What if Every Roadkill Had a Memorial?

This is so surprising. I love to be surprised. There are still some immensely caring people on this planet. 

Thank you for caring. 

I drive like a senior citizen exactly for this reason. Tragic loss of life just because I want to speed or worse, lack awareness. Even when driving Max for chemo and on a handful of days in extreme emergency, I never drove fast. 

Read the whole piece here: What if Every Roadkill Had a Memorial?

We saw it happening, my then-girlfriend and I: The little bird suddenly flew out of the bushes by the roadside, darted low across the tarmac, and then disappeared into the right rear wheel of the car in front of us. It was centrifuged for a few revolutions before it was ejected sideways and landed, flapping in an uncoordinated fashion, in the verge.

I quickly parked the car, walked back, squatted down, and picked up the animal: a Sardinian warbler, a pretty, very common bird; petite and not at all resistant to the racking it had just suffered. My girlfriend squatted beside me. Together we watched how the bird attempted a few half-hearted wing flaps, weakly pecked my fingertip, and then lost the light in its little beady eyes and died in the palm of my hand.

At that moment, to my surprise as much as to my girlfriend’s, I was overcome by sadness, and for a few minutes I sat there, crying, by the side of a country road in the Peloponnese, cradling a dead warbler in my hand, with claxoning cars swishing by and my girlfriend comforting me with a slightly bewildered look on her face. Fifteen minutes later, when we were driving again, she quietly asked me how come the death of a bird affected me so, when I am such an animal mass murderer myself.

Fifteen minutes later, she quietly asked me how come the death of a bird affected me so, when I am such an animal mass murderer myself.

She hit the nail — or rather, the insect pin — on the head. Throughout my life as a scientist I have been responsible for the scientifically sanctioned deaths of hundreds of thousands of animals, mostly arthropods and mollusks. In fact, earlier that day I had merrily stuffed some snails into a jar of alcohol. And although I have never killed any vertebrates, I have regularly participated in field trips where others were collecting frogs, small mammals, and also cute little birdies like that Sardinian warbler, and never shed a tear.

So why would I cry over the death of this bird? Analyzing my emotions, I concluded that what had touched me was the utter senselessness of this death. An animal that is killed and preserved by a researcher contributes to the knowledge that we have of its species. It is lovingly curated, its features are recorded, it is the object of study and the subject of scientific publications, and it is preserved for eternity in a natural history museum collection. Yes, its life has been lost, but its body has obtained a new kind of value.

Roadkill is the complete opposite of that. That motorist did not kill that warbler intentionally; in fact, he or she probably never even noticed the collision. And that ignorance and lack of intent are what make the event so tragic. A little life has been ripped from this Earth (and, who knows, if it was a nesting bird with dependent chicks, several lives) and its value has been lost forever.

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And clutter the road with shrines is exactly what my colleague Bram Koese did. Koese is one of the best freshwater zoologists of the Netherlands, specializing in mayflies and caddisflies but with a near encyclopedic knowledge of most other aquatic animals, and terrestrial ones, for that matter. He lives in a town, surrounded by wetlands and canals, some 30 kilometers south of Amsterdam, and takes regular bicycle rides along the Ziendeweg, a narrow road between his hometown and the next. During rush hour many commuters use it to circumvent the traffic jams on the highway. And these speeding cars often hit wildlife, Koese noticed. He saw entire families of graylag geese (Anser anser) and barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) being mowed down. Prompted by these sad encounters, and curious about the actual impact of the traffic on wildlife, he began logging his roadkill sightings on the citizen science platform Observation International. For a whole year, on average every other day, he would ride up and down the road, scanning with a headlamp if it was dark, and record and photograph every dead animal (birds, mammals, amphibians, even the occasional butterfly or migrating crayfish) and its location.

His sightings amounted to 642 carcasses. The “death list” included 35 mammals, 90 birds, and 515 amphibians, among which were rare and protected species such as the stoat (Mustela erminea), weasel (Mustela nivalis), European polecat (Mustela putorius), tawny owl (Strix aluco), moor frog (Rana arvalis), and natterjack toad (Epidalea calamita). Shocked by the volume of his data, and disenchanted by the lack of response he got from the municipality, Koese then hatched a secret plan for a clever guerrilla campaign.

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By that time the project had served its purpose. Koese, his team, and their cause were in the news for the whole weekend, the local authorities had been presented both with a letter and a scientific report with a detailed analysis of the findings, and a strong case had been made for the road to be out of bounds for anything but local traffic.

Koese’s project drives home two things. First, that road ecology, as it is called, is a perfect subject for community science projects. Good online platforms exist for logging roadkill events, and the community group could adopt guerrilla tactics for their campaign that an “official” project would probably not have got away with. (Moreover, these community projects tend to be focused on the impact of traffic on wildlife, whereas many officially approved roadkill monitoring projects are begun for the opposite reason: to control the impact of wildlife on traffic.)

The second point is that one roadkill is a tragedy, but a million roadkills are not just a statistic. By upscaling from a single roadside shrine in memory of a single deceased animal to a mass grave that showed the actual scale of the problem, Koese and his team were able to make us seamlessly progress from mourning the loss of one individual animal’s life to grasping the danger that entire populations are exposed to.