Seasonal home range
The mean home range and activity core sizes of male and non-gravid female snakes were smallest in the winter (December-February) and increased in size as the year progressed, with largest home range and activity core sizes occurring in the fall (September-November) (Table 3)(Fig. 6).
Using ANOVA of the mean home range sizes of males and non-gravid females among seasons, we found there were significant differences for the main effects of sex (N=9; F1,29,0.05 = 8.978, p = 0.006) and season (F3,29,0.05 = 28.739, p = 0.001), but no significant difference for the interaction between sex and season (F3,29,0.05=2.532, p = 0.077). According to a posteriori Bonferroni pairwise comparison of the effect of season on mean home range size of both sexes of snakes in this population, the mean fall home range size was significantly larger than all other seasons (p = 0.001) (Table 4). Using pairwise comparison of the effect of season and sex on mean home range sizes we found that male snakes had significantly larger home ranges in fall compared to all other seasons. We also found that female snakes had larger home range sizes in fall compared to winter and spring (Table 5, Fig. 6).
We found that mean seasonal home range sizes of males and non-gravid females were statistically equal and followed a similar pattern of steady increase from winter to summer, but the home range size of male snakes increased more sharply than that of female snakes from summer to fall (Fig. 6). We also concluded that the mean fall home range size of male snakes (25.30 ± 6.08 ha) was larger than the mean home range size of female snakes (14.74 ± 2.48 ha), but they did not statistically differ (p = 0.249) (Table 5).