Oh hey, it's your old binder from junior year with slipknot lyrics in the margins, Ali Ward, bulge your seatbelts for a ride through the science of roadkill. People study this so that you encounter it less, So heads up. Obviously we do talk about accidents with wildlife, that's the episode, but in the context of how to prevent and avoid and survive them. So if you care about animals or your car insurance premiums, it's worth the listen to learn how to help these critters out, both every day and
in an emergency. So this interviewee I have chased down for years. I have been tailgating his social media, like can we do an episode at cammic Camy Camming Camming. And he has been the most elusive guest technologies history because he's been writing a book about this very subject for years, interviewing rhoetecologists all over the world about nearly every biome and biological specimen. And he wanted to wait until it was done and out to chat. And that
time is now except that he got COVID. But he's a really dedicated man, and we did the interview anyway remotely as he was getting over it, so we're gonna get it right to it. But first, thank you to every patron at patreon dot com slash ologies for supporting the show and setting in your questions. For this you can join as an ologist Pal for a buck a month and submit questions, but the BFF tier can leave
me audio questions. We may even plan the show. Also, thank you to everyone wearing and tagging yourself with ologies merch for social media, and folks who just leave a review for me to read, which you know I do. Such is this one from was an odd child who wrote five stars. Ali Ward, my father, uncle and missing. Wallett is the host of my favorite hyperfixation Theologies podcast, Best Way to spend an hour or two. Okay, let's be honest. Three was an odd child. I thank you
for that. I'm glad that you're one of us. Okay wrote ecology, very legit term for a very sad reality. But today's topic, the facet of it we're looking at is the impact on wildlife and huge interactions. So this guest has a master's in environmental management from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and his literally award winning science journalism has appeared in everything from National Geographic
to The New York Times. Device His latest book is Crossings, How road ecology is shaping the future of our planet, and it necessitated talking to so many rhode ecologists and then packing all that knowledge into this gift that he's giving us in this interview. So if you have a keen ear, also you're going to hear the mention of Montana more than once. And so I invite you, when you do, to take a sip of the nearest beverage,
perhaps do a tiny imperceptible butt dance. And again the episode will help you and anyone you talk to about it and hopefully decrease collisions that impact wildlife. We're going to cover bumpy roads, wildlife using crosswalks, skunk stench, moose impacts, deer crossing signs, the most dangerous animals on the planet, laser fences, highway tunnels, lush overpasses, beloved cougars, asolot facts, What to do if you see roadkill, how to avoid making more of it, and whether it's okay to pick
up a dead thing and to eat it. With author, environmental scientist and Honorary Rhotocologist Ben Goldfarb.
My name is Ben Goldfarb, and he him.
I have been waiting to talk to you for literal years. Benjamin, It's been so long.
I know.
I feel like we've been discussing this possibility forever, and you guys so patiently waited for this book to wind its way through the publication pipeline. I'm really grateful that you guys didn't find somebody else about this topic.
There's no one else I'd rather talk fresh roadkill or old roadkill. So this is a pretty big day for me and for roadkill in general. First question off the bat, how does one end up studying roadkill? I know that you get asked this at every dinner party. How did you end up writing a book about this?
Yeah, it's a really good question. I'm not even sure what the answer is. I think, I mean, certainly part of it was seeing ways to prevent roadkill. You know, I had this really formative experience a decade ago. In October of twenty thirteen. I was in Montana, you know, working as an environmental journalist, looking for things to write about, and I ended up getting a tour of these wildlife crossings, you know, these overpasses and underpasses that let animals safely
navigate highways. This was on Highway ninety three north of Missoula, and that was just such a cool experience. You know, I hadn't really thought a whole lot about roadkill and about all the problems that roads create, but seeing these structures that were designed to prevent that tragedy from happening just sort of caused me to think about this problem in a new way.
And you know, I know that road well. My dad is from Montana. I've driven ninety three many times. And one thing that's interesting about roads in Montana is all the white crosses. Are you familiar with those? Oh yeah, certainly, yeah, which is really a stark and kind of gutting reminder of how many fatal accidents have been on that road. It really makes you slow down. Okay, So, if you've never seen these, they are these small white metal crosses planted on the side of the road, and there's one
to mark each fatality at the site it happened. So every time you see one, I mean, it's impossible not to imagine the shattered glass and the wrecked metal and the grieving families. And I've seen clusters of them at a time, And there are memorials near tricky bends in the highway that have crops of markers up to like sixteen in one place, and some groups are opposed to them for understandable reasons across may very well not represent
the faith of the victims. Also, they're a bummer, But the American Legion has been putting these up in Montana since early nineteen fifties to do just that, to scare the shit out of me personally and millions of other people so that they drive more carefully in order to spare more human lives. Did that have any impact as well, just knowing that those roads are dangerous to humans as well as wildlife.
Yeah, you know what, it certainly didn't. I think that they're I mean, they're dangerous for a lot of the same reasons. Right, They're these winding rural highways that people tend to drive too fast on, and you know, often wildlife is probably related to those human fatalities as well, Right, I mean, there's something like four hundred drivers killed in
deer crashes every year. I think Montana is the second highest state in the country for per capita wildlife vehicle collisions, Right, there are lots of animals on the landscape, so certainly that roadkill is a it's a danger to humans as well. And I've had, you know, state troopers say things like, you know, look, there are four hundred dead drivers every
year that we know of. But oftentimes when you come upon a single car accident with a fatality, you know, we don't know why that occurs, but that could be somebody who veered for a moose or an elk and hit a tree or flipped or something like that. So I think that link between human safety and wildlife safety is a really close one.
So there's a September twenty twenty three report about just this animal impacts and it was issued by State Farm Insurance and the headline screams November is still the most dangerous month, with an estimated two hundred and ninety seven thousand collisions, and they're talking about wildlife. So over the last year, one point eight million Americans filed insurance claims, apparently because they slammed into a non human creature. But the national odds of hitting an animal annually is one
in one hundred and twenty seven. But if you'd like to avoid it at all, costs. I guess you could ride a bike, or you could move to Arizona, where you have a one in five hundred annual chance of an animal vehicle collision, and West Virginia I am sorry, but one in thirty eight for y'all. Montana unsurprisingly held the number two spot, with one in fifty three people
getting into an accident with an animal. And if you can't just up and move to Arizona because your spouse and children would feel abandoned or whatever, then you can take other measures. You can be careful in the riskier situations, like driving at dusk. You can watch out for herd animals, which tend to travel in posseas naturally, and of course, do not scroll on your exos social media if the
long drive gets boring. As humans driving cages of reinforced steel are chances of survival much higher than a bunnies. So when Ben was writing the book, how did he balance the focus between the impact on humans versus the impact on the wildlife question?
I mean, I think that it's hard to separate those things. You know, so much of the history of studying roadkill is really about human safety. It's kind of it's interesting to trace the history of rhad ecology, this field of science, you know, which really begins in the nineteen twenties with the proliferation of the car, and early biologists are fretting about all of the garter snakes and ground hogs and
the woodpeckers being killed by this fearsome new technology. But then the car kind of becomes this accepted fact of the American landscape and people stop thinking about it until
the nineteen sixties when deer populations explode. You know, deer were almost hunted to extinction in the nineteenth century, and then in the mid twentieth century they start making a comeback, and people are driving farther and faster than ever, and suddenly there are these large mammals blundering onto new interstate highways and really causing a risk to human safety. And that's really when rhad ecology as a field truly takes off. And it is aren't necessarily in concern for wildlife, although
certainly that's a big part of it. Its origins are really in concern for human safety, specifically due to deer collisions. So I find that fascinating that this discipline is sort of intimately tied to human safety almost from the.
Advent that makes sense, I mean in terms of also westward expansion and American colonialism, I feel like maybe we look at things from a human centered lens a lot, just a hunch, but no kidding. Also, did killing off wolves have a lot to do with that explosion of deer?
That was definitely, I mean, that was part of it. You know, deer, we're coming back into this landscape that lacked wolves and cougars and all of the historic predators that would have controlled their populations. I think a big part of it was also the rise of the suburb. You know, suburbs are amazing deer habitat right, So many Northeastern suburbs have much higher deer populations than forests did prior to European arrival, which is pretty amazing to think about.
