Study to help threatened species
By DEREK EK THE LEADER

Eric Wensel/The Leader Hank, a 54-inch timber rattlesnake, lays in a grassy clearing at the Steege Hill Nature Preserve in Big Flats.

BIG FLATS - Bob Corneau moves quietly through thick brush on Steege Hill, wearing shin guards and carrying a radio receiver in one hand and a big metal antenna in the other.

Near a small clearing, the receiver starts beeping with increasing frequency, alerting him that his good buddy "Hank" might be lurking somewhere nearby.

All of a sudden, Corneau stops and points.

"Ahh, there he is," he says.

Upon closer inspection, Hank - a 4.5-foot-long timber rattlesnake who weighs roughly 3.5 pounds - can be seen coiled in the bushes, peering out warily. He's a male, colored bright yellow, and named after country singer Hank Williams.

Gingerly, Corneau uses a snake hook to pull Hank out of the brush, unfolding the big, strikingly beautiful reptile on the ground.

The snake hardly seems ruffled by the intrusion. He doesn't even give a warning rattle.

He does, however, stick out a forked tongue, "sniffing" his visitors.

He's fairly used to Corneau's scent.

Corneau, the steward of the 800-acre Steege Hill Nature Preserve, has been coming around for six years, checking on Hank's well-being, measuring his growth, recording his body temperature, and tracking his movements.

Corneau even keeps tabs on Hank's romantic interests, although the snake's love life has been pretty slow, unfortunately.

Corneau is a volunteer field technician with a timber rattlesnake study being conducted by Cornell University researchers on Steege Hill. Over the years, he has tracked nine snakes with transmitters surgically implanted in their bodies, and documented about two dozen others.

Steege Hill has long been known to be populated with timber rattlesnakes, which are listed as a threatened species in New York state.

The rattlesnake project on Steege Hill was started by a Cornell graduate student named Rulon Clark back in 2001, shortly after the Finger Lakes Land Trust - an Ithacabased land conservation group - bought a large chunk of land on Steege Hill and created the nature preserve.

Corneau, who lives just down the road, became involved with the project and volunteered to monitor the snakes as part of his caretaking duties, which include maintaining miles of trail loops.

The study is now overseen by Harry W. Greene, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell and a wellknown snake expert.

Last summer, a film crew from the BBC came to Steege Hill to film a segment for an upcoming series of nature documentaries called "Life In Cold Blood," scheduled to be aired early next year. Greene was interviewed on camera by the show's host and producer, Sir David Attenborough, and Hank was the star.

The BBC crew captured what is believed to be the first recorded predation by a wild rattlesnake in any documentary, when Hank ambushed a rodent, Greene said.

Greene says the Steege Hill project has been gathering detailed information on the snakes' movements, their home range, and their hunting and mating behavior.

"The observations Bob is making will enable us to have a longer-term view of the lives of certain individual snakes, and watch for unusual problems that might spring up unexpectedly in their relationships with the landscape and especially people," Greene wrote in an e-mail to The Leader.

Last summer, Corneau enlisted the help of a friend, Mike Stanton of Horseheads, to record how far the snakes wander. Using a GPS to mark the snakes' positions, Stanton then fed that data into a mapping software program.

"We figured that one of the snakes traveled more than seven miles last summer," Stanton said.

Timber rattlers tend to be reclusive, but in the summer, they occasionally cause a stir in Steuben County by popping up in backyards.

Last summer, a rest stop off Interstate Highway 86 near Painted Post was temporarily closed when some rattlers slithered down from a nearby den.

Corneau was the guy they called to come take care of the "nuisance snakes," as they're labeled. He has a license from the state Department of Environmental Conservation to handle them, and he goes out on about a dozen calls each summer.

Timber rattlers are venomous, and people need to be aware of their presence when hiking on Steege Hill, Corneau says.

However, the snakes are rarely spotted, and they aren't aggressive. Rather, they bite only when provoked or accidentally stepped on. Rattlesnake bites are very rare, he added, and the bites usually aren't fatal, especially with proper treatment.

Still, a lot of folks seem to harbor an intense fear of big snakes. They were hunted and killed for decades, but they are now protected by conservation laws which make it illegal to harass or kill them.

There is also a rattlesnake population just across the ChemungRiver, near Tanglewood Nature Center, on land owned by The Nature Conservancy. Two Elmirans, Art Smith and his daughter, Polly Blackwell, have been observing them and working to protect them in recent years.