Road Ecology Center

With increasing human development encroaching on wild areas, an understanding of the interactions of wildlife in their natural surroundings is becoming imperative. Over the past few decades, a concern for the conserva¬tion of herpetofauna throughout the world has become prevalent. Lack of information on reptiles and amphibians have raised many questions on the effects of roads on their populations. In this study, snake movements on roads in a mostly natural area were examined. Individuals of the copperhead snake (Agkistrodon contortrix) were studied in the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area (LBL) in Kentucky. LBL is a 170,000-acre federally protected area between Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley in Western Kentucky and Tennessee. On a typical night of road cruising, over 60 percent of the snakes captured are copperheads in this area. Over two hundred individual copperheads, both alive and dead, were observed during this study from April 2002 through October 2003. Males and females exhibited differ¬ent frequencies of movements, while juveniles exhibited different frequencies of movements when compared to adults. Road-crossing sites were not random, showing a preference toward less maintained roads with a denser canopy cover. Slightly more snakes were found dead on the road (DOR) than alive on the road (AOR). Significantly higher percentages of DOR were also observed on the highly traveled road as compared to the less maintained roads. Thus, a concern arose with the high numbers of road mortality observed because even though the snakes preferred to cross in areas of low traffic and more cover, significantly higher mortality was seen on the high speed and high traffic road. With LBL being a fairly undisturbed area, this poses a concern for the survivability of the copperhead, along with other wildlife, in more densely populated areas.