Dead animals at the roadside
So, combine an extensive road network with large amounts of traffic (the situation you have here in the UK)…. the result: lots and lots of roadkill. Things aren’t helped by the fact that some people seem to actually enjoy running animals over with their cars. Rabbits, pigeons, squirrels, foxes and pheasants make up the majority of dead animals you get to see (rabbits alone make up about 60%), but badgers, hedgehogs and deer are abundant casualties too. To give you some idea of the numbers involved, annual road-killed estimates for hedgehogs range from anywhere between 20,000 and 100,000 (Harris et al. 1995). Higher numbers have been estimated for other European countries. A 1998 estimate put the number of road-killed hedgehogs in The Netherlands at between 113,000 and 340,000 (Huijser & Bergers 1998), while a 1999 estimate for Belgium put the number for that country between 230,000 and 350,000 (Holsbeek et al. 1999). About 50,000 badgers are probably killed each year on Britain’s roads (Harris et al. 1995). These numbers are almost certainly significant enough to pose a threat to the health of the overall population.
I’ve spent a lot of time on the road with Jonathan McGowan. Jon is a professional taxidermist [website here] with a more than usual interest in examining and collecting dead animals (cough cough cough). He’s not only really good at spotting and identifying things from the car, he’s also inclined to stop and pick things up, or at least examine them at close range. Here are a few stories about recent adventures with Jon.