And of course the suburbs are this creation of the car in a lot of ways. Right in the mid twentieth century, the interstate highways are funneling people away from cities and into suburbs, and this whole car culture oriented around the suburb is emerging and sort of beckoning to whitetail deer, which are kind of bouncing back from their
own brush with extirpations. So I find that really interesting too, right that cars created a landscape that was prime for deer and then caused collisions between drivers and those same animals.
And for more on wolf populations, you can see the Lupinology episode about wolves, and you can prepare to celebrate the finest holiday of the year on November twenty third, which is Wolfanut. It celebrates the spirit of the wolf who brings and hides small gifts around the house for everyone, especially people who have dogs and are kind to dogs. They get better gifts than anyone else. And you eat roast meat because wolves eat meat, or roasted veggies if
you like. And you make a cake that's decorated like a full moon. And this according to the seven year old New Zealander who invented wolf in newt just a few years ago, not realizing that it would become a global November twenty third celebration, one which I myself enjoy. I have hid new pairs of socks around the house for dinner guests to hunt like Easter eggs, and my
full moon cake was ugly but delicious. Now on the topic of wolves prey, though, we of course, have an excellent two parter Deer episode featuring not one but two cervidologists named Rhannon What Are the Odds, which addresses all kinds of stuff like whether or not deer eat birds alive. I mean, be honest with me, are deers the ones getting creamed the most?
Deer? Yeah, I mean, deer are definitely they're the ones getting creamed the most visibly. I would say, I think between one and two million deer killed every year. And you know, obviously the vast majority of those collisions are not fatal to the driver but fatal to the deer. So deer are definitely getting creamed. But you know, there are also lots of squirrels and apostums and raccoons, all of the critters that we've all seen by the side
of the highway. And you know, I think that in part because the animals that we tend to see are the really common ones. You know, we don't really think about roadkill as being a true biodiversity and conservation crisis, right, but there are lots of rarer species as well, Florida panthers and oslots and tiger salamanders. You know, all of these animals that because they're so rare, we don't see
them dead by the side of the road. And yet for these these very threatened and endangered species, you know, roadkill really is an existential crisis.
Okay, So, first off, oslots are native to North and Central America. I had no idea for starters. Okay, So, an oscelot is a bobcat sized, spotted little cutie with a kitten face. It weighs twenty to thirty pounds. It's like the size of a large main coon, which is like having a real hairy toddler with knives in its face. And I thought oslots like maybe lived in North Africa or Central Asia. Nope, they live in like Texas south
of the Alamo, but not many. So forty percent of Texas oslot deaths have been attributed to human traffic collisions, and now there are only sixty to eighty Texas oscelots left in the wild. And yes, if you think some people keep them as pets, you are correct, most notably
surrealist painter and Mustache have her Salvador Deli. But before you decide to dip into like tiger king culture, be aware that your friend Wikipedia warns that osceolots might demand a lot of attention and have a tendency to suck on things, and this can lead them to accidentally ingest objects such as tennis balls, which is so specific I can only imagine that the editor of that page added it in shame after a close call and an exotic vet bill. I don't know what happened, but oslot's keep
them in the wild. Also, Florida panthers send him good vibes, man, because a September CBS news headline says it all kind of with a heaving sigh. Another endangered Florida panther struck and killed by vehicle, the sixty second such fatality since twenty twenty one, it reads, and apparently Florida panthers had the distinct honor of being one of the first critters
on the nineteen seventy three endangered species list. After hunting just struck a massive blow to their population and now there's less than two hundred and fifty Florida panthers in the wild. Ten percent of their entire population is killed each year in crashes with cars. Florida panthers don't deserve this. They should be going on motor boats and getting sun damage at Margarita happy hours like the rest of the state. But listen, these are the realities, and there is hope,
which we discussed later. I'm not just trying to bum you out. Who comes to your book readings? I got to ask you, just did a book tour. Do the people that you encounter there do they pull you aside and confess to you like you're a priest, about accidental squirrel collisions they've had or hitting a turtle in their teens? Do you get that a lot?
It's so funny us that I have compared myself to a priest taking confession on multiple occasions, because yeah, I mean, everybody's had this experience and they want to tell somebody about it. I think there's something so distressing and disorienting about hitting an animal too. You don't exactly know what
to do when it happens. I told a friend about the premise of this book a few years ago, long before it came out, and he told me that he had recently hit a squirrel and was so bewildered and confused in the moment that he just panicked and called nine to one one, which of course is not the right reaction, and I think they hung up on him, as they probably should have. But I think that just a tests to what a weird and saddening and confusing experience it can be to hit an animal.
Have you ever hit anything?
Sure? Yeah, I've hit all kinds of creators. I'm ashamed to say. I most recently, I killed an owl that was a few weeks ago in Colorado where I live, and it just swooped across the highway in the middle of the night and hit the top of the windshield, and you know, I assume it was killed. I did go back to briefly look for it, but couldn't find it. Yeah, so that was really hard. I don't know what. Have you ever hit?
Ali, Well, I hit a deer once and high school not long after I got my license. I grew up in a suburb with a lot of deer, and you'd always hear collisions. And I had an ap biology teacher, Odie, who whenever someone would hit a deer, they'd call him instead of nine to one one and he would come out and flay the deer, take the venison, take the hide.
And I saw him. There was one that was hit near school, and so he took us out to have a look at it, and I remember's belly was covered in ticks, but he showed us what to do with it, which was uncommon. They have to be pretty fresh. But I hit a deer once and the deer hit me. The impact was on the side of the car, and so when I told my parents, like, the deer hit me, they did not believe me at first, but then they're like, well, it is on the side panel, So what are you
gonna do? But what if you don't have an ode in your life, and you definitely shouldn't call nine one one? What is the best protocol if there's been a collision.
Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, certainly you could call the local the sheriff's department out here, you know in the West, or the police department just to report that incident, but you know they're not gonna do anything. I mean, I think the most common response is you don't really do anything. I mean, if the animal has done damage to the vehicle, you know there's going to be an insurance claim, right, and then that will become
a data point for somebody potentially. But the most common reaction is probably just keep driving, which is part of why this problem is so hard to grapple with in some ways and to grasp because these incidents generally are not being noted or observed or recorded in any way, and as a result, we don't really have a lot of great data about what a significant toll roadkill is taking on biodiversity.
I was curious, since Ben covered so many species and ecologies, if he had to track down possome researchers and deer teams and like a clique of panther people, a frog squad, etc. Did he have to collect a mosaic of data? And is his contact list the best?
Rhadycology this term that was coined in the nineteen nineties by Richard Foreman and a cologist at Harvard. You know, at first it was this very niche subject that only a handful of people in the country had heard of, let alone practiced. But today you can go to these rhad ecology conferences that have thousands of people in attendance.
So it's certainly interdisciplinary. It touches upon a lot of different fields, but it's also a distinct discipline in its own right that you know, increasingly has people who self identify as rhodecologists.
Do any of them come to you like, Hey, Ben, what's the deal with this? Can you hook me up with this person?
So people do say, you know, hey, I'm working on you know, mule deer over here in this state. You know, what are people doing about moos over in that state? And you know, is there anything that we can learn from those guys? And I've definitely been able to put different sources of mine in touch because the field has become so large and dispersed and atomized in some ways that not everybody knows what everybody else is working on.
And it's nice to be able to play that kind of interstitial role sometimes.
Did you want to focus on different countries, different species? How did you break it down? And why do I feel like Australia has the most roadkill? That's just absolutely a hunch.
No, I think you're You're totally right, But actually Tasmania is considered the roadkill capital of the world. It has some of the highest roadkill rates ever recorded. I know, super sad, right to think about all of those wallabies
and wombats. Those are like the coolest critters and and that was actually one of the places that I went and working on this book was Tasmania the road kill Capital, and they're One of the amazing things is that, of course, because those animals are marsupials, right, they're carrying their babies in their little pouch. What happens often is that the mother will be killed by a car, but the Joey,
the baby will actually survive in the pouch. So there are hundreds of wildlife rehabilitators in Tasmani who just drive around the countryside looking for dead animals, checking their pouches and extracting the joey's the babies within, and then raising them to adulthood over a couple of years, which is just this amazing, heartbreaking, beautiful inspiring practice. You know, we're so used to just driving past roadkill all the time.
That was really incredible to go to a place where people actually notice it and even seek it out.
Do those animals that are raised by rehabbers do they ever go back into the wild or is it like they've imprinted and their ambassador species.
