Can you imagine, for a moment, what it’s like to sit on a sunlit scree slope on a perfect spring day, surrounded by dragons? The narrow canyon of reddish columnar basalt below me—what’s left of the fifteen-million-year-old Roza lava flow—is filled to the brim with chest-high gray-green sage. Wading through that sage on my way to this spot has left my sun-warmed skin anointed with a spicy pine scent that rivals anything sold in a delicate French bottle. It would be an idyllic scene, except that I’m sitting on a sharp rock, which is digging painfully into my backside. I’d like to move away from it, but there’s a rattlesnake comfortably curled up in the hollow behind it, and I’d rather not disturb her. I could move the other way but, well… there’s a rattlesnake there too. In fact, their little dragon faces are all around me, some watching me with calm curiosity, others ignoring me entirely. I’ll get to everyone eventually but, at the moment, my attention is on the one in front of me, probably a male, maybe three years old. He looks a little dehydrated from the long winter, which is why he’s getting first dibs on the water I’ve hauled up to the den.

     An observer less familiar with snake behavior might be puzzled to find me using a vegetable mister to spray warm water over the snakes as if I’m watering a strange reptilian garden, but it’s the most natural way to offer them a drink. It allows them to sip the droplets from their scales, as they do after a rain shower in our dry, shrub-steppe environment. This is my spring ritual, and the best part of my year.

     Through the summer and fall, rattlesnakes in my area die by the thousands on the roads that cut through their ever-diminishing habitat. In order to hunt, to find breeding partners, and even to find water, they’re forced to cross these dangerous open expanses, exposed not only to the raptors that prey upon them but to human carelessness, and, worse, to those humans who come to these roads specifically for the “sport” of deliberately running vehicles over them.

     In the spring, though, the snakes emerge from brumation (a state similar to hibernation) and spend a couple of months in the relative safety of the dens, waiting for the nights to be warm enough for them to disperse for the summer. It is in those few magical weeks that I’m able to make the trek up to the dens to sit among them and offer them water.

     On rare occasions, I’ve allowed someone who was afraid of rattlesnakes to accompany me. Not one of them ever feared a snake again. In fact, they have gone on to support rattlesnake conservation. The experience of sitting on a den, closely surrounded by rattlesnakes would seem, then, to be an obvious antidote to the widespread, irrational fear of these animals and a route to improved conservation efforts. Sadly, it’s not that simple.

     The locations of den sites are closely held secrets for a reason. Rattlesnakes are entirely dependent upon the den for survival. So much so, that a relocated snake who is moved more than a half mile or so will almost invariably die of starvation, setting aside even the instinct to feed, focusing solely upon trying to find his way back to the e den, without which he cannot survive the winter. Because the snakes all return to the local den in the fall and remain through the spring, the damage that can be caused by one individual at that location, whether by poaching or by destroying the den, can be catastrophic. I would love to give every rattlesnake-fearing person I meet the chance to sit with me, and have their perception of rattlesnakes forever changed. But it’s not worth the risk. In their enthusiasm to share their experience with their friends, or on social media, they could inadvertently cause the death of every snake in the den. Conservation work for unpopular species is always a delicate balance.

     So, I can’t take you to my favorite den. Not really. But if you will follow me in your mind’s eye, through the sage and up over the scree that rolls out from under your feet at every step, to the outcrop of columnar basalt that serves as a heat sink for the den, maybe you can imagine the Northern Pacific Rattlesnake tucked in by my feet. He’s not very big. Only a couple of feet long. When he’s fully grown, he’ll have chocolate saddles on a greenish background. For now he’s still young, and he’s freshly shed, so his pattern is bright, his saddle markings still more russet than brown against a light background. He’s relaxed and calm, so he’s lying in a flat coil with most of his black and white striped tail tucked under his body. His forked tongue flickers occasionally in my direction, tasting the air curiously for my scent. But mostly he’s busy sipping water from his scales, touching each drop delicately with the very tip of his mouth. If you watch closely, you might see the muscles at the base of his jaws contracting rhythmically as he drinks. Once, he gets the angle wrong and gets a drop of water in his nose, which makes him lift his head and give a comical little sneeze—pff—before settling in to drink again.

     Can you see him? He’s beautiful, isn’t he?