My State Keeps the Location of Its Last Rattlesnakes a Strict Secret. But I Got to See Them.

Timber rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus) are the most critically endangered animals in New Hampshire. Only one known population of these once abundant animals remains in the Granite State. With that in mind, the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, self-described “guardian of the state’s fish, wildlife, and marine resources,” keeps the whereabouts of these rare creatures a virtual state secret even to most of their employees. They scrub the den’s location from maps in official documentation and police physical access to it—although, I’m assured, the guardians won’t deceive if you do discover the site. Certainly, there are others in these woods who know of it.

Wildlife biologist Brendan Clifford is one of the state’s appointed silent caretakers, sworn to keep the snakes hidden and manage their well-being. When I first spoke with him, over the phone, I learned he had been monitoring this population for nearly 15 years by tracking their seasonal movements, recording the ebb and flow of their births and deaths, observing the ravages of a fungal disease plaguing the population, and rehabilitating injured and sick snakes. His tenderness toward these animals sat in stark contrast to many 18^th-century settlers and naturalists, the subjects of my historical research, who either avoided rattlesnakes or set out to annihilate them. Brendan surmised that for some of the serpents in this isolated community, he was the sole human being they had ever seen. One contemporary nature writer, I learned, had already been blacklisted in herpetology circles for not taking sufficient care on the printed page to keep the location of this and other rattler dens unknowable and untraceable. Despite the profession’s unease with authors, after our phone conversation, Brendan’s supervisor, for whatever reason, granted me permission to follow Brendan to the hibernaculum.

Since Europeans first invaded this landscape, the ancestral and still-unceded homeland of the Pennacook, Abenaki, and Wabanaki peoples, rattlesnakes have had figurative targets on their cursed backs. Current secrecy efforts help guard the animals from an extermination ethos shared by many early settlers: a belief in a God-given duty to kill rattlesnakes as a satanic stain on an Edenic landscape. Brendan informed me of a snake slayer named Rudy Komarek, deceased as of 2008, who remains notorious among the conservation community as a “fanatical enthusiast” and federally convicted wildlife trafficker. He single-handedly removed thousands of timber rattlesnakes from dens in the northeastern United States, often under the guise of protecting public safety. Komarek killed snakes, traded their limp bodies for bounty payments, sold some alive into the commercial trade, left some for dead in sealed bags as he evaded wildlife officers in hot pursuit, denied water and care to others for so long that their bodies aborted their babies, stillborn. He reportedly sold maps of den sites to like-minded collectors in a direct reversal of the conservationist practice of geographic occlusion. “In the snake community,” Brendan said, “he was the No. 1 guy to look out for.” Herpetologists William Brown, Len Jones, and Randy Stechert had harsher words for Komarek in a co-authored journal article, branding him a “pathological snake-hunter” on a par with the settler-exterminators of early New England, a “nefarious hominid” who “seems even to relish the idea of his power to exact a devastating toll on this species.” Early America, I learned, is never far from the minds of timber rattlesnake biologists when dealing with the likes of Komarek. They look back to the 18^th century and its “purposeful snake-hunting raids” as the prelude to the mess they must work to clean up today, assured that they are themselves part of a different lineage of rattlesnake investigators.

But Brendan wasn’t keeping the den secret from only the Rudy Komareks of the world. He told me how the merely curious, people not unlike myself, seeking to observe these rattlesnakes either for their extreme rarity or for the unique black coloring of this particular population, could cause the community distress and unintentionally expose the site’s whereabouts to others. I thought back to the Enlightenment-era naturalists I studied. Some killed these animals out of fear, or even a desire to enact revenge. But others captured them as a curious pursuit—to study and dissect their bodies and convert them into specimens and images or to parade not-yet-dead snakes and their live-birthed young—which distinguished rattlesnakes from many other serpents—in public displays. The state’s recent efforts worked to sever human and snake worlds, curiosity be damned.

To see these secretive serpents, we were beholden to their own schedule and rhythms. We counted down the days until warmer weather would coax the vipers en masse from their winter hideaway, many fathoms deep in dark fissures of rock. We waited. And we waited. Once the snakes emerged from their hibernaculum, they would bask in the sun to raise their body temperature and then disperse miles into the woods for their short summer window of terranean activity. Postpartum mothers who had given birth to litters of live young the previous year would continue the slow labor of rebuilding their fat stores after their resource-intensive pregnancies. And those females in the population who had mated in a dance of intertwined tails last autumn, who had been holding and quietly tending sperm in their bodies all winter, would now begin their formal gestation at the very moment we sought them.

