September 13, 2010
A Roadkill Map of California
A map depicting California roadkill for the last 30 days.
Curiously, there sure seems to be a lot of roadkill around Sacramento.
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The prof who spearheads the project was interviewed on CBC’s As It Happens tonight.
In terms of roadkill I’ve been a party to:
One coyote
One porcupine
One skunk
One curious ball of meat that was maybe a badger
One goose (killed near downtown Toronto when it jumped off a grassy median right in front of my car. I’m pretty sure it was a suicidal plunge.)
First four were in western Canada, where I used to drive long distances on weekends to visit friends.
I’ve been lucky, considering the amount of backroad driving I’ve done. Or maybe I’ve developed hyper-acute senses. I assume that almost any point along the road is to be regarded as a crossing or an intersection! Coming around curves is the worst, as neither the driver nor the animal can see, and the animal’s hearing may be impaired.
The creature I am happiest to have avoided was a beautiful kit fox in one of the roads leading out of Nevada’s Valley of Fire State Park. It was about 3:00 am and I was driving out of the park back to Las Vegas, still a little ‘funny’ from the mushrooms I had done with my friend.
That Sacramento roadkill is not my fault. I rarely drive. There was an incident with a squirrel when I went for a bike ride yesterday, but we both walked away.
Bloody, but unbowed?
none in Death Valley.
Hunh. Well, Death Valley’s different.
Actually, I had to ask the fellow behind me about the fate of the squirrel. I felt him hit my rear wheel but, due to trail traffic could not react without causing a horrid accident.
That’s the thing. You can’t just mindlessly swerve to avoid an animal if you might risk your own safety or that of others.
Damn it. A little kit fox just northwest of Ocotillo, not all that far from where I lived for a while.
You know, I reckon most folks out in the back of beyond don’t report roadkill. It’s those conscientious types up in Sacramento or the Bay Area.
Sheila:
Same here – I would have risked crashing my car if I’d swerved to avoid the Toronto goose, as there’s either 2 or 3 westbound lanes on Lakeshore Drive and it was afternoon rush hour, I just helplessly watched him go under the car, and then a horrid plume of feathers coming out of the back of my car. If that was bad, I can’t imagine what it was like for the guy in the car behind me.
One should bear in mind that the project’s out of UC Davis, which isn’t that far from Sacramento.
The photo gallery is morbidly fascinating to me. Especially those photos where the animal is whole and seems as if it could almost still be alive, except that it is strange somehow and really you know immediately that it is dead. All those barn owls! So sad.
Yep, Walt, after a while it did strike me that there might be a reason for the concentration of reports in the (broadly defined) vicinity of UC-Davis.
More than five years living in the back of beyond, and I have grown calmer in the face of the suffering and death of animals than I’d ever have believed possible, but I have to confess that roadkill still upsets me. Some nights I hear the screams of whatever prey the coyotes are ripping apart, and that does disturb me, but not in the way that I am disturbed by the sight of an animal crushed by a fast-moving, heavy machine.
(Again, not saying anyone should place human safety above the life of a possum or a raccoon. Still, it always seems like such a waste.)
I stopped and checked on 3 of the 5 to make sure they were dead and not suffering. The skunk and the goose, for reasons that should be obvious to you all, were the ones I didn’t do that for.
The coyote was particularly traumatic – I was outside of Carseland, Alberta, and not far from a couple farms. I had initially thought that I had run down someone’s dog. Coyotes have always been interesting to me. Both the Indian/First Nations notion of trickster and specifically the Cree creation myth involving coyote have somehow stayed with me – I learned them both as a kid.
I wept, in the red tail lights of my car, for the animal who’s only sin was crossing the road at the wrong time. Didn’t sleep much that night.
Oh, Walt, I am attracted to coyotes, too. In my wandering-in-the-desert years, I would often encounter one of them when we were both out at break of dawn — some loner who had drifted from the pack. (You shift your human schedule when the mercury in the thermometer has risen beyond 100 Fahrenheit by an hour I’m now accustomed to consider ‘morning’.) The loner and I would nod and pass one another.
I remember one time around 5:00 pm when, for some benighted reason, I’d decided to set off hiking into the malpaís — the badlands (and that’s a whole ‘nuther story). Anyway, right at the outset, I passed by a burrow from which I saw a snout emerge — and then most of the rest of the coyote, which then shook its head and retreated as though to say, “What stupid animal is out at this time of day?”
They are wonderful animals, and I never tire of hearing their choruses. In fact, pretty soon, I bet I can step outside and hear a gang of them up on one of the ridges.
Did I tell this? Near roadkill but for police intervention?
I was in my car, waiting on red at a notoriously long stoplight. Suddenly, people in other cars were waving at me, horns blowing. A sheriff’s deputy standing nearby with a radar gun began walking toward me, fast, with a bullhorn, yelling, “Halt, mam, don’t move!” or something like that. How could I have been speeding, my mind screams, I AM STOPPED DEAD STILL AT A RED LIGHT!!!
The officer then says, “Okay, you’re fine, move along” and walks back to his radaring. But I was frozen, trembling. A woman in a minivan across from me rolled down her window. “There was a little duckling crossing the road in the crosswalk in front of you. We just didn’t want you to run over it.”
Thank you, Carole. Sometimes I think humans are all right.
Were you in boston? Did you write a children’s book about it?
It was sweet. Arlington, VA, where craziness can break out because of the monuments, Pentagon, etc. But that deputy wasn’t going to let me hit that little duck. Especially considering it was observing traffic laws, waddling in the crosswalk toward the high school.