Every summer, cottonmouth snakes from Newport News City Park in Virginia to Trail of Tears State Forest in Illinois wander along creek banks and through marshes and swamps, restlessly seeking a comfortable place to set up shop (Ooh. Good idiom there, no?). They set out on their treks in all directions, looking mostly for wetlands with lots of three dimensional structure (i.e. cover), plenty of fish, frogs, and birds, and, importantly, not too many resident cottonmouths.
Of necessity, some of the snakes move north. A few individuals move far to the north. As winter closes in, these snakes find comfortable muddy burrows and settle in to hibernate. Unfortunately for our itinerant heroes, winters these days ain’t what they used to be. Warmish conditions during what are nominally the cold seasons make hibernation problematic. Metabolic processes don’t shut down completely, because the warmth favors ongoing chemical reactions. However, warmish weather isn’t sufficiently warm to allow the snakes to wake up, shake off the sleep, and get out of the burrows to go fishing, frogging, turtling, whatever.
Bottom line is, the northward pioneers starve while they sleep [1]. I suspect the irony of winters being too warm for survival is lost on the snakes themselves. Still, it’s an interesting story, and a nifty bit of science to boot (this last being an idiom with which I’m familiar, but which I neither understand nor know the origin of).
Anyway. The dynamic at work in the population of northward-marching cottonmouths results from the natural tendency of organisms to push limits, just to see what happens. In practice, limit-pushing is a fundament of ecology and evolution. All the action is at the margins.
Limit-pushing is also, I’m learning, a fundament of post-cancer life. As spring arrived, I started to get active. Finally liberated from my recovery recliner, I’m anxious to do stuff. Last week, for example, we spent a wonderful afternoon having a picnic lunch and trail walking at the National Arboretum in D.C. This was more walking than I’ve done in 8 months. Took me 2 full days to recover.
This week, I made it out the Patuxent Reserve to look for my mega black racer, other snakes, and early spring flowers. I only managed to walk in about a half mile before I had to stop, choke out big blobs of throat mucous, and drop to my hands and knees to catch my breath.
Took me a full day to recover from that minimalist expedition. For crap’s sake. But, I suppose that’s the not-unexpected cost of having been butt-parked for the better part of a year.
Then yesterday, having rebuilt my “strength” from the earlier “hike”, I headed back out to Patuxent. Once again, I found myself unable to get all the way down the trail to the ancient river levee that I suspect harbors at least a small population of copperhead snakes. This is unfortunate. I want to document the presence of copperheads here, and try to get some idea of their population size. The Maryland Piedmont has, as a natural landscape, been transformed into a single, rolling residential development, complete with highways, shopping malls, and the other necessita of modern suburban life. The preservation of the big slab of habitat in the Patuxent Reserve is remarkable and unexpected. The value of the land for housing development was on the order of 10s of millions of dollars when the last owner died a few years ago. The farsighted coalition of public and private organizations that managed to snatch the property off the table just as the developers were reaching for it has my deepest gratitude. Now I’d like to do my part, by documenting some of the awesome biodiversity in this landscape that, in some parallel universe, is a honkin’ big slab of quarter-acre lots and endless mowed lawns.
And hopefully I’ll be able to get back out there this weekend. But I’ve been unexpectedly and depressingly sick all day today. Until further information is available, I’m chalking it up to recovery from yesterday’s walk, with maybe an assist from the abundant aerial pollen following the rains of the past week.
We’ll see. If I do get out there, I expect to have a bucket of photos now that I’m becoming familiar with my new high-powered, rocket-charged, nitro-fueled, laser-guided camera. So check back here next week. Spring is here, and that means large numbers of cool pix.
Rock on, all. Remember the key lesson of cancer: live ‘em while you got ‘em. Especially if they’re warm, breezy, and bright. But even if they’re damp and muggy. We only get one shot at this, and it is up to us to do something with it!
Notes
[1] I turned up this story in a dissertation some guy did in the 1970s at, I think, VCU. At the moment I cannot recall his name or the title of his thesis, so I can’t find a bibliographic reference for you. I do have a hard copy of it somewhere, but I suspect it remains buried in a box in the basement. I regret not being able to give this guy the citation he is due, but don’t have a lot of recourse. I offer a proactive apology to the intellectual ether, on the off chance that his spirit stumbles upon this weblog and recognizes the characterization of his work.
No comments:
Post a Comment