Only, as luck would have it, this particular year was the infamous 2020. Our snake community’s spring exit happened to coincide with the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, wrought from some unknown form of human-animal intimacies. I worried our expedition would be delayed indefinitely on account of the strict lockdown. But despite the virus raging around us, care of these endangered animals was deemed essential state business, given their precarious hold on existence.

When I told my friend Charlotte about the upcoming trip, she asked an offhanded question that I couldn’t shake from my mind: “What’s more dangerous: A stranger in a mask or a mama rattlesnake?”

The mama rattlesnake, I thought to myself without hesitating—but perhaps not for the reason you might answer the same. I feared a masked stranger, but I had faint premonitions of what a mother was capable of. For I, too, was pregnant.

I hadn’t left the house in months, apart from scaled-back prenatal visits to the hospital. Faced with the prospect of venturing into an apocalyptic world, to root around for a potentially lethal animal across steep terrain, with a creature in my body I was determined to care for, and, as I saw from the ever-updating weather report, all during a massive heat wave, I began to feel some apprehension. I debated whether to reveal my pregnancy to Brendan, the wildlife biologist, in advance for fear I would be banned from seeing the den, my state of being too much of a risk for the state of New Hampshire; and then, when I decided to tell him and he was happy to proceed, I felt trepidation that this trip was actually going to happen, only days before I would enter the turbulent third trimester, as my lungs started to lose precious capacity and my abdomen and sense of balance grew yet more unwieldy. Would I react like 18^th-century naturalist William Bartram, I wondered, who, when faced with one rattlesnake, felt “so shocked with surprise and horror as to be in a manner rivetted to the spot, for a short time not having strength to go away”?

Before I left in search of snakes, my father-in-law, Guillermo, offered a bit of family lore—something we call a Robles Story. A woman who worked at the ranch and general store of Guillermo’s grandfather in Veracruz, nestled along Mexico’s Gulf Coast, also encountered a rattlesnake as an expecting mother. Early one morning, while she milked a cow in the semi-dawn, a serpent hiding behind the livestock struck out from the shadows and envenomed her leg. The woman cried out in pain, only to find, to her surprise, that the rattlesnake died instantly and collapsed in a limp spiral at her feet. A physician was called to the ranch to treat the woman. But when he arrived, he told her not to fear: He insisted that the forces of vitality flowing through her body from the pregnancy had simultaneously killed the serpent and protected her unborn child. He assured her: “There is nothing more poisonous than a pregnant woman.” After a grueling labor several months later, she gave birth to a baby who was unscathed. And out with the child came a tidy sealed sack of rattlesnake venom.

The morning of our journey, I found my husband, William, already on the couch downstairs. He had woken hours before me due to a serpentine knot of nerves in his stomach, which he hoped either to ease or exacerbate by watching videos of timber rattlers, looking for some sign that these beings would not harm his wife or child. Brendan had given William permission to join the excursion since social distancing requirements made Brendan unable to help a substantially pregnant woman scale a cliffside. As William and I started our drive shortly thereafter, a large and surly snapping turtle lumbered across the road and temporarily blocked our path, perturbed at the humans who dared help it to safety—as good a reptile omen as any. The thermometer in our car soon read 95 degrees, highly unusual for a New Hampshire morning in late May. It was yet another reminder of our tinderbox of a world, which seemed ready to ignite on all sides from fires and pandemics and melting permafrost and police brutality, as protests over George Floyd’s murder would erupt in just a few days, his body not yet laid to rest beside his mother, inside the earth. The trees on distant hillsides shimmered sickly from the heat’s haze.

We drove to a location I cannot speak of, passed trees whose nomenclature I should not name, leaped—as much as the gestating can leap—across rocks whose form and geologic history must go unsaid. The rocks, I will note, were towering and magnificent, ancient wardens sheltering legless spirits in their stony wombs.

But there are other things I can’t tell you.

We initially greeted Brendan from afar in a parking lot. He asked us to follow his vehicle, which made strategically confusing twists and turns, to the undisclosed location.  Increasingly alarmist signs on our ascent warned “Stay on Trail or Stay Home”—the forest’s own version of “Don’t Tread on Me.” But with the blessing of the state, we diverged from the sanctioned path, entered the brush, and let the bushwhacking begin.

