Research

It may take a sense of crisis. In Europe, forest preservation occurred at the tail end of deforestation. In the U.S., the environmental protection laws that passed in the 1970s were an incredible turnaround driven by a sense that things were disintegrating. The fact that the environment is still deteriorating is a question of ineffective application of these solutions. People are mostly good and essentially hopeful and it’s possible for people to have a really good interaction with the world. 

There are two main ways to look at roadkill. One is the obvious and mundane conclusion that roadkill is the result of a bad interaction between nature and industry. For some animals, roadkill is related to extinction, and with more common species, it may make them less common.

It’s also a form of wildlife observation. In Maine, we have a website for both live and dead observations, and in California we’re going to migrate over to having both on that website, too. If you observe an animal in its environment, it’s a remarkable experience, but it doesn’t tell you much about its state; but a roadkill observation is very clear. The animal is not moving. The observer can take a picture of it, so we can verify and calculate their accuracy in identifying the species.

In the California system, the accuracy is about 93 percent, which is very high. This is actually the largest wildlife observation system in California. People call it a citizen science effort, but there are a lot of professional scientists and natural historians out there who are familiar with lots of species.

Scientists have found several main causes: speed, adjacent habitat, curves in the road, visibility. Animals are more active at night, so visibility questions matter. Some species are attracted by the lights, so they are killed directly. Others avoid the roads, so that helps with direct impact to the individual animal, but creates sub-populations. Fragmenting populations of animals is not a good thing genetically, and for species survival in general.

The most popular mitigation is to build some kind of passageway. Those passageways are used very frequently by common animals. But you don’t get uncommon or shy animals using the passageways: Wolverine, fisher and ringtail are a few examples.

We have cameras set up at a lot of underpasses in California. Some are large railroad underpasses, some are culverts. After a year and thousands of pictures, I’ve found that there are maybe 10 species that go through these crossings — and the cameras are sensitive enough to pick up mice. There are deer, black bear, coyote, bobcat, raccoon, possum, skunk, fox, and rattus rattus. But out in the woods, there are 30 or 40 different wildlife species.

People involved in conservation usually emphasize the need for more passages over or under roads. They don’t discuss the likelihood that we are killing off species not only by direct impact but also by fragmentation. To me, that seems not very scientific. Maybe at some point we will have the motivation and ability to take on the entire problem, but we certainly won’t do that if we don’t acknowledge it. It’s addressed in the literature but not in the policy discussions by conservationists.

Under almost all conditions, slowing traffic down will mitigate the effects, almost completely. It’s much cheaper than all these wildlife underpasses. At 35-40 mph you can avoid a lot of collisions. The rate of roadkill goes down 90 to 95 percent.

Right now, it would be pretty much impossible. But it’s important to look at what we’re not talking about. With I-80, you’ve effectively bisected an area like the Sierra Nevada. The highway has an enormous impact on the jewel of California.

He’s a character of resistance, and at the same time he’s living off the detritus of society. He’s got the pirate veneer. He takes roadkill, the most upsetting, visceral sign of environmental destruction, and says, I’m really confronting this and I’m gonna use it.

Last year, a chef who has a show on TV wanted a suggestion for a gourmet roadkill meal. I said, ‘Are you willing to serve raccoon?’ I think the people who were eating it were a little taken aback when they found out what it was.