Numlock Sunday: Valerie Bauerlein on the snakebite summer

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Valerie Bauerlein of the Wall Street Journal who last week wrote “Snakebites Hit Record Highs in Southern States as Suburbs Expand”. Here's what I wrote about it:

Snakebites in the U.S. disproportionately happen in North Carolina, Georgia, Texas and Florida, which combined accounted for 39 percent of all reported bites among kids in a 2016 study. The leading culprit is the copperhead: in 2018, there were 2,118 Copperhead bites and 5,093 snakebites from other snakes. That’s on the rise, up from 1,840 copperhead bites in 2014 and 4,507 other bites. Bites tend to happen where the suburbs encroach on areas where snakes thrived before development, and wet winters (like this past winter) tend to drive the snakes to get a bit bitey.

This story has a little …