I actually did own something like “wide sailor’s pants,” Swedish explorer Pehr Kalm’s outfit of choice for navigating rattlesnake territory in the 18^th century. (Kalm also mentioned that people in labor draped rattlesnake skins over their bodies “to promote an easy delivery,” though I wasn’t yet sure such a thing existed.) Opting for modern protections that day, I instead wore maternity jeans covered by snake gaiters that Brendan had supplied to provide bite protection from ankle to knee. Given the distinctive onyx hue of the snakes in this population, known as black morph or black phase, as opposed to the yellow-brown coloring of most timber rattlers, Brendan told us to be on the lookout for anything that resembled a clump of moose poop. They loved to hide along the edges of fallen trees, he warned. He also said that this sheltered and fragmented population in New Hampshire bears so little ill will toward the foreign form we call the human that they don’t typically even rattle when he approaches. With each step, I surveyed the land past the hill of my pregnant abdomen to ensure I didn’t step on a coiled snake.

I daydreamed that we would find the rattlesnakes emerging together from the rocks, their remarkable reptilian social structure on view. To survive, they must join, or die. But once we reached their stone stronghold, we realized the snakes had beaten us to the punch. Already dispersed into the woods, they likely would not return to the den until later in the fall or, in the case of pregnant females, a bit sooner to begin a gestational sun vigil together.

These beings were not the writhing spectacle of vulnerability I expected to find, which had so exposed rattlesnakes (especially pregnant ones) to settler predation in early America. In fact, tracking devices that had been affixed to four females provided the only clues to the existence of any snakes at all in these quiet woods. Brendan’s team had placed radio transmitters either directly onto their rattles with glue or, more invasively, through surgical insertion at a veterinarian’s office. Each snake had her own FM wavelength, and to track her down Brendan would hoist a giant metal antenna above his head—similar to the ones you’d once expect to find on the roofs of suburban homes—and follow a steady beeping that intensified as we ranged closer. In addition to listening for their quivering rattles, as so many 18^th-century wanderers had done, we readied our ears for very different soundwaves.

As we moved deeper into the forest, I felt not fear but a surprising alertness and calm. I silently repeated a mantra that would carry me through this miles-long search over and through bramble, steep cliffs, slippery leaves, mosquito clouds, and menacing logs to meet the one I sought, a mantra I would repeat again, just months later, throughout my own labor: “There is nothing more poisonous than a pregnant woman.”

The rattlesnakes and I—we had all been waiting. Life had been paused, dormant, latent, on hold. Timber rattlesnakes, near the northern limit of their range in New Hampshire, spend the majority of every year underground, deep below the frost line. Brendan hoped to acquire a borescope, a camera on a wire dozens of feet long that could explore the network of stony channels hosting this community. But without the human technological snake, this pit of pit vipers stayed hidden in darkness. Their underworld lives were perhaps better known to Blanket—a Cherokee man who told of his travels to the serpent underworld to witness an emotional rattlesnake funeral in the 18^th century—than to modern-day herpetologists or to me.

Many female rattlesnakes spend these dim subterranean months readying themselves for a spring and summer gestation. In summer, pregnant females join together as if to form one mass, enveloped in each other’s coils and folds while exposed on sun-soaked slabs of rock near their maternal den, one more instance of the firm sense of home ingrained in the species. In late August or early September, these females will give birth to reptilian replicas in miniature as the surrounding treetops burst into fireworks of redback salamander and burnt orange—the very same season when I would be due to deliver a daughter.

So while this community of snakes had been waiting, I was waiting out a biological and cultural winter of my own. In early March of 2020, I retreated into my own den, into my own self, for quarantine, all while tuning my senses to the small life growing inside me. And then March became April became May. Time twined, knotted, rolled over itself and concealed its true shape. I felt my child’s first tadpole twitches in this state of suspended animation; early modern women called a fetus’s initial perceptible taps “quickening.” Pregnancy wasn’t the worst time to slow down and simply be, for those like myself with the tremendous privilege to afford stasis. I was curled up, becoming, snake-like in my incubation, expecting, expectant, waiting for things not yet seen.

