MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — When Frank Jernejcic retired from the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources several years ago, he didn’t have to wonder what he’d be doing in his golden years. The answer was the same thing he had done during his three decade career with the agency.
Since 2016, Frank has spent much of his spare time looking for and documenting encounters with timber rattlesnakes at Cooper’s Rock State Forest. What had long been his vocation as a biologist is also a persistent hobby.
“These animals are amazing. I can’t get over how impressive they are when I look over this data. When you look at these snakes, they go out and may travel a mile or two during the summer. How do they find their way around? How do they keep coming back to the same spot year after year?” he asked rhetorically in a recent edition of West Virginia Outdoors.
Frank even suggested if you want to understand how truly amazing the timber rattler can be, the next time you’re in the woods lie down on your stomach and look around. Consider that’s the view you have to maneuver around to hunt for dinner, reproduce, and navigate to a wintering area and back.
“It’s truly amazing,” said Frank.
The dynamics of the timber rattlers’ habits become even more impressive when you look at the data Jernejcic has been able to collect. He has posted signs around Cooper’s Rock with his phone number asking anyone who spots a rattlesnake to give him a call. His phone during the summer is constantly ringing and he’s hot footing it up the mountain from his home in the Cheat Lake community of Monongalia County to try and catch them.
“I try to get to them and get them out of the road or off a trail,” he said.
He typically can force the snake, with some coaxing, to crawl into a plastic tube where they can be rendered harmless so he can age them, sex them, measure them, and mark them. Marking the snake is important in Frank’s work to track movement and changes in health condition if they are captured again.
“We’ve got one snake we’ve caught five times,” said Jernejcic.
This particular snake liked to frequent a woodshed in the forest and even when moved 100 feet and then 500 feet away, kept coming back to the same haunt.
Jernejcic was also helped out when Marshall University did a telemetry study by putting radio tracking devices on a number of the snakes to chart their movement.
“One snake that was really informative was a gravid female. We got her in May and then found her with four young ones in September. Then she went to the over wintering site. It was caught there just after having its young and had lost almost half its body weight. It was so emaciated, I didn’t expect it to survive. But we caught it again after it came out and it was the same weight and then a few months later in the spring we caught it and it had gained back half its weight,’ he explained.
During the seven years Frank has been asking for people to report the snakes he’s been able to document 811 rattlesnake encounters in the Coopers Rock State Forest and on the other side of Interstate 68 there have been 413 encounters on the WVU Experimental Forest. One thing he’s noted, not a single snake has crossed I-68 and he’s been able to document no road kills on the highway at any time. The interstate is clearly a barrier to movement, however, that’s not to say the snakes aren’t on the move.
“When I map their profile, I’ll look at the distance and a snake will move maybe a mile from point to point. However, when I profile it on a topo map I find they move from the top of the ridge to the bottom of the valley. One snake I found went 1100 feet up and 1100 feet down,” he said.
The West Virginia DNR has been conducting its own research throughout the state on timber rattlesnakes fearful their numbers are dwindling. It was a similar concern for Jernejcic when he started his personal survey, but he’s been pleasantly surprised the population on this particularly stretch of land is in remarkably great shape.
“That was the initial hypothesis that there weren’t a lot around, but after getting the public involved and with Cooper’s Rock being one of the most highly used state forests and even close to the use of some State Parks, there are a lot more opportunities for encounters,” he said.
He also surmised most of the encounters he’s been able to document were in the high use areas like the campground, hiking trails, picnic areas, and the overlooks. Jernejcic suspects if the population is that dense in areas where there are a lot of people, chances are there are even higher numbers in places where humans are less likely to travel.
Finally, another important note Frank wanted people to understand about of those 1,200 encounters.
“Not a single person has been bitten or hurt,” he said.