don't live in trout streams. Sometimes they will, but trout streams are pretty much too cold. And so unfortunately, though, a lot of anglers will kill this species under the pretty much mistaken belief that they're impacting game fish populations. They certainly might take a game fish every now and then. But there's no evidence that they are impacting populations of these species like bluegill or largemouth bass or smallmouth bass or trout. This species can be known for its temper, but it's not going to come at you. But if you pick a bit, it's gonna give you a nip. So what's really interesting is we see a completely different distribution and then with the common garter snakes, so everyone is always interested in where we see snakes. And this is going to be a common pattern though. They're much more common in the Hudson Valley than they are in the heart of the Catskills or even in the Taconics. So those environments are harsher, right, they have higher elevations, they have longer winters, they have more snowfall, and they have shorter summers and they have less sun because we have lots of tall trees that block the sun from hitting the ground. And snakes are of course, cold blooded, they get their energy from the environment, not the food they eat like we do. And so when you have cold temperatures and short growing seasons and not too much sun hitting the ground, it becomes somewhat inhospitable for snakes. And so when you see snakes, or watersnakes in particular in the Catskills, most of them are going to be following river valleys. But we seem to lack them in the heart of the wilderness areas. And then the question though becomes, is that because many fewer people are hiking in here with cell phone coverage to take a photo and submit it. But at the same time people found common garter snakes here, right? So there seems to be something going on. What's also interesting is, while we've gained new locations, we've lost some; no one has reported a common northern watersnake from these areas, you know, in what is it now, nearly 25 years. So maybe something's going on. Maybe not. These are really the first looks at the changes in distribution. And maybe we can start formulating hypotheses and have a master's student look at these things and see what's happening.
Now, I can't talk about watersnakes without saying we do not have cottonmouth or water moccasins in New York. And so, this is a picture of a watermouth, and they do look superficially similar to a water snake, the same background appearance, the same general girth, they are stockier, but to the untrained eye, they're they're definitely almost identical, except that a cottonmouth gets its name for a reason, right? They throw their head back, and they have this bright white mouth, which is a defense display. And this is the range map of the cottonmouth. And you can see the northern tip is in North Carolina and Virginia Beach, you can find them in the dismal swamp, is that what it's called in Virginia Beach?, and then up into Missouri and a little bit of Illinois. And where they occur, they are super common, and you see them everywhere. But they're very sensitive to elevation, and they just can't handle colder temperatures and shorter growing seasons. And so, oftentimes, you'll say, "Well, someone told me they saw a water moccasin, or they saw a snake swimming." And what that person saw was a northern watersnake. And it's just that they were taught growing up that that is called a cottonmouth, or a water moccasin. And so they're not wrong, per se. They're just not using the same terminology. And so I never like to tell people, you know, you didn't see what you saw. No, you saw a snake swimming in the water and you were taught that was called a water moccasin. But we know that is more than likely a northern watersnake; nonvenomous, harmless to humans.
The third most common species is going to be the black rat snake. And this is often people's favorite snake to see when they're hiking in the Catskills. What most people never see is the baby, which has a white background with black blotches. And they're absolutely amazing. And they also don't realize the black rat snake is our longest species of snake in New York; it gets bigger than the timber rattlesnake. It's not as heavy, but it can be, probably not anymore, but at least historically, when they had really great populations and people weren't killing them, you know, they could reach in excess of six feet long, probably pushing seven feet. And they love to climb trees, which is really interesting. Now you see a similar distribution to the northern watersnake. This species is mostly in the edges of the Hudson Valley on, kind of on the cliffs and ledges on either side. But they're also pretty extensively distributed along the Shawangunk Ridge. And then along the eastern edges of the Catskills. You don't see them at all in the western portion, and they never did in the '90s either. And historically, they were up in the northern Taconics, but we don't really see them there anymore, either. And this is a species, though, that when people see it, they know what it is and they take a picture of it. And that's because this is a species that tends to stand its ground. So you'll often see them kind of looking kinky on the trail. And no one's really sure exactly why that is. But they'll tend to sit there, basking kind of in a zigzag pattern, or they'll climb a tree. But they'll kind of rear up and then they'll hit really loudly. And so people love to get a picture of that and upload that. And so that's why I think we have a lot of observations of the species. Truly an amazing species. If you're ever up in Saratoga, Moreau Lake State Park has a really nice specimen in their nature center in a huge enclosure. It's a really cool species if you're ever up there.