And yet, the early season of this pandemic was a trying time to be with child. To have little choice about bringing new life into a major historical event, as I was already pregnant when lockdown began and soon realized my daughter would enter a world quite different from the one she was planned in; to know in your mammal gut (and from basic logic) that gestation put you at a higher risk of severe illness and death, only to be dismissed by doctors and federal agencies until “the needed data” vindicated you long after it mattered; to flee at the sight of people, given the very real consequence, should you or your partner be infected, of birthing a baby alone—a baby that would then be whisked away from you for days or weeks, under hospital protocol; to miss out on any sense of normalcy before such a metamorphosis in one’s life. All this, to emerge and suddenly find that the village you were promised is empty.

Scientists do not typically describe rattlesnakes, or other reptiles for that matter, as pregnant. Instead, they are termed gravid, from the Latin gravis, meaning “burdened” or “heavy.” The word initially struck me as more clinical, less human—an attempted bulwark against anthropomorphism. It was not until I became pregnant that I would realize just how clinical and yet human it could be. When reviewing my medical records, I noticed the label G1P0 on every document: G to denote gravidity, the number of times a person has entered this state of burden and heaviness, and P for parity, defined in the United States as the number of previous pregnancies that made it past 20 weeks of gestation. Various pregnancy-induced medical conditions, like the brutal onslaught of chronic vomiting known as hyperemesis gravidarum, likewise imbue human pregnancies with this notion of gravidity. Interacting with the medical establishment quite literally makes pregnant humans into gravid specimens. The violence of that association has been truest for people of color, stretching back to the abuses of enslaved women as research subjects of early obstetrics and lingering into the present with stark racial disparities in maternal and infant mortality rates.

In the 18^th century, naturalists feverishly quantified and described every facet of the animal specimens they collected. This was especially true when it came to matters reproductive. In possession of a dead rattlesnake, they would count the number of joints in its rattle, measure the snake’s length and girth, tally up its total number of scales, and, were it a gravid female, slice its abdomen to unearth and account for the offspring inside, as when the colonial traveler Jonathan Carver carved opened one rattler with a reported (and perhaps exaggerated) “seventy young ones in its belly … perfectly formed.”

Herpetologists continue to carry out aspects of this calculus. Their practice relies on unfettered manual access to specimens, to bodies. They count up a snake’s scales to differentiate species and sexes, for instance—even though it can be gallingly difficult to get right. For male rattlesnakes, biologists quantify and characterize each minute feature, fringe, spine, and lobe of the rattlesnake phallus, a two-pronged member known as a hemipenis that resembles dewy, barbed bunny ears. For females, as shown by Brendan’s labors, they surveil pregnancy and postpartum life, enumerate the young.

Each prenatal checkup, I would lie down, exposed like a curiosity, while a doctor, midwife, or more typically a resident in training calculated the size of my growing uterus with a tape measure and palpated my bare stomach. They rarely referred to me by name; I was suddenly “mom.” Medics in masks logged each pound I gained, pondered every blood pressure reading, sought any trace of protein in my urine. I almost thought I fooled them when my apparently nonbinary blood type went undiagnosable for months—until they found a term for that, too. Once I started experiencing heart palpitations from the increased blood flow of pregnancy, a cardiologist fastened electrodes across my chest and ribs, which he connected by wires to a device that monitored my internal rhythms for several days, making me feel not unlike a radio-tagged snake.

During labor, I would be strapped with monitors again to chart the thump thump of my baby’s heartbeat and the crescendos of each contraction. Birthing at a university hospital, I was a pedagogical specimen, like many an early modern snake. Accommodating, pliant, compliant, and female, my body was a teaching moment, a canvas for heuristic mistakes. (One blunder by an unsupervised resident during labor could have become life-threatening, had I not noticed it.) My baby, as well, became an object of study and specimen to track, her early weeks marked by an obsession over pounds, ounces, minutes of milk, inches from head to toe, centimeters of head circumference. When I first saw her on this side of existence—

But there are still things I must keep from you.

“Vulnerability has always attended being pregnant,” writes historian Sarah Knott in Mother Is a Verb, a memoir-history of motherhood through the ages. “Projections of vulnerability on the visibly pregnant, too,” she adds. Both rattlesnake bodies and pregnant human bodies have been viewed through a lens of danger: one capable of inflicting it, the other of receiving. But vulnerability cuts all ways. Historically and now, gravid females have been the most exposed snakes in any timber rattlesnake community, as pregnancy prompts them to bask conspicuously on rocks, heavy with young that distend their bellies and spread their scales. In distinction to a human pregnancy, they will also forgo food during gestation and eventually lose around a third of their body weight, which takes years to regain. Even as females in this condition remain vulnerable, they are also a snake community’s cornerstone and perpetuating force. The yearslong intervals between each snake’s gestation means that, in the words of recent biologists, “Removal of a single animal, especially an adult female … has a relatively high negative effect on the population, damaging its ability to sustain itself.”

