Wildlife Crossings

by. Pa Rock

Traipster of Backroads

Back in the mid-1990's before poor people had access to cell phones or even bag phones (remember those?), and before there were any cell towers to empower those science fiction gizmos, I did child protection work for the state of Missouri in very rural McDonald County.  A large part of my work was child abuse investigations.  On serious cases my co-workers and I rode with county deputies, but on not so serious cases where we were primarily going to check on a child or family's welfare, we would travel in pairs with our co-workers, or sometimes even alone.  

Home visits in a remote area could be a scary experience, both in terms of incensed hillbillies with guns who did not like the "gummint" prying into their private lives, or the ever present possibility of getting so lost on some of the mule trails that we might never be heard from again.

But all of that is just color commentary.   What I really want to write about is wildlife crossing the road.  There are certain spots where particular species of animals feel comfortable it darting across the roadways.  Deer seem to develop preferences for certain places, and my state posts occasional signs informing drivers of "Deer Crossings."  There was one particular spot way out in the woods of McDonald County on what was essentially a cow path that doubled as a country road where someone had posted a sign on a tree that read "Duck Crossing" along with a sketch of a mama duck leading a straight line a ducklings.  I regarded it as country humor until the day that I was driving very slowly down that cow path and came to the sign just as a mama duck and her well-organized line of little ones were crossing.

Man and nature don't always get their act together, but in that instance they had.

Yesterday morning I drove from my home just north of the city limits of West Plains, Missouri, to a doctor's appointment in Mountain Home, Arkansas, fifty-five miles to the southwest of my residence.  It was a beautiful morning and a beautiful drive.    The entire route is a two-lane paved road, with a speed limit of fifty-five mph most of the way.

I go to Mountain Home eight or ten times a year, usually for doctor's appointments and sometimes to shop, and I can differentiate the various times of the year on those trips by the varieties of roadkill that I encounter.  We are currently in "armadillo" season.  I drove past five dead armadillos yesterday, the first I had actually seen since last fall.  They have obviously just dug out of their hibernation and and are out on the prowl for spring sex.   Armadillos can be a particular nuisance at night when they tend to "freeze" in a car's headlight beams and get run over.   I ran over one once on a sudden twist in the road.  It sounded like a large metal basketball bouncing beneath my car, but the poor armadillo suffered fatal injuries and the little car drove on.

Old Joke:  How are armadillos born?   Dead, and lying along the side of the road.

Turtles were also out in abundance in the Ozarks yesterday.  Well, I lie.  The turtle-like creatures which I was dodging on the roads yesterday are actually "tortoises," of the three-toed box variety.   "Turtles" are fully aquatic, and "terrapins" are semi-aquatic, and tortoises spend thieir entire lives on land.  (Is that correct, Ranger  Bob?)    During my drive to Mountain Home, I encountered five live, three-toed box tortoises crossing the road and one who didn't make it.

I feel sorry for these small creatures struggling through the grass, weeds, and underbrush lugging their homes on their backs.  They live 50-80 years, roughly the same life span as humans, and have been around since the age of the dinosaurs, and many might spend their entire lives encountering only a handful of pesky humans were it not for the advent of cars and paved roads,  Now as they slowly shuffle along in search of food or carnal pleasures, the slow-moving tortoises come to the occasional road which they feel compelled to cross, a situation that opens them to capture and degradation as temporary "pets," or, worse yet, death form speeding vehicles and the ultimate humiliation of being food for the buzzards - or, worse yet, for the US Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Yesterday I also witnessed on squirrel getting run over.   He ran across the road in front of my car, and I braked enough for him to get past, but the car in the other lane caught him about mid-vehicle.  My last view of the unfortunate creature was him bouncing in the road after the other dar had driven on.

I have a theory about squirrels and evolution which I may have posted here before.  If I have, please be tolerant because you, too, will have passed your "use by" date at some point in the not too distant future and be repeating yourself ad nauseum. 

In the olden days when I was still a youthful presence on the planet, dead squirrels were more common on the roads than they are today.  Back then it was not uncommon for a squirel running across the road in front of on-coming traffic to get almost completely on the other side, then have second thoughts about the matter and race back toward his starting point - and inevitably to be run over on his return trip.  I have noticed over recent years that they seldom backtrack any more, and consequently there are far fewer dead squirrels on the road than there used to be.  Some of that may be due to a learning process as roads became more common and the amount of traffic increases, but I think some of it may also be due to evolution.  The dumb ones  have mostly been run over and died out, and now it is the smarter ones who live on and are reproducing.  Survival of the fittest

America's roads are alive with wildlife.  Drive cautiously and respectfully.

Deer to ducks to armadillos to tortoises to RFK, Jr, to dumb and smart squirrels - that's all I've got for today!