And then this is really interesting. The range map for this one is, I think, interesting. So this is the milksnake. This is a species that a lot of people think is a copperhead or they think it's a rattlesnake or they think it's something that is going to sneak into barns and suck the milk out of cows, which is how they got the term milksnake. And that's because farmers used to find them in their barns. But why were they in their barns? To eat the mice, not to drink the milk out of the cows. But it's a fun story. Right? And so baby milksnakes are are probably the most beautiful snake in New York. They're white with scarlet red blotches on their back. And then as they turn into adults, they become decidedly less beautiful. But they're still really gorgeous. This is a pretty much a generalist species, so you'll often find them in fields or meadows around farms or buildings. They love to eat rodents, they love to eat other snakes. But they can also live in the mountains and they can also live in wetlands. I found them in swamps, I found them on the tops of mountains, I found them in meadows, I found them in, they love old stone fences. And they're one of our few species that is nocturnal. So oftentimes, they'll be crawling around at night, whereas almost all of our other species in New York are out mostly during the day. And you can find them pretty much everywhere. And it would not surprise me if more turned up in these wilderness regions. However, it's really hard to find them; you just happen to stumble across a milksnake, and then it makes your day because it's crossing the trail. They are often confused for rattlesnakes, because they will rattle their tail in the dry leaves and it will sound a little bit like a rattlesnake. So watch its tail here, that garter snake, look at that tail. So that gets them killed. Because people say what you rattle the tail, surely it's a rattlesnake. And so they'll say I saw a rattlesnake, what they saw was a snake that rattled its tail. And that's a distinction. And I have some more pictures of that later.
Now, this is another really interesting little snake, also absolutely stunningly beautiful. This is the ring-necked snake, and they have a ring around their neck and a bright yellow belly. They're small, they're only about a foot long. And they're thin, there's, maybe a big one is as thick as a pencil. And these are a species that really likes moist, rocky areas, you'll find them under shale. So if you see an exfoliating shale side of the road, you can stop and kind of flip rocks. And then underneath, there'll be these beautiful little snakes, and they'll also eat other snakes. So if there's a baby snake, they will overpower it and and slurp it down like a little noodle. And this is another species where you can find almost anywhere. But look, we're down now to 75 observations in the '90s and only 100 observations now. 1.7 million people every year visit the Catskills, and that's not including Minnewaska or people who are just going into the Hudson Valley or the Taconics or all the way down here, right. But only 100 people have taken a picture of a ring-necked snake and submitted it to our database or the world's database essentially. So this is species that probably has a broader distribution. But it looks like it occurs anywhere. And this is a really successful species. And oftentimes, you'll see them under rocks near your house or even in your basement. And then they probably just got in through holes in your foundation, and you can leave them in your basement or you can take them out as long as it's not the winter, if it's the winter, leave them in your basement. But if it's the summer, you can just put them back outside and they'll be fine.
All right, now this is a species, the northern brown snake, one of my favorite species, one of our smallest species in New York, pushing 12 inches, you know, this is a tiny little snake. This is an adult right here in my hand. And what's really, really cool is this is the friend of the gardener. And so this is a species that eats slugs and snails and it will grab a snail and literally pull the body out of the shell and then eat it. So it doesn't eat the shell. It wraps around, presses the--it doesn't constrict it--but it presses the snail against the ground and will reach in with its teeth if it can grab it before the the snail closes the operculum, and literally pull it out and then eat it. They also eat earthworms. And so you know you get them some of your earthworms in your garden and in exchange they eat the slugs that are going to eat your zucchinis. Really, really cool species; also gives birth to live young. But now here's what's weird. This is the only, the only of our 13 species that has not been seen or reported from the Catskills since the '90s. No one has reported one of these. There were only 19 observations in the '90s and there are 63 observations today but they're all in Saugerties. They're in New Paltz. They're in around here in Millbrook. They're in Minnewaska State Park. No one has found one of these in all the Airbnbs in the Catskills. No one has found one in the garden. And I think that's really interesting because their range has declined west of the Hudson River throughout New York as well. And I think something's going on. And this is a really, really interesting case study. I'm not sure what's causing it. But this is a pretty much an unmistakable species--AI picks it up, any expert knows what it looks like. But for whatever reason people have not found one of these. So when you're hiking, I want you to please find a little tiny brown snake in the Catskills and send me an email because they're missing. And we don't know why.