No, they do get released back into the wild, and I definitely talked to rehabers or they're actually known as terrors in Tasmani, which is the phrase that I love. I talked to terrrs who say, yeah, this is a dubious practice in some ways, because we're removing these animals from this incredibly dangerous environment, and then we're releasing them
back into the same incredibly dangerous environment. Right, it's still the roadkill capital of the world, and is it really humane to reintroduce them into a setting where they're likely
to suffer the same fate as their mother did. Because Tasmania doesn't really have those wildlife crossings and other kind of infrastructural fixes that prevent roadkill, you know, the state itself is kind of relying on all of these volunteer rehabers to deal with this crisis without really addressing it in a meaningful way.
Did you get to extract any baby wombats or Tasmanian devils or wallabies out out of an available did you ever have to do it?
Yeah? Well, it's funny. I stopped for so many dead animals while I was there, and every single one was a male. It was very strange. I mean, probably a dozen or so and they were all they were all males. It was surprising. Mean, I think it's not too uncommon. Lots of species have higher rates of male roadkill than female. You know, males tend to have larger home territories than females do, and many mammal species especially, and often it's
those young dispersing males who get hit. You know, they're setting out for their own territories and looking for females. Hello, ladies. So you know that's not uncommon that you would see more male than female roadkill, But to check a dozen or so carcasses and they're all males, that was pretty surprising.
Did you get to see any baby wallabies in carror centers at all?
I got to see so many wallabies and wombats and patamelons. I'm sorry, Actually I love padamelons. That's an animal that moost people haven't heard of. But they're almost like if you took a kangaroo and miniaturized it, you would have a padamelon. And they're basically as cute as you'd imagine. And at one of the places I went, it was pretty wild. It was this couple, this wonderful couple who have extracted and raised so many patamelons to adulthood and
they released them into the wild. But you know, the pedamelons still have this kind of ancestral memory of the place that they were raised. And in the evening, this couple actually tosses food out for them, and all the ptamelons emerge from the forest and congregate in their backyard. And it was just this really surreal, beautiful, magical moment to see all of these creatures come out of the bush, and it's sort of like, Okay, you know you're feeding them,
Is that you know, the best thing for them? But in some ways I think maybe it is. You know, they're giving them kind of a soft entry into the wild in some ways and still meeting some of their needs while not actually having them in captivity.
Is this couple the happiest couple on earth?
They're pretty happy. Yeah, they were living out in the bush in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by their hordes of patamelons. There's definitely definitely worse ways to live.
Imagine a life with your love you're surrounded by animals that look like less stone version of quacas. The p melon is nature's chimera. It's the size of like a small raccoon or maybe a large bunny. It's got a squirrel face, kangaroo limbs, and a tail like a rat. But most spectacular, if you ask me, is it's asked to head ratio a pea. Melon's got a caboose easily ten times the size of its head, but sadly it's still not enough cushion to soften vehicular pushion. What a life?
Just critters coming out of the bush to be like, hey, mom, oh that's a cute thing I've ever heard.
Yeah, you could move to Tasmania and experience that yourself. That would be a radical change in lifestyle for you, but it sounds like you'd enjoy it.
I gotta befriend them on MySpace or something. Okay, so you said males more than females. What animals tend to be most vulnerable because the idea of a panther getting hit or we have a massive problem with pumas out here in La, which I'm sure you're familiar with in P twenty two two and all of that. We did an episode about P. Twenty two with Miguel and Beth. Oh cool, yeah, and it was so emotional. I mean, he was really an LA mascot for so long, and
the freeways here are so punishing. But you don't think of leopards as not being able to outrun a kia. So what species are most vulnerable?
Yeah, it's a good question. I'm so glad you talked to Beth and Miguel because I you know, those guys are awesome in there in my book as well, and certainly there's a lot of P. Twenty two stuff in there.
So P. Twenty two was this beloved puma that lived in the hills beneath LA's Hollywood signed for years and he died last year, and I was able to interview the wildlife biologists who discovered him in the special episode will Link of the show notes there is crying.
You know, there are kind of two main classes of animals that are really susceptible to road kill. I mean, the first are those large carnivores, you know, the cougars, the ocelots, the Asiatic cheetahs in Iran. You know, these are animals that patrol really large territories, which means that they cross highways often and they tend to occur in load densities. Right they occupy these big home ranges. There aren't a huge number of them on the landscape, so if you lose just a few to cars, the whole
population can really suffer. So for you know, the Florida panther in the southeast, I mean more than ten percent of their population is killed by cars every year. For ocelots in Texas, cars are the leading cause of mortality, right, So it's those carnivores that again occur in load densities and patrol large areas. You know, I definitely consider those some of the most endangered, the most road endangered species
out there. And then you know, on the other end of the spectrum, you've got the smaller stuff, the amphibians, especially frauds and salamanders that have to migrate to breeding ponds every spring and cross roads and mass in the process and get crushed in these events that you know, one ecologist described as a massive squishings, which are incredibly tragic.
Okay, So side note. I needed to know who coined that term because we needed to know, and via Ben's bibliography, it was first used in the textbook called rhode Ecology, Science and Solutions, which was written by host of authors including doctor Richard T. T. Foreman, now eighty eight years old and a professor of landscape architecture at Harvard, and he is considered to be the father of landscape ecology and rhode ecology and helped spearhead urban ecology and town ecology.
Truly a metro polyologist this one. But that textbook passage I found reads hundreds of Amphibian tunnels in several nations of Western Europe funneled the animals under roads in their seasonal reproductive migration. Massive squishings and associated messy auto accidents were reduced, So that's good news. But on the topic of squishings, here's some pop cultural trivia. Okay, so you know the video game Frogger, right, I love an underdog story and frogs, and it was inspired by a true incident.
I just found this out. Akira Hashimoto, a designer for this Japanese video game developer, was chilling at a stoplight and saw a love frog trying to cross the road, and he got out of his car to help the frog, and then he pitched the game. But American executives hated it, saying only little girls and women would play it, and girls and women were a trash demographic. And this was in the early nineteen eighty so I'm assuming that was a conversation in like a boardroom filled with power ties
and cigarette smoke. But this one American executive for Paramount disagreed and really fought for Frogger, saying, you, Dix thought pac Man sucked and look at it now. And so they said, yeah, that's true, and they bought it and it became this colossal success across all ages and genders. And that Paramount pro Froger advocate was named Elizabeth Falconer,
who was a executive in the early nineteen eighties. So if you've played Froger, you have enjoyed a rhodecology simulation and the fruits of a lady in shoulder pads and a men's world.
Those amphibian populations, too, are really being wiped out. So those are two, you know, incredibly disparate groups of organisms, right, these large cats on one end, the tiny frogs on the other, and they're both dramatically affected in different ways.
Do you cry about roadkill?
You know, I think that I cried about roadkill once.
It was Yeah, it was ten years ago. As in twenty thirteen, my wife and I were driving through Yellowstone National Park early one morning this beautiful morning was kind of missed, rising off the pavement just a you know, a gorgeous day, and we hit a red squirrel and the poor squirrel had a little pine cone or a nut or something in his mouth, which he dropped when we killed him, and my wife took his little body and sort of curled it around the pine cone he'd
been carrying and covered him in bread by the side of the road. And yeah, we both we both cried about that. And you know, I think that part of it was just the fact that we were in a national park, you know, this place where animals are theoretically safe and protected, and you know, it turns out they're protected from everything except for cars, right, They're safe from hunting and development and all of these other pressures. But there are still these highways running through the middle of
our otherwise secure, protected areas. And there was something that felt so unjust about that, you know, that you could live in a national park and still be run down by humans. That that was I think that was why we shed some tears over this world.
I don't blame you.
And it was Karen, a pine cone.
It was It was really hard. It was really hard to see.
I bet it was so excited about the pine cone.
Toad. You're trying to make me live this.
Sorry, I'm just I'm just here. I'm processing this for the first time.
Got it together?
Well, I mean, okay, you've written also beautifully about and eaters and the rainforest. What areas are putting in preventative measures like what's working out there?
