The most recent trip was in February of 2012, and I was fortunate enough to participate along with two other NZP staff members. ![]() Each keeper spent about a week working in the field with the Orianne Society’s seasonal field biologist Andy Day and their Director of Inventory and Monitoring, Dirk Stevenson. The Smithsonian’s National Zoo’s Reptile Discovery Center recently sent several Animal Keepers to Georgia to collaborate with Orianne Society staff. They use their conservation work with the indigo snake as a model for other initiatives such as their pit viper conservation program focused on the eastern diamondback rattlesnake. Now using the eastern indigo snake as their flagship species, they work nationally and internationally to conserve reptiles and amphibians. As a result, the Kaplan family created the Orianne Society to save the eastern indigo snake. Following her encounter with this beautiful reptile, she asked her father if he could do something to save them. This organization was founded in 2008 in response to a little girl’s infatuation with an indigo snake she was given the opportunity to hold. The Orianne Society is a wildlife conservation organization working to save the threatened eastern indigo snake. These large-bodied snakes eat a variety of vertebrates, using their considerable size and strong jaws to overpower its prey. The northern part of their range includes southern Georgia where the snakes use gopher tortoise, burrows to escape the cold in the winter. They are beautiful, uniformly black but in sunlight they are remarkably iridescent, with a wash of bright orange-red on their chin area (see photo to the left). They live in a variety of habitats depending on the region. ![]() By Lauren Augustine, Reptile Discovery Center Keeper at the National ZooĮastern indigo snakes, Drymarchon couperii, are the largest nonvenomous snake in North America.
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