All right now this is another really cool species, the black racer. They can get to five feet long; most of the time, they're only about three to four feet. They're maybe as thick as a broom handle, and they're shiny black with a white chin. And these are an amazing species. A lot of people who live in rural areas know them because they eat other snakes, and they'll eat other venomous snakes. It's also another species where the juvenile looks different. And they'll have these blotches, almost kind of like a slatey pale background with these brown mahogany spots. And then as it gets older, from the tail up it starts turning black until it looks like this; you'd think they were completely different species. And you wonder how scientists in the 1600s knew they were the same species. This is another species that has never been common in the Catskills, only on the eastern edge. But it's also kind of declined along the range margin. So no longer in the Taconics that people have been seeing them, no longer in the southern extent of the Catskills. Again, we seem to pick them up in Minnewaska; snakes seem to love the Shawngunks. And this is a species of greatest conservation need in New York, it has been declining statewide. And it's been completely lost from Nassau County, on Long Island, many, many places have been losing this species. And it's not clear why. It could also be a reporting issue. This is our fastest species, and they're going to zoom off the trail, whereas a black rat snake is going to sit on this, on the trail and hiss at you so you can take your picture. This one you have a split second before it goes and then you're lucky if you get a picture. So there might be what we call detection probability issues. But this is a really amazing species that, like I said, loves the venomous species. This is a copperhead that it's eating. And this one is eating a rattlesnake that's bigger than it. And snakes are able to do that because they have very flexible bodies. And of course, there's a lot of air and things the same way you can squeeze you know, if you have a vacuum seal, you're vacuum sealing chicken breasts, right, you can get it so much smaller than when it was full of air and moisture. And so snakes can swallow things that weigh as much as they do, or in some cases more than they do. Really amazing biology.
Now, this is a really gorgeous species. Also, this is the northern red-bellied snake. And this is a snake that will never bite, they don't even try to bite. And if they wanted to, their head is the size of your pinkie nail and it couldn't break the skin, even if it tried to, like if you had the meanest red-bellied snake, it literally couldn't hurt you. Look how small their head is relative to their body. And this is actually a pregnant female from Allegheny State Park. They get also about 10 to 12 inches and they're relatives of the brown snake, they're in the same genus. But where the brown snake will eat worms, slugs, and snakes, the red-bellied snake, they don't even eat worms, just slugs and snails. So this is, you find one of these in your garden, you keep your cat away, you keep the birds away, like this is the species you want in your garden. And of course, they have this beautiful red underside, which they use to flip over to hopefully scare predators for a split second, so they can crawl away. What they do do is, this is the only snake that I know of that can curl their lips up and show their teeth. And what they'll do sometimes is they'll drag their teeth along your skin. And if you have rough hands, sometimes their tooth will get caught in a callus. And no one knows why they do this. They're harmless, they don't bite, but they'll just kind of like sneer at you. And they're so tiny with little tiny heads and, and then you just want to give them a slug and just put them on their way after they do it. But this is also a species where surprisingly, we kind of find them throughout the Catskills. And this is a species that seems to be a little more tolerant of kind of mountains. And so you'll find them in meadows but also kind of those higher elevation meadows. But what's interesting is unfortunately for the people of the cities, we're not finding them in people's backyards. So we're relying on our brown snakes for our slug control, where the red-bellied snakes are kind of maybe helping out the rural gardeners a little more.
Now this is species you're gonna say, "Hey, this is a common garter snake. We already saw this one." This is the Eastern ribbonsnake. And the ribbonsnake is stunning, but really fast and only lives in the edges of wetlands. And so this is a species you're almost never going to see on a trail. But for whatever reason, they're in these wetlands and they're eating salamanders and they're eating little fish. And so probably because of their habitat requirements, they're very underreported. There have only been 23 observations on iNaturalist out of those 2,000 observations of snakes. This is also a species that's declining across New York. And there's only this one recent observation within the Catskill Park. I suspect they occur because people are not tromping through the edges of wetlands. But that's where they'll be found if they're still in numbers in the Park.