Yeah, you know a lot of different countries and states in the US are doing stuff about this problem. If you talk to you know, Miguel and Beth about the p twenty two saga. You know, you heard the story of the Liberty Canyon overpass. Right, this giant wildlife bridge. It's going to reconnect mountain lion populations in southern California. That's incredibly exciting, and I think is galvanizing lots of
energy around building infrastructure that helps animals safely crossroads. I mean, I think a lot of cool stuff is happening in countries that aren't the US. You know, we think of ourselves as such leaders and infrastructure and conservation, and yet one of the problems we face is that we have
such old, kind of calcified highway systems. Right, we built all of our major highways, you know, in the nineteen fifties and sixties and early seventies, before our understanding of how roads really affect nature and before laws like the National Environmental Protection Act that require environmental assessments. So as a result, we kind of made these mistakes decades ago,
and now we're stuck dealing with the consequences. And yeah, we can build wildlife crossings and retrofit highways with fences that keep animals off the road and things like that, but you know, we're sort of stuck in this world we've built, whereas other countries are doing all kinds of cool innovative stuff as they build out their infrastructure for the first time. You know, in India, for example, they
built a highway through a tiger sanctuary. Unfortunately, right ideally the highway wouldn't go through there at all, but you know, they elevated the entire highway on these giant concrete pillars, so the animals can just wander underneath the highway unimpeded, which is more radical and progressive than anything we've done here in North America.
But not all corralling efforts are created equal. So, according to this twenty fifteen study, mitigating reptile road mortality, fence failures compromise eco passage effectiveness even with the tunnel under the highway, the fences that border the wilderness, and the roads that direct the critters toward their safe route matter. So the research found that plastic fences can tear and they end up trapping reptiles and amphibians on the road side because they can't find their way back into the
safe side. So rather than keep replacing these failing plastic fences, it's better to just spend the money on more permanent solutions. And this adheres to my husband's stance that instead of skimping on something shitty and then replacing it multiple times, get the good thing that will last, even if it's more expensive initially. And this steep but singular investment is known as buy once, cry once. He has yet to purchase miles of reptile fencing, but if he does, I'm
going to share that study. What about speed limits, like in Tasmania, as reducing speed limits helped or I wonder also if the oil crisis in the seventies, when speed limits went down a lot, at least in America to fifty five miles an hour, if that reduced roadkill.
You know, the speed limit thing is. It's an interesting question because I mean, certainly driving slower is good, right. It gives both the driver and the animal more time to react. We know that the problem is that it's really hard to get people to drive slower. You can lower speed limits, but people generally don't respond very very strongly to that signal. And the reason for that, basically is that we have highways that are designed to be
driven fast. On right, we have these wide, straight freeways that basically make you want to go fast, and there's lots of research showing that people tend to drive the eroad's design speed rather than the posted speed limit.
Right.
I mean, how many times have you been like flying down a straight away and you just kind of glance at your speedometer and it says, you know, eighty five and you're like, oh, I didn't realize I was going on. I mean, there have been studies showing that lowering speed limits does not really lead to a meaningful reduction in roadkill, because people just continue to drive fast because that's what
our roads want you to do. One of the really cool roads that I visited working on this book was actually a road in Brazil in this park where they had deliberately engineered the road to be really sinuous and also to be kind of wavy on the y axis like a roller coaster, basically to force drivers to go
slowly for wildlife. So instead of just changing the speed limit as we do sometimes here in the US, they actually designed a road that you could not speed on, which is a really cool and innovative idea.
I think just like giant speed bumps kind of.
Yeah, or like way yeah, yeah, it felt sort of like being at sea. They also closed that road at night, which was a great innovation, and I feel like we should be doing that as well here in protected areas.
What about things like answers and LED lights and solar lights for the evening. Are there any places that are trying to at least like illuminate the roads.
Yeah. You know. One of the cool technological solutions that's out there are these animal detection systems. So one of the challenges in rhode ecology, right, is that our most common innovation, or our most common attempted solution for dealing with roadkill is signage. Right, that classic yellow diamond with the leaping black buck that says, you know, watch for wildlife next forty miles or whatever. And those signs as you'd probably guess are totally useless, you know, because drivers
just habituate to them. You know, if you drive past a Florida panther crossing one hundred times and never see a Florida panther, you're just going to stop slowing down, right, and then the one time that the panther's there, you've already habituated to the absence of the panther and that's the time that you hit it, because you just got that negative stimulus so many times, right. So one of
the cool ideas that exists now. One of the cool technologies are basically responsive animal warning signs that only tell you there's an animal on the road when there's actually an animal on the road. They are these kind of real time signs along roadsides that are outfitted with radar and other sensors that light up these warning signs only when the critter's actually approaching the road side. So those sorts of solutions that don't let drivers habituate, I think
those are more effective. They're not perfect. They have I think about a fifty percent roadkill reduction rate typically, which is definitely, you know, better than nothing, but not as good as a wildlife crossing with fences that you know, keeps the animal off the road altogether.
So systems using yeah, radar or laser trip wires can give this technological heads up that says, hey, unless you want to think about the time you kill the deer for the rest of your life, maybe slow down because you got one comming up, buddy, and you don't want to meet up with it in hell? What about myths in roadkillingcology? What do you feel like is something that you learned was not true you didn't know going into it, or most people just don't know.
There are just so many failed attempted solutions out there, right, I mean, you know, you hear about deer whistles sometimes, right, these contraptions that you can mount on the hood of your car and that make this noise that's audible to the deer and frightens the deer away from the roadside. Or deer reflectors. You know, another really common attempted solution, These roadside reflectors that sparkle when they're hit with headlights and alert the deer to a coming car and frighten
them away. You know, those sorts of things. I mean, we've been trying that in this country for decades. And they're just not really backed by any good, peer reviewed science. So I think that the sordid history of failed roadkill solutions is something that was surprising to me.
I know, people asked about those horns and things at the front of the cars, and I was wondering. So that's good to know. And we did a couple episodes about ticks and lime disease, and obviously Connecticut came up a lot in the northeast, and I was reading a study about how when they gave more hunting permits for deer in those areas, the number of animals that were hunted for venison and buckskin and stuff reduced the number of crashes by about the same amount is legal hunting
of non predator animals. Is that becoming more popular?
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if it's becoming more popular. Certainly that's another thing that has been tried. There are lots of stories of communities in the eastern US that have actually done these white tailed deer culls, where they you know, they hire sharpshooters to control the population, at least partly as a roadkill reduction strategy. I think a much cooler idea than increased human predation is actually increased natural or wild predation.
Right.
They're actually a couple of fantastic studies suggesting that cougars and wolves, you know, by eating lots of deer, dramatically reduce roadkill rates and vehicle collisions and damage and even driver decks, which is pretty amazing. You know, wolves in Wisconsin have been shown to save the public millions of
dollars by eating deer. And there was a great study that estimated the value of reintroducing cougars to the Northeast and I forget what the figure was exactly, but it was you know, in the I think the hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of decades thanks to all of the deer vehicle collision reduction that cougars would achieve for us. So I think that's a pretty cool idea. You know, we could rely on natural predators as collision prevention technologies.
Yeah, not volvos. Just get up back out there. I also imagine that when you hear reintroduce wolves and cougars, it's like this hairs on the back of your neck stand up and you're like, that's so dangerous, but you are so much more likely to be killed in a collision with a deer than just torn to pieces by a cougar, I imagine, statistically.
Absolutely, yeah, I mean, that's same paper about cougar reintroduction in the Northeast estimated that cougars would save many lives over the course of thirty years. So yeah, these are seemingly dangerous animals when in reality, you know, the most dangerous wild animal in the country is the white tail deer, you know, much more responsible for many more human fatalities than sharks and snakes and bees and other animals, and
certainly than cougars. Of course, that's not the deer's fault, right, that's the world that we've engineered in which deer are implicated. But there's no question that anything we can do to kind of reduce some of these unnaturally high white tail deer densities, you know, is gonna save some lives.
I wonder even do you think they're even more dangerous than mosquitoes? Hm, that's in this country.
That's a good question.
I got to look it up.
I mean, certainly not globally, but yeah, I'm not sure how many how many Americans are killed by mosquito born illnesses.
I don't know, Okay, yeah, I checked this out for US, and while over a million people worldwide so come to mosquito born illness every year, it is a low percentage in the US. So the CDC reported just seventy nine human deaths last year, but deaths in America from deer collisions around four hundred and fifty, which is the same number of American fatalities from salmonella or acetamenophin hepatoxicity which is the medical term for a taile and all overdose.
But that's still four hundred and fifty funerals because of deer. And you know, they say it in Montana specifically, if you've ever been on a hike in Montana, you have been stalked by a cougar in a tree just looking at you, which is like, well, I've been on a lot of hikes in Montana yet to be killed by a cougar. Knock on something, So that's good. I have questions from listeners. Can I lob them at your face?
