Riley Davis, Discover Magazine, 28 June 2022 The black pine snake, living mostly in longleaf pine forests, can sometimes be mistaken for the eastern indigo snake, another longleaf resident that is just starting to rebound in Alabama after reintroductions in the Conecuh National Forest. 2018 The eastern indigo snake is the largest nonvenomous snake in North America and is typically found in southern states including South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama and Georgia. Roni Dengler, Discover Magazine, 14 Sep. 2022 The burrows increase plant biodiversity and also provide a home for more than 360 other species, many of which can’t dig for themselves and some, like the indigo snake and gopher frog, are also endangered. Support for her project came from a state program that collects money from specialty license plate sales that promote wildlife.Recent Examples on the Web The black pine snake is listed under the Endangered Species Act as a threatened species, as is the indigo snake. She spends her days in the field searching out where they go, measuring them, and recording how they move among the wiregrass, bluestem, goldenrod, and longleaf pines. Here, Sara Piccolomini, a graduate student at Auburn University, monitors her charges as part of her thesis on the success of a new indigo snake population. The project will continue for at least the next couple of years, with the release of roughly 30 snakes a year into Conecuh National Forest.Ĭonservation biologists also brought a dozen snakes to the Nature Conservancy’s Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve in the Florida panhandle, the second reintroduction site. Steen left the snake-reintroduction work with Jim Godwin, a zoologist with the Alabama Natural Heritage Program. There’s little appetite in the federal government for endangered-species research, he says, and money for the bird monitoring dried up. Finding an increase in box activity could mean fewer predators such as copperheads and rat snakes as a result of a robust indigo population.īut just as the project began showing promise, Steen was forced to pull the plug. So far, bluebirds, Carolina Wrens, Tufted Titmice, and Carolina Chickadees-as well as flying squirrels-have taken advantage of the new shelters. Because the snake disappeared so long ago, no one knew whether bird populations had declined in their absence-or how much they might rebound once the snakes returned. Two years ago, Steen, then a research ecologist at Auburn University, helped set up more than 250 bird boxes to gather some much-needed baseline data. With the species making a comeback, other researchers began investigating the effect of that reintroduction on the food chain-in particular, songbirds. Since then 137 have been released (plus another dozen last year at a second site in Florida). In the late 2000s, scientists began to reintroduce the snake in Alabama, where it had gone functionally extinct some 50 years earlier. Although indigos once glided through longleaf pines and sandhills from Florida to Mississippi, over time their habitat has been reduced-by development, agriculture, and fire suppression-to just 2.2 percent of what it once was. The country’s largest native snake, the Eastern indigo is an apex predator it sits atop the reptilian food chain, eating the snakes that eat birds. More than three feet long, its shiny dark body curls onto itself like ribbon. Steen chases the indigo snake off the road and into the brush, where he catches it by the tail and lifts it up. “That’s an indigo!” he says before throwing the truck into park, flinging the door open, and running out into the dappled November sunlight in hot pursuit of his quarry. David Steen slams the brakes of his black Chevy, bringing the truck to an abrupt stop on a sandy road in the Conecuh National Forest in southern Alabama.
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