Now, this probably takes the tie with the milksnake as one of the prettiest species in New York. This is the east, the smooth greensnake. And this was also known historically as a garden snake or a grass snake. And it was common throughout Long Island, common throughout New York City, and vacant lots. And it was a snake of meadows and farms. And they're insect eaters; almost none of our snakes are primarily insect eaters. But the smooth greensnake loves to eat caterpillars, and also spiders, one of the very few species that are even moving beyond insects, and they're eating arachnids. And this is full grown, they get about a foot long. And they give, they lay like Tic Tac-sized eggs, maybe six of them, and the eggs will hatch in as little as like six or seven days. So they're like almost there on the edge of evolutionarily giving birth to live young. But this is a species that has declined tremendously. So it was reported from less than 20 quads from the '90s. And there's only one observation, one or two observations now, in the Catskill Park and in the region that we probably are only hanging on in Minnewaska. Now this is a species that when you see it, you take a picture, and people do and there are places where this species is holding on. But this region is not one of them. And probably the big reason is insecticides and habitat loss.
And now this is the probably the rarest non-venomous snake in the Catskill region. This is the eastern hog-nosed snake, my favorite species, the one I studied for my master's research on Long Island and up in Saratoga. This is a species that has an upturned nose like a pig, that's where it gets its name, and it uses that scale to burrow in the ground, but it's also famous for one, it eats toads--that's its favorite food, toads--and will grab a toad bigger than its head and just chew it until it gets down. They come in a wide variety of colors, even jet black, and they will spread their neck out like a cobra: they will hiss, they will open their mouth, but they never bite. It's all a bluff display and then if you push them too hard, they flop over and play dead like a possum. And now, I don't have a video of that because this is not really a snake of the Catskills. But I do have a video of them doing their bluff display and their cobra display. And you can see that they were found, you know, in some areas in the '90s. But now we only ever find them kind of in the sand plains around Dover Plains. They like sandy soil. But for whatever reason, we seem to have lost them from the Catskills. And this is a species that people love to kill because they think it's literally a cobra, except we don't have cobras in New York. So it's actually kind of hard to fault people because when you see this video, this is a baby, eastern hog-nosed from my master's research and you can see no matter what I do, he's not going to bite me. And eventually he's going to get a little fed up and he's going to storm off like a like a teenager going into their room and slamming the door. He said, go away. And then people see that and then, whack--cut the head right off. So we don't really have very many eastern hog-nosed snakes anymore, but they're an amazing species.
Okay, our venomous snakes. We have two of them. The copperhead. So, baby copperheads are little, right, so that is a big Tic Tac, that's a big big pack of Tic Tacs. Right, but you can get the sense of how small a baby copperhead is. And then we have an adult copperhead on the side. You can see where they get the name, right, they have a copperish-colored head. This is a species where iNaturalist automatically obscures the locality information. So we actually can't use this database to figure out trends in distribution or relative abundance. We do have, so, you can still submit observations and we know there's about 100 of them but iNaturalist won't give us point data so we don't know exactly where they were recorded. But from this general region, people have been reporting them more. And so the question is, Are people more likely to say, "Oh, that's really a copperhead, let's take a picture and upload it," or are their populations actually doing better. We can't..there's no way to know. Historically though, they were most common along the Shawangunks. And then if you go down the Hudson Highlands, that's copperhead territory, the Hudson Highlands. And so they come north, you know, you might be able to find them along the eastern edge of the Catskills. But that seems unlikely these days, it's mostly a snake of Minnewaska State Park and the Mohonk Preserve. They're also masters of camouflage. Can you see the copperheads? So you saw that one, right, and then this one, and that one and that one. And then that one. So these are two viral images you might have seen on Facebook or other social media. But this is a snake that you walk by, and you never see and they don't rattle. So you're never going to see them, they're not going to alert you to their presence. And so snakes are hard to find. And I love that people come up with really interesting papers to write about snakes, and one of them is that not only are snakes hard to see and find when you're out hiking as an amateur, or just, you know, a skilled naturalist. You know, it says this paper is titled snakes have their secret of natural history has defied both conventional and progressive statistics. So scientists even have trouble doing anything with the numbers that they get, because they're so, it's so hard to reliably find snakes in numbers with sample size that we can actually do math on them. And I just think that's amazing. And that is another amazing thing that snakes have. They just, they're better than us. Right? They're better than our mathematicians. And a copperhead is venomous, right. So that is a species where you don't want to get bitten. And we'll talk about what to do in a minute.