Oh? Please? Yeah, I'm ready, But before.
We do, let's steer some money at a cause of the ologists choosing, which this week is wild Landsnetwork dot org, which uses the principles of conservation biology to identify the core native wildlife habitat areas and the corridors the connect them, which they call wild ways, and their work is shaping conservation projects across North America. So if roadkill upsets you, consider checking out Wildlandsnetwork dot org. And thanks to sponsors
of the show for making that donation possible. All right, let's wild out. Let's tear through your Patreon questions. To submit questions for the Ologies ahead of time, you can just go to patreon dot com slash Ologies. It's a book a month to join, and we're going to hite your questions specifically a few audio questions asked by the BFF here on Patreon, but this first topic of inciry
was a popular one. It was also submitted by Jenna Briner, Rachel j Alisia Smith, John Burbridge, Maras Schoner, Kayla C. Chandler, Witherington, Elena Litton, Alana Wood, Alissa Gregory, Nicole Kleinman, Elizabeth Newman Taylor, and Denoah. Okay, let's hear it. Collar you're live, You're not absolutely not live.
Not too try to.
Put anologist out of work, but is there any way to avoid running over my little and sometimes not so little friends on the street.
Yeah, good question, And I think that minimizing your nighttime driving is probably the best way to do that. You know, that's just when the critters tend to be more active, and also you know, when your reaction time is the slowest. So yeah, that's definitely something that I've tried to be more conscious of. It's obviously hard to avoid altogether, but making trips in the daytime when you can, I think, is one way around that.
And also, early bedtimes are the new sleeping in? Am I right?
Like?
I love an early bedtime? So A pal and a host of the beauty podcast Natchbute, Jackie Michell Johnson. She calls herself a niche over thirty influencer, and she has influenced me.
Guess what is so much better than sleeping in? Going to bed early? Going to bed early.
It's so much better than sleeping in, take it from me.
And for that, I am ever grateful.
So nice, it feels, it feels so good, it's the best.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's just like I used to think, like things is so old of me, but I'm like, no, this is luxury, are you kidding? In bed of the book by nine.
Yeah, it's that fucking man. Your device turned off in another room ideally, so good.
Yes, I got a flip phone recently, a bat phone. I call it for emergencies. Only only a few people have the number, so I could just leave my phone in a corner. I know that if there's an emergency that people can reach me with a bat phone. But highly recommended, Ellie.
I've actually I have been an exclusive flip phone user for the last five years. So now we'll do another another a flip Phoneology episode sometime because I could talk about my flip phone all.
Day, oh my god. And you still are able to text people obviously, you could still take pictures on it. It's just no scrolling. That's amazing, very.
Very pixelated pictures and very slow texts.
But yes, yes, yes, good for you. Love it. Oh my god, that's amazing. I never would have guessed that about you. Some people, some of you out there, can just delete an app where you can silence your notifications, and congratulations on that. But I cannot trust myself around a browser because I blink and it's two forty am and I'm learning that the National Animal of Scotland is a unicorn who allowed that? Don't make me look it up,
but okay, back to a podcast about actual wildlife. So Ben's biggest tip is avoiding night driving and be hyper aware, especially during dusk and down. Other tidbits from experts on how not to kill an animal or yourself include don't look at your phone for everyone's sake, stay alert, especially during the peak season, which is now you are welcome,
and especially when you see those animal crossing signs. If you see an animal, you can flick your high beams, which is the universal signal for go on gee it. You can honk your horn, You do a little tap dance on the brakes to let anyone behind you know that there's some shit going down on the road ahead, and if an impact is imminent, if it's going to happen, the wisdom is not to swerve because that could land you in a ditch or rollover. So don't veer off
the road. Call nine one if it's a big critter that you hit that could endanger others, or if it needs humane treatment. Insurance companies are also like tape pictures so that we don't wrap your claim up in a lot of bullshit. Or moose shit. So okay, now you know how to avoid it or what to do. Just your internet dad here asking you to drive safe. Kiddos, want to have you around for as many episodes as possible. Okay.
This next one is another audio question from the bfftre on Patreon, but it was also on the minds of patrons Anna Thompson, Scarlett Page and Baker, Katie Murray, Ashley Dent, Sodnis, Jenna Coongden, Chris Curious, Jason Lowenthal, Destiny Beg, the Saccgrast Scientists, Pedal Luck and Emmy Dalrymple. Let's roll the tape.
This is Emily and Michigan. I was wondering who comes and cleans up the road kill and what do they do with the road kill? Where did they go after they scrape them up off the road? Sorry for being so explicit.
Yeah, that's such a great question. So every road has its maintenance personnel, you know, whether that's county staff or state staff or Federal Highway Administration staff, depending on the jurisdiction of the road. Who owns and operates the road, you just lends their private contractors as well, and you know most of those carcasses get land filled or incinerated. Some just get like taken to some random dump site and shoved off the side of the highway. Oh dear,
oh dear, that definitely happens. Sometimes. There are a couple of carcass composting programs out there which are kind of cool, and then some get eaten as well by people. You know, I think about thirty states now have legalized roadkill consumption. You know, typically you have to obtain a permit, which you're usually pretty easy to get, or you know, report your salvaged animal via an app. It's a cool program. It's kind of a way of getting free range, organic
meat to people who need it. One of the people I talked to working on the book was a woman who used to be a truck driver for the Alaska Moose Federation, which was this organization that went around collecting dead moose and taking them to the elderly or poor people who signed up for a moose carcass, and you know, there's your protein for the year. Those are some pretty hefty animals.
Right Gigantic Alaska residents check out the Alaska Wildlife Troopers Roadkill Salvage Database, and that alerts eligible organizations to come fetch this hot carcass within thirty minutes of the notification. Time's a ticken now Wyoming people. As of January twenty twenty two, there is a five to one one app where if you've cleared yourself with fish and game first, you can get notifications to salvage a whole edible menagerie, including elk, deer, moose, antelope, wild bison, or wild turkey.
But so, maybe hold off on just having a flip phone because a bison buffet could be just at that tips your fingers. But would you want to do you? Will you get a disease that you'll regret for the
rest of your life or is it scruptuous? So patrons Jesme Ritchie, Elta Sparks, River Kanina, Melanie Yakimovic, Sheilen Whippert, Laura Brunner, Jessica Fowler, Roslin has Bi, Savannah McGuire, jen Ander mcadam's, Tessa, John Mitchell, Gregory Hayes, mar Go Lewis, Brenna Pixley, Heather Moore, Olivia Kimes, who asked is it safe to eat? Not talking about rodents? And on that note, first time question asker Julie Bender wanted to know, is roadkill really safe to eat? And if so, how can
you tell? R. J. Deutsch wants to know. Is there a place to take it to find out if it's safe to consume? You know, is chronic wasting a disease with deer a concern? Or how do you know if like this one's past its prime or this one's like ready for the barbecue?
Yeah? Good, good question. I mean, certainly there are definitely conditions in which you're more liable to want to harvest roadkill than others. You know, I talked to a number of roadkill salvagers working on this book, and they definitely all said, like winter is kind of prime time. Right in summer, you know, carcasses decomposed quickly, whereas in winter they're naturally preserved. If you know that an animal's been
killed very recently, right, that's a good sign. I actually just ate roadkill for the first time a week ago. It was a friend who lives in Montana and actually saw the elk hit in front of his house and you know, ran out and salvaged it. One thing that you know, a lot of guys check for is they
check for bruising. If an animal is you know, badly bruised by a collision, its meat's not as good and you know, maybe the internal organs have kind of been scrambled, and that's certainly not good for the quality of the meat either.
Heads up a little warning for details of collisions. But this stuff is really good to know from an ecological and a sustainability perspective.
You know, an animal that's been hit in the head rather than the flank is generally a better one to harvest. As for the questions about zoonotic disease transmission, I mean, to my knowledge, and you know, I did plenty of dignity because I was curious about that as well, I've never found an instance of roadkill to human disease transmission.
I mean that's not to say that it never has or will happened, And certainly there are activists out there who have complained about roadkill salvage or raised concerns about it for that reason, But as far as I can tell, there's never been a recorded instance of that actually happening.
