Kevin Messenger on the way to release a brown water snake. Kevin is conducting an intensive ten-year study of snakes at the Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge.

Excerpt from "Snake Cruising"

Kevin Messenger, a graduate of North Carolina State University, had undertaken “a huge project, a ten-year mark-recapture study” of snakes at the NWR. “I want to look at the biodiversity of snakes on the refuge, see which populations are going strong, which are dwindling” . . .

Snake populations at the refuge are not static. The first “herp study” at the refuge, Kevin said, was conducted from 1975 to 1977 by John Garton and Ben Sill of Duke Power Company, about the time of the first prescribed burns at the NWR. That study found no pygmy rattlesnakes. “From 1995 to 1997, Jeff Camper from Francis Marion University did a second study.” By then, pygmies were the most common species on the refuge . . .

“When I began my study, I found 2 or 3 pygmies a night. But if you go 50 miles up into North Carolina, they are endangered. What makes the Carolina Sandhills refuge so special that pygmies are abundant? That’s one of the things I want to figure out. I think that prescribed burning is a huge benefit for pygmies, though I’m not sure why.” He speculated that burns are a boon to fence lizards, a favorite pygmy food. After a burn, the lizards are camouflaged on the charred trunks of trees. “They hide more easily from birds” . . .

Visitors to the Carolina Sandhills NWR, Kevin continued, might not enjoy knowing that 3 of the 4 most common snakes he finds are venomous, though encounters are rare . . .

Carrying his snake stick, a long-shafted handling hook, Kevin strode down the trail to the cottonmouth sluice. I followed. Closely. It was 10 pm. The terrain was dark and tangled, a grassy bank leading to a precipitous path so narrow and overgrown that I had to place each foot directly in front of the other. Large spiders, orb weavers, hung in lacey webs from branches. I had brought a flashlight, an inconsequential thing with two AA batteries that was about as useful as a birthday candle in a haunted castle . . .

I said that I had heard that cottonmoths were aggressive.

"They are to other cottonmouths. But they're not as aggressive as people think. As long as you don't step on one, you're not likely to get bit." . . .

Excerpt from "Banding RCWs"

June 2. Blue sky, warm day, cool breeze. My hands were spotted with pine tar from helping wildlife biologist Laura Housh load gear and a Swedish climbing ladder from her truck onto a four-wheeler. Laura was banding endangered red-cockaded woodpecker chicks, and she had invited me along to watch . . .

“All of our banded birds--RCWs, wood ducks, doves--have an aluminum Fish and Wildlife Service band,” she explained. On each USFWS band is a number which Laura forwards to a center in Maryland where it’s entered into a nationwide data base.

With deft fingers and special pliers, Laura put three colored plastic bands on one leg of the chick, and one aluminum and one colored band on the other. Then she recorded each chick’s colors and number on a spreadsheet . . .

Because the Carolina Sandhills NWR has a stable red-cockaded population, the refuge donates RCWs to other refuges to aid in species recovery. “We only translocate subadults, and we have to identify the birds we translocate.” She held up a chick. “For example, if this bird is the cluster’s only helper male,” she said, referring to the RCWs’ remarkable family structure, “I wouldn’t translocate him. I’d keep him here on the refuge” . . .

She handed me the chick. It was warm, the talons were well-developed, and the skin was so transparent you could see the internal organs. . . . I tried to imagine what kind of life it would have--whether it would be a helper or breeder; whether it would remain at the refuge or be translocated to Virginia, Arkansas, or elsewhere; and whether its offspring and the Sandhills crew could help keep its kind from going the way of Carolina parakeets.