But this last species of the Catskills is the timber rattlesnake. And this is why we're all here, right? Everyone wants to see rattlesnakes when they go hiking. This is a species that, you will go to the hospital if it bites you. And so avoid that at all costs. But this species can reach five foot, and thick, you know, thick as a hot dog bun, maybe, you know, and they like rocky outcrops and forests. And they eat mostly shrews, mice, and chipmunks. And so if you, if you've been to a lot of these Cary talks, I'm sure you could think there's probably something going on with cycles; maybe, you know, if it's not a good gypsy moth, spongy moth year, and then you know the there's changes in the mouse population. I'm sure there are changes that's going on in timber rattlesnake population. How that relates to ticks; I'm sure there's all sorts of amazing ecological interactions. A timber rattlesnake, a female takes seven years before she can have her first litter and she gives birth to live young. They take a really long time to reach their size and then they can live 40, 50, 60 years, assuming someone doesn't cut their head off with a shovel or a hiking stick or blow up their den with dynamite like they used to do. And they come in two color phases: yellow, and jet black; with, you know, a variation in between. And what you'll see this snake doing is it's sitting with its head against the log. And this is going to come when we talk about hiker safety in two or three slides. These snakes will sit along the edge of a log and where a mouse or a shrew or a chipmunk or a squirrel will run across and the snake finds the scent trail and it will sit there for a week, two weeks, three weeks along the scent trail that it smelled with its tongue until the mouse runs across, and then it strikes. And it uses its venom to paralyze or to incapacitate or kill its prey. And then it lets go, it doesn't fight the prey. And then it follows the scent trail for wherever the mouse ran off and died and then it eats it without any fuss. And so these snakes don't want to bite us because their fangs are fragile, and they need.. if their fangs break biting your Carhartts, you know, it can't eat so it does not want to do that. So that's, it's going to rattle its tail or it's going to freeze, and biting is its last defense.
And iNaturalist also does not give us location data. But we do keep track of location data in our internal databases. Because this is a New York State threatened species. And as such, though we don't give out specific locality information because they are so sensitive to wanton destruction. In the past, a single collector has been known for removing 5,000 timber rattlesnakes from the wild. One person, back when there was market hunting when they were sold for their skins and people who just hated hated rattlesnakes. And I'm sure back then they probably had good reasons to, but we don't live in those days anymore, thankfully. But so we do know several incidences where the snakes used to occur and no longer do but if you are going to see timber rattlesnakes in the Catskills, it's going to be along the eastern edge and everyone knows you go hike Overlook Mountain, they have the signs there. That's part of their summer range where, if you're really lucky, you might get the chance to see one of these amazing animals. And what's amazing too, is that they will congregate in these areas where they'll bask in the sun. And you can see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 snakes. This is a September photo in the Catskills. And they'll congregate here because their basking habitat is limited. And they need the area of these rocky outcrops where the sun is going to let them get warm, right before they give birth so they can have the energy to have their pups, or for them to digest their final meal before they go in for hibernation. And so this is why they're particularly sensitive. If you know where their den is, you could go and clean house and that's why that information is kept secure.