Oh okay, that's good to know. So there are hunter training programs that advise of say a high metal toxicity in certain regions, or how to test for chronic wasting disease in deer or other pathogens in say, raccoon meat. So you might want to seek out more local info or take a course for hunters of game meat so you can familiarize yourself with wild animal carcass handling for
the purpose of consumption. So roadkill, it's accidental, it's free protein, it's unfarmed animals who may have had a good life. Who's not down with a good roadkill harvest? Where who's the haters?
A couple of things. I mean, first, I've definitely read concerns that it could lead to intentional roadkill, and I think that's extremely rare, not to say that it never happens there, Actually there are I have heard of a couple of instances of people deliberately running down deer with their cars and then harvesting them. And one guy actually I think of some prison time for that, and a security camera caught him doing that. You did meet, which
is pretty pretty wild. That just seems like a really dangerous and expensive way to go about it, right, I mean you like, you don't have a rifle in your car or something. I don't know.
Yeah, if you're gonna do something illegal, make it at least easier.
I guess right exactly.
A guy in Wisconsin twenty thirteen misdemeanor illegal deer hunting charge, pleading guilty find a few thousand bucks, but is a carcass on the road worth two in the freezer section.
I'd also read a letter or a paper that basically said that it was sort of classist in some ways. Right in some places, you know, a fair amount of roadkill ends up in food banks, and the concern there is that again, there's potentially something classist about giving needy people these animals that were hit on the side of the road and could potentially be carrying parasites or other pathogens. You know, I think that those health concerns are generally,
I think overblown. And you know, as many roadkill salvagers pointed out to me, you know, think about how many how many antibiotics are stuffed into a factory grown cow or pig or chicken, whereas you know, roadkill is this free range, organic wild meat that you know, in some ways might be healthier than an animal grown and a feed laph.
I always wonder about that too, because it's factory farming is so destructive for the environment as well, and then there's so much just meat and protein that goes to waste. And we had great questions from Shalen Whippert, Kaikishimoto, Megan Yo, Knnie, Connie Bobani, and Jen Squirrel Alvarus, who wanted to know about taxidermy roadkill. Connie said, I have a friend who would pick up deer and tan the hides. Any reason
not to do this? Jen wants to know how can I collect skulls for roade kill without looking like a serial killer? And is it okay to pick it up and tax it dermy it?
Yeah, I mean it depends on the species, and you know, end on your local UH or state regulations. I don't want to give any any advice. It's going to get anybody into any trouble just because the regulations are so sort of diffuse and diverse. So I'll just say, you know, check with your local, your your state fish and Wildlife agency before picking up in taxi durying any any wildlife.
Mm hmm, good call google it. Google it in your area.
Peter, kind of a cop out, but that's That's what I'm gonna go with.
Hey, you're avoiding people getting arrested.
I don't want to be aiding in our betting any any any taxidermy felons.
You're like, here's what you do. You get yourself a briefcase? All right, say it's paperwork. Okay. With all this talk of roadkill meals and taxidermy specimens, I'm sure that the animal lovers and all of us feel like a little like a little squeaky.
Let al.
And I wondered how Peter would feel about this whole episode, Like, am I going to get letters next time I go to the mall? Is someone going to douse me in red pain? And People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals weighs in via their website and whoo boy, get ready. Okay, this is what they say. If people must eat animal carcasses, roadkill is a superior option to the neatly shrink wrapped plastic packages of meat in the supermarket. Wait what Okay,
Peda continues. Eating roadkill is healthier for the consumer than meat laden with antibiotics, hormones, and growth stimulants, as most meat is today. It's also more humane, and that animals killed on the road were not castrated, dehorned, or debeaked without anesthesia, did not suffer the trauma and misery of transportation in a crowded truck in all weather extremes, and did not hear the screams and smell the fear of the animals ahead of them on the slaughterline. Perhaps the
animals never knew what hit them. Wow, Okay, so animal activists are like, hey, man, it sucks, but it's unlived already. So when it comes to a dead frail pig, go hog wild Hatren Shalan Whipper wanted to remind us of a person who called into Fargo, North Dakota radio station Y ninety four Playhouse with concerns about deer crossing signage.
Why are we encouraging deer across at the Interstate. I don't get it. That's such a high traffic area. I mean, I understand the deer world animals, they need to travel across the streets occasionally to survive and of course to sign food. But it seems to me that so irresponsible of us to a lot of these deer cross needs to be in areas where these deer are so likely to be struck by oncoming traffic.
May won't you agree to be clear that was not an ologies patron with an audio submission, that was just some person years ago, but this ologeite did want some elucidation on it. I thought Elena Litton had a great question. Is there any meaning behind where the signs are placed along a road, Like is there a deer trail right there? Or is it just like in this general area.
You know, it's so ad hoc in some ways, there's not really. I wish there was a great systematic way in which signs were placed, but my impression is that that's not the case at all. You know, sort of where crashes have occurred in the past, or where deer have been observed or hunter saw some deer tracks at a time or two. It seems like it's often pretty arbitrary. And I think that's why signs aren't super effective, because
they're just so many of them on the landscape. Again, we habituate too, then they kind of become white visual noise. So yeah, those deer signs again not too effective, and they're not generally placed in a really focused strategic way.
Okay, just think I wondered that too, like if there was a deer that was just hanging out behind the sign being like is it safe across?
Yeah? If I could train them across at the signs that, you know, that would be really effective.
Right, as someone who has been hit by a car crossing the street, I trust deer dab better instincts than I do. I survived, obviously, but it was it wasn't a fun experience. I was like, twelve, that's off.
Sorry that happened to you.
I know, a Mercedes Sedan hit me. And they're like, here's the deal. We'll give you five hundred bucks not to sue us. And I was like, five hundred smackers. There's a lot of money. I'll take it. So I guess I benefited slightly, and from what I know, I didn't have any lasting traumatic brain injury.
Are you sure about that?
We had some great questions. Chen Burbridge wanted to know how has roadkill affected animal behavior? Have some animals started to avoid roads, or has it changed the evolution of certain species that are are learning to just like I don't cross that.
That's such a good question. There's some fantastic studies and anecdotes out there about that very question. I mean, so you know, those are really a couple of different questions right, there's a question about evolution, and then there's a question about behavioral adaptation, you know, learning to live around roads on the sort of the behavioral front. Yeah, lots of research showing that animals have become road avoids. Grizzly bears are kind of one of the archetypal examples of that.
You know, they're studies showing that even six cars an hour, so one car every ten minutes, right, a really low traffic rural road is enough to prevent a grizzly bear from crossing road. But you know, there are other kind of boulder animals out there that have really learned to live with these structures that we've built and the traffic we've created. You know, the Chicagos of coyote or what did I just say, the Chicagos coyote, The coyotes of Chicago,
you know, a very famous urban animal population. They actually cross at crosswalks, at human pedestrian crosswalks, at red lights, or at least that's been described and reported. They look both ways before crossing the street, which you know not every human pedestrian does. And there are carrion crows in Japan that will drop nuts at intersections and you know, they'll let the cars crush the nuts for them, and then they'll scurry out at the red light and grab
the nut meat. And you know, if the car doesn't hit the nut, they'll reapos issuean nut by a few inches so the car gets it the next time around. So you know, animals are sort of learning to live with us in some really fascinating ways.
So I wondered if this was a common occurrence, and our managing director Susan Hale told me that she has seen coyotes crossing Elle streets several times, and the internet is choco block with video footage, including a bear lumbering about in downtown Ashville, deer on the Japanese island of Nara, who have apparently also learned how to bow in thanks to treats better than me at avoiding social gaffes, at
Alaskan moose waiting for the light to change. There's footage of Middle Eastern bores at crosswalks, a South Carolina alligator just shuffling safely over the stripes, and a small flock of German ducks waiting until the light goes green to waddle through a crosswalk, which I was like that's odd
because it got wings none of my business. Also noteworthy is this group of elephant bulls in Hiland who can smell the approach of raw sugarcane trucks and they stop them in the road to demand like a toll of a few hundred pounds of the goods before they let them continue on. So if you've been too scared to ask for a raise at your job, just know that there is an elephant somewhere with a sugar high just because it was aware of its own worth and its
own power. No rays, block your boss's car with your body and take their wallet. You can write me from prison. Now, how much of this is pattern recognition and how much is evolution?
