Numlock Sunday: Dina Fine Maron on wildlife crime

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 Dina Fine Maron, who is the senior National Geographic Society wildlife trade investigative reporter. Maron reports on wildlife crime and exploitation for Wildlife Watch, and wrote Pandemic-induced poaching surges in Uganda last week. Here's what I wrote about it:

Cheap wire snares and steel traps made out of old car parts are scattered across the Murchison Falls National Park forests of northwestern Uganda, traps powerful enough to ensnare giraffes or lions indiscriminately. The Uganda Wildlife Authority counted 367 poaching incidents from February to May, more than double the number in the same span of time in 2019, and it’s thought that poachers are capitalizing on the pandemic, with the throngs of tourists that would normally make poachers less …