So here's another photo of them of them sitting and this gets into hiker safety. If rattlesnakes like to sit with their head against the log, you should not be stepping over logs when you're hiking in snake country. What you do is, you step on the log, lean over, look down, and then you can walk across. And doing that alone is going to remove most of the risk. The snakes also have two heat pits on the side of their face. And so they can actually not only see and smell prey, they can see the heat signature and track their prey that way. It's pretty amazing. Here's another photo of why you step onto logs and then over it, right. So you wouldn't necessarily see this unless I, you know, I clearly crawled down on my hands and knees to take this photo. But I hope this illustrates the point: you step onto a log not over the log. I'll keep saying that because that's the number one thing. I also wanted to point out that this is the species that is a good mother. So a timber rattlesnake will stay with her litter; she gives birth to live young, and she will protect that litter from predators until they shed their skin for the first time and then they'll kind of go on their way. But then, they will follow the parents' scent trail to come back to their hibernation spot for the first year. So when we, it's also really hard to repatriate these snakes, because when you, if you want to translocate them, they don't have these scent trails and so they don't know where to go. So there's literally thousands of years of history of snakes going to the same dens and so the snakes are able to figure out where to go, because it gets cold in the peaks of the Catskills. And I also wanted to mention right so that milksnake was rattling its tail. But just because a snake has a rattle to its tail doesn't mean it's a rattlesnake. A rattlesnake has a physical rattle on the end of its tail. It's not just moving its tail. So a hog-nosed snake, a red-bellied snake, a milksnake, a pine snake...they don't, they just have a tail, right? But look at the rattlesnake. Right? So that rattle actually is what makes that noise. It doesn't need leaves to make that noise. And so it's important just because someone says a snake rattled, doesn't necessarily mean it's a rattlesnake. And here's what that sounds like. And you can see the rattle; it moves it. And that's what it sounds like. It doesn't sound necessarily like what they say on the movies. It's not [audio from video] "All right, sorry buddy, we're leaving, we're leaving."
All right, so these are the tips for hiking in snake country. Leave snakes alone, right? If you don't know what a snake is, don't pick it up. And that solves all the issues. It used to be a common belief that the people who are most likely to get bitten by snakes were men under 25 that were intoxicated and the bites were on their hands. What does that tell you? There's been more research that suggests that that's less the case nowadays, as people are becoming more aware of what to do, but keep that in mind unless you are 1,000% sure it's not a rattlesnake or a copperhead, which doesn't have a rattle. And I'm not telling you how to identify them here because that's beyond the scope and I don't want the liability. Don't pick up a snake; you can admire it from a couple feet away and you're more than safe. Stay on the trail. If you are staying on the trail, you're not going to encounter snakes at nearly the frequency of people who go trapeze across the rocks. Step on the logs, not over them. And look before stepping off rocks. The same if you're going downhill; don't just kind of go backwards down, and look where you're putting your hands when you're going up the rocks, Wear boots and pants. Their fangs are like hypodermic needles, and they're super fragile. And so just protecting your feet and your legs with fabric goes a long way. And have a cell or satellite phone. There's no first aid for venomous snake bite. If you know you're bitten by a timber rattlesnake or a copperhead, the only first aid is to call and get to the hospital. And you don't need to kill the snake and show them what it is because the treatment is the same for any snake in New York. So they don't need to know that it was a what kind of rattlesnake. You know, if you're not going into shock and dying right there on the trail, you could take a photo to make sure that it's not a garter snake, and you're not wasting your deductible. But it's mostly prevention, right? If you are smart, and you stay on the trail, and you wear boots, and you don't step over over logs and rocks, you're going to be fine. And this is why you look, there's no snake, right, on the edge of this? So this was from just last month in the Taconics. So look where you put your feet. And that goes a long way. And it seems silly, but that's advice that people need to hear. Because you're...you wouldn't think of this, right?
And now, dogs. So this is my dog; an Australian cattle dog, the breed from the original Mad Max. So number one, leash your dog. My dog's not leashed here; this is a bad example, right, but keep your dog on leash and it's less likely to encounter the rattlesnakes or the copperheads that are off the trail in the rocks by the logs. And train a "leave it." So we encountered this garter snake on the trail and I asked my dog to leave it. And I know that he has a strong leave it; he has a big history of positive reinforcement with that command and he also knows he's not allowed to not leave it, right, so for his safety. Also train an emergency recall. Let's say your dog is off leash for whatever reason; because you let it off leash, or you drop the leash. Your dog needs to be able to come when you call immediately for his safety or her safety. Not even just for a rattlesnake; let's say you hear that rattle, your dog is in the bushes, you know something wrong is happening. You want your dog to come when you call, right. And so if that means you have a specific word that is different from coming in from the bathroom, and your dog hears that emergency recall word and he knows he's getting a steak, or there's going to be consequences if he doesn't listen, right, wherever you fall on the positive reinforcement spectrum when training your dog, your dog needs to have an emergency recall if you're going to be hiking in snake country. You should also know a local emergency vet's number; you don't want to be Googling "what emergency vet is open" just in case. And this is the same with hiking with children, or anything, you know, you should have those resources saved on your phone. And then you should also know if you can carry your dog out. If you have a Great Dane, and it weighs more than you do, maybe hiking on a high peak where there are rattlesnakes, just in case is maybe something you should think otherwise about. I know that I can pick him up with one hand and put him on my shoulder and carry him out, even if he just broke his leg and didn't get bit by a snake. So those are the key things; very similar to humans, right, basic precautionary safety.