And then the evolution question is also an amazing question. There's one really iconic study that I talk about in the book about cliff swallows. Cliff swallows are these birds that build mud nests on the undersides of highway overpasses and bridges, and historically they build their nests on cliffs, right,
That's how they got their name. But you know, now they've kind of taken advantage of all of this infrastructure that we've built, and as a result of that, they do get hit by cars sometimes, you know, they're living over highways in many cases, and they get you know, they get plastered. But there's some amazing research that was conducted by a scientist named Charles Brown starting in the nineteen eighties in Nebraska, and he basically found that over
time cliff swallows became less susceptible to roadkill. And the reason is that they were evolving shorter wings. Having a long wing is good for flying long straight directions or distances, whereas having a short wing is good for making lots of tight turns and rolls and pirouettes, all of those little quick maneuvers that you'd use to you know, get
out of the way of a barreling eighteen wheeler. So over time, all of those long winged swallows got weeded out of the population and the cliff flaws became shorter winged as a result. So that's you know, evolution happening really like in the blink of a geologic eye.
Oh that's amazing. I had no idea. I always wonder what those mud nests were too. When I passed under them, I was like, who is living in there?
Those are the cliff swallows?
Yeah, just a fun to bring up. Will everyone choose yams silently?
So?
Cliff swallows build their little domed adobe houses out of over a thousand individual pellets that they gather from puddles and mud banks. Like imagine if you could make ceramics no hands, using just your mouth, and then also live in them and not have a mortgage. Next time you're driving along and you've see an underpass turned into a hipster enclay for birds, say hey, way to go, I love it. Make me one. Aaron Burbridge and Emily Stuffer
raised a great point about seasoning the roads. Aaron lives in Nova Scotia, Canada, and we apply salt brine to the roads out of winter storms. And I've heard that some animals are attracted to the salt and that brings them closed to road sides. Does that happen? I've heard that with moose too in Maine. They're lapping up the shoulders of the roads. Is that a problem?
Yeah, that's a great question, and that is a problem. Mean, certainly roads can become these ecological traps. You know, salt is this super stimulant that animals crave. And our profly salting of highways does lure them to the roadside and
create trouble as a result. I mean, there's one place in Quebec that I read about where basically they had created all of these little artificial salt ponds by the side of the highway actually in a wildlife refuge, and moose were so often drawn to the highway and hit as a result that they actually had to drain all of those salt ponds and fill them in with rocks so that the moose wouldn't keep coming back to the
road over and over again. In Jasper National Park there's actually they put up these road signs in winter that say do not let moose lick your car, which is like, I feel like, if a moose wants to lick your car, it's going to be really hard.
To prevent it from doing that.
But you know, that is I guess that's a problem.
How do you have boundaries of the moose? Yeah? Yeah, and I've heard too. My dad, who grew up in Montana, always used to say that if you hit a moose, it's like hitting a brick wall, like your toast.
Yeah. Absolutely, I mean there's been lots of studies showing, you know, the sort of the different costs to hitting various animals, you know, the costs in terms of vehicle repairs and hospital bills and insurance costs and tow trucks and so on. So now you know, the average deer collision costs the American public more than nine thousand dollars, and the average moose collision costs more than forty thousand dollars. Because they're just such an enormous animal that does so
much damage. And I'm sure that that sort of per moose crash, I would imagine that they're the most dangerous animal in the country.
Do halogen lights help it all? I know that there are some new cars that are like blinding, but do better bulbs help.
From a driver visibility standpoint? You know, you'd imagine that any headlight that increases the distance that you can see in front of your car is going to be helpful.
There's also there was a cool study done by a guy named Travis de Vault, who's an ecologist who's done lots of work with roadkill and scavenging and collision avoidance, and he basically showed that putting these backward facing light bars in the front of cars, which actually like illuminated the car rather than the road itself in front of the car. That helped because it seemingly made the car
more visible to wildlife. So that's one solution. I don't know if we're going to, you know, outfit all of our vehicles with these light bars, but you know, it does seem like there are things we can do to our vehicles that might make a difference.
One possibility that giant roof mounted set of fiberglass antlers, maybe just to intimidate other ungulates, like dang, that dude's on the juice. See I'm out because, as patron Tara asked, our deer's part moth for headlights and in Natalie Risou's words, why do deer want to die so bad? And I can't believe I forg got to ask this one. So many listeners want to know, deer in the headlights? What's going on? Why do they freeze?
Yeah, that's a good question. They have eyes that are incredibly good at absorbing light essentially, and as a result there basically blinded, you know, And that's of course another example of cars hijacking this otherwise useful adaptation, right, And you sort of think about the evolutionary history, or the evolutionary defense strategies of You know, all of our most beloved animals, skunks that spray, and porcupines that have quills,
and turtles that pull their heads into their shells. Right, these are all amazing defense mechanisms that have been honed over thousands of generations. You know, when you're predator is a hawk or a coyote, but you know, against an F one fifty barreling down the interstate, they're normally useless. They're actually maladaptive. Right, The worst thing you can do is stand your ground and hunker down. So cars have
this really evil way. I think of hijacking evolution and deer freezing in headlights because they have these wonderful eyes that are capable of absorbing light but get blinded by its unnatural brightness. That's just another example of evolution kind of gone awry thanks to automobility.
I didn't want to keep them, but I had to ask skunk questions from Jenny Brown's and leneam Brink Anderson, I swear to more, and then I'm letting you go to cough and take more. Dequel, I'm so very sorry. Julie wants to know. Is it weird that I like the smell of skunk coil driving by? Also? Do they spray when they get hit or what's the deal there? Is it unrelated? How do you feel about skunk smell?
Weird that you like that smell? Dear, dear listener, you might be alone in that one, and I don't know for sure, but you know, my assumption would be that when they're hit, the scent gland that they used to spray is just crushed and the scent is released.
I love it. I love it. It reminds me of home. It reminds me of summer night. I don't love that there was a skunk that's resting in peace, but I do if I smell it far away, I'm not mad at it. It's like the smell of gasoline. Some people are like, ah, love that, you know, I don't know. Go figure, listen. I'm going to do an old fact dology episode at some point, but for now, I needed to know why skunk is music to our noses but
not all of us. And it turns out that Skunk's first off, they have not one, but they have two anal glands, and they can spray up to fifteen feet with military accuracy, and what's in them volatile sulfur containing compounds called thiols. And you may enjoy it because the olfactory bulb resides in a part of your brain associated with memory. So if it's a nostalgic scent, you say yea me me mimiam. Sunset drives on warm summer nights, heading to make out with my crush on a park bench.
And for more of that you can see the July twenty twenty one study Contextual Variation and Objectivity in Olfactory Perception.
Or maybe because it smells like the gancha. According to another recent paper titled identification of a new family of pre nihilated voladile sulfur compounds in Cannabis Revealed by comprehensive two dimensional gas chromatography, so researchers found that it's not cannabis terpenes, but rather a three methyl two buttine on thighol VSC three, or volatile sulfur compound number three that gives weed its skunky aroma, and VSC three is also found in bruce Ki's exposed to UV light, which you
might know is skunked beer. So VSC three it's in your weed, it's in your beer, it's in the skunk's butt. I have never been skunked, but I understand it's kind of like when you put lipliner outside of your lip. It's better at a distance, but up close, skunk musk smells apparently like someone farting garlic near a tire fire.
And the smell is so bad that it's been used as inspiration for a weaponry, such as a yellow mist fired from a water cannon that has the aroma apparently of a rotting corpse in an open sewer wearing filthy socks. And it's called simply skunk and has encountered opposition from several human rights organizations. It's considered that cruel. I need to do an episode on smell. Last listener question, Aaron Ryan wants to know do.
You ever cry when you see free special animals that have become roadkill, like a heron? And then do you also later realize that you cried over a garbage bag that you thought was a heron?
I think this is a personal question. Have you ever thought you saw roadkill and then it turned out to just be like a duffel bag?
Yeah, that's like one of those like asking for a friend. Yeah, no, I mean yes, I have definitely stopped for yeah, many sticks and tire fragments and all kinds of stuff. Yeah, especially for snakes. You know, I definitely stopped for snakes very often and shepherd the snakes off the road. I did that the other day, and you know, it turned out to be a rattlesnake, which was a little bit
more exciting than I'd anticipated, but awesome. I was really happy to help that snake off the road, even if he just returned to bask on the warm asphalt fifteen minutes later. But a snake looks like anything, right, So if you're habituated to stop for snakes, you also end up stopping for lots of ropes and bunge of corks and branches and all kinds of things.
And the snake was alive.
Snake was alive.
