Posted: Sun, 25 Oct 2009 05:39 PM - 8,791 Readers
By: Mike Leggett
photo by Mike Leggett
The beeps are faint at first, tiny cricket chirps laid over grating static from the hand-held receivers.
Up the hill from the parking lot and then down across the main entrance road to St. Stephen's Episcopal School. Four students holding electronic equipment and their teacher, Johnny Wilson, push into a ragged cedar break, looking for Chester.
They wander in and out of a small creek bottom, up a caliche hill and then back across the road. The beeps get louder, fainter, then louder again. Wilson lets his students lead, offering only an occasional "turn down the gain as you get closer" advisory to keep the crew on course.
Shair Ahmed, 14, Jake O'Hare, 17, Jack Albright, 15, and Reed Goodman, 15, are members of Wilson's science class. In a sense, so is Chester.
In and out of the brush. The beeps get progressively louder. More beeps, less static. Now it sounds like a bulldozer backing up.
"We've got him," Wilson calls out.
Uh huh. They are standing next to a modest size tree growing right beside the busy main road that carries traffic in and out of St. Stephen's. No sign of Chester.
The radio gear says he's here. Right here. But even a slow visual scan of the tall grass and prickly pear clumps around the tree reveal nothing. And then, somebody decides Chester must be airborne, and we look up.
And there is Chester. Airborne. At least as airborne as a rat snake can get.
Laid out across several limbs, his black back exposed to soak up maximum sunlight on this cloudy, rainy day, the five-foot rat snake is calmly letting everything take place below him.
"If people only knew how often that happens, how many times they walk right under snakes like that, they'd die," Wilson says.
That's just one of the things Wilson and his band of student volunteers have learned in two years of implanting tiny radio transmitters into non-poisonous snakes they've captured and released on the 370-acre property between Lake Austin and North Capital of Texas Highway just west of Davenport Ranch.
What started as one student's extra credit project has turned into a campus-wide project — complete with help from the University of Texas — to follow the snakes, learn as much as possible about their habits and habitat and to give students a reason to take their classroom outdoors.
"I think what I like about it is that it combines so many things," says Wilson, who also takes students on extended summer trips to Big Bend, where they study feral hogs and Montezuma quail. "These kids live in a tech world. They don't know, or even realize, that they're learning something. They're just doing."
The result is that Wilson's classroom has grown exponentially and the students can combine the technology of the transmitters and receivers with the practical aspects of hiking and climbing and sweating and fighting bugs in the bush.
"It will capture kids' interest that may not have an interest in the outdoors," Wilson says. "They see the snake in the tree and all of a sudden, it's like, 'Oh, my God, this is pretty cool.' You're probably doing more as a teacher than if you're lecturing for an hour."
Travis LaDuc, assistant curator of herpetology at the Texas Natural Science Center at the University of Texas, has helped the students through his expertise with the tracking equipment. "The project with the St. Stephen's students is such a fun project because it reminds me of one of the main reasons I got into herpetology: it's a lot of fun," he says.
"This study takes chasing snakes to another level with the ability to track them wherever they might be hiding in the landscape," LaDuc said. "Seeing the students getting excited in science and herpetology is a huge reward for me.
"The opportunity these students have to see these animals interact in their habitat is not only exciting for the students," LaDuc said, "but once these events are summarized and published, these data will add to our overall knowledge of snake natural history here in Central Texas."
So far, the students have learned:
The home ranges of the snakes, at least here, don't overlap very often and usually only during mating season.
Home territories change with circumstances. One currently tagged male moved into another snake's territory after the other snake was killed.
The snakes live in confined ranges, and they make slow circuits. "They'll stay in one spot for several days then move to another spot, not very far away," Wilson says.
After marking a GPS waypoint on Chester's tree, Wilson declares the mission complete. But the students want to go to the other side of campus and look for George. So, a quick change in frequency, and they're off. Across the football practice field, through the same creek drainage and up a cedar slope, the beeps getting louder.
Finally the search party stops, looks around and then you-know-where. George is up a tree, catching the sun.