And let's say you want to add to this database, how are you going to help out. You could email me: this is my email address, I'm sure it'll be on the contact information or the follow up emails, jovanek@esf.edu. They left out the "h" and the "n." My name is John, not Joe. But it's jovanek@esf.edu. You could submit to iNaturalist.com, and we'll provide links for how to get started with that. You could also be a little more official than iNaturalist and you could submit directly to us at the New York Natural Heritage Program. Or you could call your DEC office, I think they have trained people who will come and remove rattlesnakes from campgrounds from backyards. And that phone number is going to differ depending on what DEC region you're in.
And this is this is my last real slide. And I just wanted to say this is why I don't go over exactly how to identify all those species. What species is this? It's five species. It's a black ratsnake and eastern hog-nosed snake in the black phase. It's a black racer, it's a jet black timber rattlesnake. And it's a black northern watersnake. And so there's a lot of nuance. And so this is also why I say I love snakes. I pick up almost every snake I see and I take a picture of it. And I show my kids. I never pick up venomous species because even though I'm a trained professional that's not safe or responsible. So I don't do it. But I know what a venomous snake species looks like. And so even if you think you know what it looks like, it's best to just appreciate the snake from three to five feet away, take your photo and enjoy it that way. Because there's a lot of nuance to snake identification. And I'm going to plug books, right, there's not really a great online presence that shows you exactly what snake you have. There are some Facebook groups where you can upload a picture and experts will identify them but these are the books you want. The Amphibians and Reptiles in New York State, written by professors at ESF, DEC biologists...yeah, lots of, lots of some, lots of really great people that are not with us anymore. Tremendous, amazing resource and the proceeds go back to conservation. And then this book, the Peterson Field Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians spans more than New York, but it is the best field guide. I prefer the third edition. But the fourth edition is more readily available these days.
And then I just wanted to end with this quote from Dr. William Brown of Skidmore College and he said, "The Timber Rattlesnake is one of the last symbolic wilderness species remaining in eastern North America. Many of our mountainous deciduous forest would not have an element of pristine excitement without the species in these woodlands. Seeing one of these snakes quietly coiled on the forest floor on a warm summer day is a naturalist's or hiker's thrill of a lifetime. Saving this species for our future is a high priority for those with a sense of respect for the natural world." And I absolutely agree with that. And I think if you see a rattlesnake when you're hiking, you're never going to forget that. So all right, thank you.
Joshua Ginsberg 56:13
John, that was spectacular. Thank you. We have time for a couple questions. And I'm going to take one or two. I'm not looking at my text messages. I'm looking at questions that came in over online. Question in the audience first.
Speaker 1 56:30
When I was much younger, they said in the handbook, you could cut a X on your skin and suck out the venom.
Joshua Ginsberg 56:39
So this is a question about being bitten by a snake: "Can you suck out the venom?"
John Vanek 56:45
Yeah, so that? And the answer is I would, we do not, no longer recommend that advice. And there were a number of techniques that you could buy in the store. And to this day, you could buy snake extraction kits from camping stores. But the consensus of medical professionals, real doctors--not PhDs--like MDs, they would say, get to a hospital, there's no evidence that any of the first aid snake bite treatments work. And if anything, they can cause more harm. So it's don't cut an X, don't suck the venom out. Don't burn it. Don't anything...just get to a hospital. And if you can't, you got to hike out.
Joshua Ginsberg 57:25
So from the web: "What are some of the strategies for landowners to consider to preserve or restore habitat for snakes in the region?"
John Vanek 57:33
Yeah, so that's a great question. So for landowners who are interested in preserving snake habitats, it's about maintaining a mosaic of habitats. So snakes are very sensitive to habitat loss and fragmentation. So where possible, it's about preventing new roads and developments from coming in. It's about consolidating smaller tracts of land into larger tracts of land. And it's about maintaining woodlands and meadows and wetlands, so that a variety of different species can live. And it's about fostering a positive educational message so that you let a lessee into your land for deer hunting or for logging or something like that, you say, "Hey, on our property, we don't kill snakes. And you know, that's just a rule we have, and I hope you appreciate that."