These snake matriarchs guard the next generation, too. After giving birth, the assembly of basking mothers will stay by the sides of their vulnerable newborns and protect them for a week or longer, until propelled by hunger into the forest for that first, precious postpartum meal. Rattlesnakes have their village. Familial affection and ties of kin in the reptile world have often been hard for scientists to see, though they have always been there.

Take the small carnivorous dinosaur known as Oviraptor, whose name translates to “egg thief.” Ever since the dinosaur’s discovery in the 1920s, when a fossil uncovered in Mongolia showed an adult specimen hovering over a clutch of oblong eggs, paleontologists assumed the dinosaur was scavenging the eggs right when catastrophe hit and preserved them all in a prehistoric snapshot. It took until the 1990s for Mark Norell, after finding an actual oviraptorid embryo in another oblong egg and then a fossil of a dinosaur actively sitting on a nest in full brooding position, to fully convince and document for the paleontological community that these reptilian raptors—the kin of modern birds—were parenting just like birds do. In fact, modern birds probably parent because the practice existed among ancient dinosaurs, birds simply being those dinosaurs who averted extinction. Some scientists suspect that, contrary to human norms, it was the Oviraptor fathers, not the mothers, who sheltered the eggs, given the presence of male parental care among the so-called ratites, like ostriches and cassowaries—the most basal and dinosaurian of modern bird groups. As with the terrible lizards, it has similarly taken some time, retraining, and mental openness for naturalists to appreciate rattlesnakes not as unemotive killers and loners, but as parents, too: mothering as not just warm and soft, but also cold, scaly, and hard.

A mile into the woods, we were surrounded by female timber rattlesnakes, assured by the beep beep beep at every frequency of Brendan’s radio. We knew they were there, hidden from view. One, we determined, had found refuge somewhere in a nearly vertical cliff wall, which dropped beneath our toes many dozens of feet. We debated sending a nongestating person to scout but agreed it would be far too treacherous for anyone to attempt to scale from our vantage at the top. We could take time to circumvent the cliffside and try from the bottom, but there were still no guarantees, and we would be further, and downhill, from other signals, potentially without a snake to show for it. Knowing the terrain, Brendan could tell from the beeping that a second rattlesnake had traveled across a dense marsh that would be similarly difficult to maneuver. A third was just too far. Trying to find these snakes would have been dangerous on this oppressively hot day.

One lone signal, however, held out an electric promise. It hailed from a direction that, though deep in the forest, wasn’t filled with cliffs or marshes, according to Brendan. We put our faith in this sound, and in her direction we went, eager to find this subtle serpent, not-so-subtle antenna hoisted overhead. After what seemed like an eternity, Brendan pointed his antenna at a fallen tree and an adjacent patch of bramble.

And I knew from his body language that we had found her.

We approached slowly, reverentially. She was as unmovable as a mound of brain coral. Due to her infrared-sensing abilities, we must have appeared like lumbering towers of magma. The serpent’s gaze almost seemed to narrow at us, an artifact of a rattlesnake’s characteristic supraocular scales, which create a permanent hood above each eye. Without the aid of technology, we likely never would have found this statuesque snake curled quietly atop a scrim of dead leaves. She was a lighter charcoal color than most of her kin out here, her hallmark banding pattern faintly visible like veins in marble. Brendan estimated that she was four feet long when fully extended and that she could strike about half the length of her body from this pose. We remained more than a couple of feet back. Brendan recognized her as a postpartum female who had given birth to at least six live young the previous fall. She was near the start of the long journey of a mother’s recovery, not to give birth again for several more autumns. The offspring she had sheltered and cared for were now in the woods as well.

Brendan described her as confident. She barely budged when we approached, assured of her own power. Yet, he noted, she probably didn’t want to resort to expending her venom if it could be avoided, given the cost of cultivating it. I wondered if she may have also been afraid: She was one of the snakes who had been radio-tagged through surgical means. Ironically, as we gathered around this stoic and highly potent being, a commonplace bald-faced hornet began to divebomb our heads, its venom posing more of an immediate threat than that of the calm snake. In that moment, Brendan and I jovially agreed that we’d both rather die by rattlesnake bite than a horde of wasps. William wasn’t so sure. Brendan found a long stick and used it to lightly lift the veil of bramble covering the serpent’s face to allow us a better photo op.

