"How Poachers Use Social Media to Find Prey" Topic

Dr. Chris Howey, an assistant professor at the University of Scranton, slid over a Post-it with the coordinates I had come for. "Turn off anything that transmits location before you visit it," he said. "Make sure the GPS-embedding is off on your camera. And be careful."

The coordinates were for something better than a place that sold a really, really good cup of coffee, or an illegal outdoor marijuana patch known only to stressed out, local graduate students. They led me, sweating and crawling with spiders, to a special, out-of-the-way pile of rocks that soon promised to hold a slithering congregation of venomous timber rattlesnakes preparing to den for the winter.

As a species, rattlesnakes are almost quintessentially American. Some Appalachian Christians still practice their faith by holding the serpents bare-handed. Benjamin Franklin once called the rattlesnake "a strong picture of the temper and conduct of America", which would make sense if America was a long-lived, slow-growing, near-sighted, sociable creature that took care of its children and spent its winters underground with dozens of its neighbors. […]

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Sad story.