Speaker 2 58:22
[inaudible] About the ring-necks. I remember as a kid, and everything, they would always excrete...
Joshua Ginsberg 58:34
It's a question about musk emissions and ring-necked snakes.
John Vanek 58:40
Yeah, so that's a great question. So the question is how to, you know, what smells are snakes emitted when you when you pick them up, and I mentioned that for garter snakes. But yeah, every species of snake can release musk, which is kind of...you could think of it as like a skunk's spray, but not, you know, it's not emanating in the air. And it comes out of the same place that they're pooping, and there might be a little poop mixed in, but it's essentially a stinky liquid that will make a fox or a raccoon want to spit out the snake and not eat it. And it, every snake has its own distinct aroma. And as an experienced herpetologist, you can identify a snake by the smell of its musk, and your significant others will not appreciate that when you come home from a day in the field.
Joshua Ginsberg 59:27
I think John is talking from personal experience. Do we have one more question? Two more. So one more and then the last one?
Speaker 3 59:34
Firstly, thank you for this most remarkable lecture. I'd like to know what your take is on the view that I've seen some ecologists offer that it's unchecked land development and excessive tourist traffic in state parks and wilderness areas that has been the driving force behind the decline in timber rattlers and other snakes.
Joshua Ginsberg 59:59
So the question is, and I'm just repeating it so the audience in the ether can hear. Question is, has fragmentation and development led to the decline of snakes and how much is that a factor for rattlers and others?
John Vanek 1:00:14
Yeah, and so I think that's a great question. And I think there's a lot of empirical evidence that species like timber rattlesnakes are negatively impacted by roads. And so species like a, like a garter snake are less impacted, but a rattlesnake, they're sensitive to roads and human presence at both the individual snake level because they're slow moving and large and noticeable. And so they attract attention that leads to their early demise. But also that makes them more likely to be hit by cars because they're slow and large. And, you know, it's not smart to swerve off the road and hit a tree. Unfortunately, sometimes the right decision is to drive straight, but at the same time, there are lots of people who will intentionally hit a large snake that they see on the road. And so at the individual level, that's absolutely the case. But then also, rattlesnakes are a species that has a long lifespan and needs to reproduce many times in its lifespan. And the adults typically have low mortality, except when humans are around. And so that leads to their early demise at the population level. So roads and humans near dens and places where snakes congregate--rattlesnakes in particular--just is bad for the individual snake and it's bad for the population. And there's a lot of good evidence that has absolutely led to their decline. And there's some evidence that rattlesnakes will abandon dens where there is too much human traffic. And so state parks have done a really great job of actually moving trails away from known rattlesnake dens and so I have to applaud them for that, because I think there's a lot of organizations that wouldn't give the snake that consideration.
Joshua Ginsberg 1:01:52
So bravo for New York State Parks. Last question, and then we'll let you go and have dinner.
Speaker 4. 1:01:57
[inaudible] ...a poisonous snake by the shape of its head?
John Vanek 1:02:03
Yeah, so the question is, "Can you tell a venomous snake by or a poisonous snake by the shape of its head?" And that is something that I think most snake educators are trying to move people away from. Snakes have, the technical term is they have really kyphotic heads. They can move their bones around; you've heard of snakes dislocating their jaws... it's not really technically dislocated their jaws, but they're really variable. And so even a snake with a really narrow head when it's agitated, can flatten it out to look larger and more intimidating. And so unless you are a really skilled herpetologist who can look at the exact shape of the head, it's not a characteristic that I would use at all. And so if there's any doubt, I would just give the snake space and let it be on its way. But I would not use any kind of mnemonics or algorithms or anything quick and dirty in the field to identify a venomous or non-venomous snake, even though that was commonly used advice in the past. I wouldn't recommend it these days.
Joshua Ginsberg 1:03:04
So we're gonna make space for snakes by giving snakes space. Absolutely. Oh, there you go. Okay. Thank you all for coming. Thank you to the hundreds of people out in the ether and most of all, thank you, John, for a great talk. Thank you.