Oh, oh my gosh. I have a rattle from a rattlesnake in Montana that my cousin Boyd, who we've had on in the Bisonology episode, cut off of a dead one and he gave it to me and it's it's a bit of a treasured possession. But he was like, well, the rattlesnake wasn't using it anymore. He didn't kill the rattlesnake, but he did harvest the rattle.
But that's like another example, right of that evolutionary hijacking. You know, Rattling is this amazing, unique, bizarre defense mechanism that you know is really good at warning off people and foxes and all kinds of other creators. But your subrew doesn't care.
Oh so true. But last questions, I always ask what was the hardest thing about writing this book? What was the toughest moment for you in this experience?
Yeah, that's a good question. You know, Look, there are a lot of tough road killer related moments, you know, certainly seeing a giant ant eater or a tape air, you know, all of these amazing, just majestic exotic animals dead. You know, when I visited Brazil for one of the chapters, I think the toughest thing was writing a book that you know, I hope is enjoyable to read. I mean, it's such a dark topic in some ways, and yet there are so many inspiring people out there who are
working on understanding the problem and devising solutions. All of the you know, the real rhode ecologists that I was just fortunate to translate. Basically, so writing a book that dealt with a dark, challenging topic, but you know, is still enjoyable on the page and maybe even uplifting in places that was challenging throughout, And I'm not sure if I got there, but I was definitely trying again.
His book is called Crossings, How RhoD Ecology is Shaping the future of our planet, which I have It's beyond wonderful, but don't take my word for it. Reviews of the book have called Ben the David Attenborough of the Asphalt, the kind of gonzo environmental journalist Hunter S. Thompson would have loved, and said that his book is rilely funny, full of cool stories, and a deeply researched and compelling read.
What about a moment that was uplifting or one of your your favorite moments in writing this book or researching it?
Yeah, you know, I loved going back. I mean, I think I mentioned at the start of this conversation that I began the journey of this book by visiting one of these wildlife crossings, right, or a number of these wildlife crossings, you know, these structures that we create to help animals cross the road safely. And eight or nine years later, sort of at the end of this process, I got to go back to one of these wildlife crossings,
a different one. This one was on I ninety in Washington State, you know, about an hour east of Seattle. I got to go on top of this big wildlife overpass, this bridge that's been used by elk and coyotes and little toads and all kinds of other critters, and there was it was just so cool to see the sensitivity of the ecological design of this crossing in some ways, right that they were really thinking about every member of
the ecosystem. And you know, you can imagine that every member of the ecosystem has different requirements in a wildlife crossing. Everybody uses slightly different habitat, and you need those different
habitat elements up there. You know, you need the rock piles for the lizards and snakes, and the little log jams for the toads, and the kind of the dead trees that are going to you know, entice some of the birds to visit the crossing because actually, you know, birds that are often reluctant to fly over highways as well, at least some species are. They'd planted all this native vegetation and they'd even inoculated the soil with you know, native microorrhizal fungi that are going to grow all of
the right plant species. So it was just so cool to see this bridge that wasn't really a bridge, It was really an entire ecosystem that had been designed and engineered by humans. And I just found that, again really really inspiring and touching in a way that you know,
we would go to such lengths for wild animals. You know, we do so much on this planet to make animals lives difficult or more difficult and more dangerous and harder, you know, and here was this beautiful, multi million dollar structure that we designed to make their lives safer and easier. And I thought that was really really lovely.
Oh that's gorgeous. And do they find their way over at through cent? Does a cougar say, I'm going to keep following these tracks and then oh, hey look at that a bridge?
Yeah, you know, really the most important piece in terms of getting them to actually use the crossing really the fences. You know, you need fences on either side of the wildlife crossing along the road. So the cougar is wandering around, he's trying to find a way to cross the highway. He hits the fence, he starts walking the fence line, and then he finds the crossing ideally and says, oh, here's the way I'm going. I'm going to get across
this thing. But you know, the really wonderful thing that happens over time, and there's you know, plenty of evidence showing this does happen, is that animals teach their own offspring. You know, you get a mother grizzly bear who learns to use a wildlife crossing, and you know, then her cubs follow her across it themselves, and they become crossers,
and they teach their cubs, which is really cool. And the other wonderful thing is that over time, all of those animals going across create game trails, you know, little animal paths, all of those hoofs and paws leading to the crossing and guiding other animals to it. There are so many great stories of these amazing spider webs of game trails that converge on wildlife crossings. You know, it's almost like this form of collective external memory that's leading
creatures to these places. I talked to one roady cologist who had worked in Banff National Park in Canada, where there's some very famous wildlife crossings, and he said it was like the land itself was learning to use the crossings together, which I thought was the most beautiful sentiment.
Oh that's amazing. That's gorgeous, and how exciting to know that that's happening in different parts of the country and hopefully will be happening more and more.
Yeah, Yeah, that really is happening. You know, there's this really big new pot of money for wildlife crossings, and the twenty twenty one Federal Infrastructure Act three hundred and fifty million dollars, which is the most money that's ever been allocated to these sorts of solutions. You know, there's a big effort led by Beth Pratt, who you talked to, to raise five hundred million dollars in private philanthropy for crossings.
So there's a lot more money out there for this sort of thing than there ever used to be, and you know it's not enough yet, right, We know, this problem is such a huge problem for wildlife in this country. You know, more than a million animals are killed by cars every day, right, so even three hundred and fifty million dollars in federal funding isn't enough to treat all of the roadkill hotspots that we know are out there.
But we're at least going in the right direction. Whether we're doing it fast enough or aggressively enough to save biodiversity, that's a big question.
Well, thank you for answering so many questions. We're so excited to finally get.
To talk to you allie. Thank you so much for doing this. I really really appreciate it. That was super fun.
So ask driven people drivelling questions because it's the fastest way you can move forward. And again, Ben's new book, it has so much more detailed info. It's called Crossings How Rhodocology is shaping the future of our planet, And of course it's all wherever you get books, so you can probably get it on your lunch break or at the link in the show notes. His social media is really gorgeous as well, full of wildlife photos and it's linked in the show notes. We are at ologies on
Instagram and Twitter. I'm at Aliward on both. We have shorter, kid friendly versions called Smologies available at Aliward dot com slash Smologies. You can be a patron for a book a month at patroon dot com slash ologies and submit your questions there. And Ologies Merch is available at ologies meerch dot com. And we have cool shit if I do say so myself. Aaron Talbert admins Theologies podcast Facebook group.
Emily White of the Wordery makes our professional transcripts. Susan Hale as our managing director, literally runs the show and did additional research on this episode. Noel Dilworth is our scheduling producer. Kelly ar Dwyer makes our website and can make yours. And in the driver's seat of our editing is lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn did the music and he's in a band called Islands.
And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you a secret, And this week there are two, but I have like fifteen I want to tell you this week, but the first one is courtesy of Mercedes, the person, not the car. And she said said, heck, you can tell the world my secret if you want. I have eaten Road killed there we knew exactly when it was hit and there were people on the scene very shortly after. My partner is with volunteer fire and
he and another first responder split it. It was fine, no different than any other while venison. Did it feel kind of weird? She says, yes? Did I get it over it real fast because venison is delicious? Also yes, and bonus, I did not have to shoot it and feel bad. So there you have it. A veritable yelp review from the shoulder of the road from a Canadian and a trusted member of Temologies. Lead editor Mercedes Maitland has eaten roadkill loved it. Okay, this other secret is
my own and maybe you know this. Maybe this came late to me in life, but it wasn't until maybe this year that I understood why did the chicken cross the road to get to the other side? I thought it was just like this flat shrug of a punchline, like a dotta as joke. But getting to the other side means to die. Why did the chicken cross road
to die? Which is bleak, but it makes more sense. Also, this is a sad note, but my dad was going in for this kind of risky emergency surgery and his last words in the waiting room to me and my mom were see you on the other side, which like broke my heart that he had to think of the right thing to say in case this was like goodbye, goodbye. But we were lucky we saw him on the other side of the hospital that day and he lived another few years. But I always remember like that, see on
the other side. I also, I don't have a good sideway for this, but I didn't understand the bumper sticker honk if you're horny until recently either, like that horns honk like honk if you're horny. So there you go. Some automotive confessions for you. Okay, drive safe, uh yeah, dude, seatbelts, bye bye, pacadermatology, hombology, crypto zoology, lithology, hinology, meteorology, batology, anathology, areology, ethology. Okay, okay, wait a year.
I'm walking here, I'm walking head