She made no sound at the stick’s approach, demurring even to reveal her eponymous rattle, let alone shake it in alarm or defense. William said she had the air of a grandmother, putting him at immediate ease. He told me later that he felt a desire to move closer—an urge he suppressed out of respect, both for biologist and snake. I, too, felt a magnetic force, similar to what one 18^th-century Vermonter named Elias Willard experienced. Initially planning to kill a rattlesnake he encountered, Willard wrote that “my curiosity led me to view him … while I forcibly dragged off my body, my head seemed to be irresistibly drawn to the enchanter, by an invisible power.”

Brendan gently lowered the bramble over the serpent’s face again, leaving her as obscured as we had found her. And that was that. Our encounter had to be brief, by design. Lingering any longer might have perturbed her. “We don’t want to distress endangered species,” Brendan said, unironic about the understatement. We said our goodbyes to the snake and began our way back.

On our descent, we decided to travel down and around to the base of the cliffside from before to see if we could glimpse the snake whose signal had appeared first on our radar. But peering up from the bottom confirmed our fears: The stone fortress was not safe for human wandering. The rocks formed a theater in the round that scattered our radio waves, making any effort to pinpoint that snake’s location a ruse. Just by looking, we could see why the snakes would call this architectural stronghold home. Nothing else in the forest resembled it. I resisted the urge to take a photograph, as that somehow felt disrespectful, or profane. Nor did I want to tempt myself with a record that could lure me into retracing my footsteps.

That we could only find one snake made sense in retrospect. Her singularity was compelling: a reminder of cryptic and unseen worlds underfoot, of invisible scent trails and pheromonal chains linking these snakes in a dispersed network of communion, of gestations best left hidden from human view, and, more solemnly, of vastly diminished snake numbers in this region.

We didn’t see a single human soul on our adventure. Perhaps for the better. I wondered if this snake had any inkling of the storms of the human world raging around her. If the pandemic retreat of people into homes had coaxed her and the three others to venture farther, wider, wilder than before. In the minds of Brendan and his colleagues, their task wasn’t simply a matter of ensuring people don’t find the site. They saw victory not only in humans losing some knowledge of rattlesnakes, but in rattlesnakes losing some knowledge of humans, too. For eastern timber rattlers, memory of the human is a tragedy.

“Into the underland,” writes Robert Macfarlane, “we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.” Coexistence of humans and rattlesnakes is fundamentally fraught. Yet efforts to completely divorce the worlds of snakes and people are also futile. If snakes can elude human knowledge, they can also elude human attempts at estrangement. One quite conspicuous trace of humanity already encircles the den—though to avoid divulging the site, I once again won’t say what. The three biologists who penned the aforementioned diatribe against the snake-slaying Komarek write: “The timber rattlesnake is one of the last symbolic wilderness species remaining in eastern North America. Many of our mountainous deciduous forests would be lacking an element of pristine excitement without this species.” Such a vision of wild species and wild lands would have been incomprehensible to settlers who arrived in the New World in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. To them, wilderness was a vile and desolate thing. And it was never really wild, given the manifold ways that Native people shaped, and continue to shape, the landscape.

The environmental historian William Cronon delivered the most famous and trenchant critique of the concept in 1995, writing that “there is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the culture that holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny.” Wilderness, far from preceding humans, in fact depends on civilization for its creation. That snake biologists I’ve spoken with don’t know that they are in significant ways borrowing a long-standing Native practice, already established in the 18^th century, of hiding rattlesnake dens likewise points to a collective amnesia of how these lands and animals have been managed since long before Europeans ever set foot on the continent.

But even if the notion of a pristine nature is illusory, something did tangibly shift for these snakes when settlers invaded. Now, even more changes will afflict them due to further upheavals in our global system. Remove human bodies from the den of the snakes, if you can or should, and the tentacles of climate change can still find their way in.

Looking back into the green hush of the woods, hand on the growing orb of my belly, I wanted to ask that snake a question I had been quietly mulling for months. How do you mother when the world is burning?

This piece is an edited excerpt from Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History, by Whitney Barlow Robles (Yale University Press, November 2023).