Road Ecology (ROAD KILL) with Ben Goldfarb
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Oh, hey, it's your old binder from junior year with Slipknot lyrics in the margins. Allie Ward, bugger 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 yet? Can we, can we, can we, can we? And he's

He has been the most elusive guest in ology's history because he's been writing a book about this very subject for years, interviewing rhodocologists 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 going to get right to it. But first, thank you to every patron at patreon.com slash ologies for supporting the show and sending 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 as this one from WasAnOddChild who wrote...

five stars. Allie Ward, my father, uncle, and missing wallet is the host of my favorite hyperfixation theologies podcast. Best way to spend an hour or two. Okay, let's be honest, three. Wasn't on child. Thank you for that. I'm glad that you're one of us. Okay, rotacology, 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 human interactions. So this guest is

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 to Vice. His latest book is Crossings, How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet.

And it necessitated talking to so many rhodocologists 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, ocelot 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 road ecologist, 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 for 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 to do 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. I had this really formative experience a decade ago in October of 2013. I was in Montana working as an environmental journalist looking for things to write about, and I ended up getting a tour of these wildlife crossings, these overpasses and underpasses that let animals safely navigate highways. This was on Highway 93 north of Missoula, and that was just such a cool experience. 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 93 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 16 in one place. And some groups are opposed to them for understandable reasons. A cross 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 1950s 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's

It certainly did. And I think they're, I mean, they're dangerous for a lot of the same reasons, right? There are 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 400 drivers killed in deer crashes every year. I think Montana is the second highest fatality

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 400,

So there's a September 2023 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 297,000 collisions. And they're talking about, wow,

So over the last year, 1.8 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 127. 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 500 annual chance of an animal vehicle collision. And West Virginia, I am sorry, but one in 38 for y'all. Montana.

unsurprisingly held the number two spot with one in 53 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 posses naturally. And of course, do not scroll on your ex's social media if the long drive gets boring. As humans driving cages of reinforced steel, our chances of survival much higher than a bunny's. So when Ben was writing the book, how did he balance the focus between the impact on humans versus the impact on the wildlife?

It's a good 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 road ecology, this field of science, you know, which really begins in the 1920s with the proliferation of the car and early biologists are fretting about all of the garter snakes and groundhogs and 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 1960s when deer populations explode. Deer were almost hunted to extinction in the 19th century. And then in the mid 20th 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 road ecology as a field truly takes off. Its origins 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. 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 were 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.

In the mid-20th 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 white-tailed deer, which are kind of bouncing back from their own brush with extirpation. 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 23rd, which is Wolfenoot. 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 wolfanute just a few years ago.

Not realizing that it would become a global November 23rd 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.

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 Rhiannon. 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 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 there are also lots of squirrels and opossums and raccoons, all of the critters that we've all seen by the side of the highway. And 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 biopsy

biodiversity and conservation crisis, right? But there are lots of rarer species as well. Florida panthers and ocelots and tiger salamanders, 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 very threatened and endangered species, roadkill really is an existential crisis. Okay. So first off, ocelots are native to North and Central America? I had no idea. For starters, okay, so an ocelot is a

bobcat-sized spotted little cutie with a kitten face. It weighs 20 to 30 pounds. It's like the size of a large Maine coon, which is like having a real hairy toddler with knives in its face. And I thought ocelots like maybe lived in North Africa or Central Asia. Nope. They live in like Texas, south of the Alamo, but not many. So 40% of Texas ocelot deaths

have been attributed to human traffic collisions. And now there are only 60 to 80 Texas ocelots 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 Dali. But before you decide to dip into like Tiger King culture, be aware that your friend Wikipedia warns that ocelots 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 ocelots, keep them in the wild. Also, Florida Panthers, send them 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 a vehicle. The 62nd such fatality since 2021," it reads. And apparently, Florida panthers had the distinct honor of being one of the first critters on the 1973 endangered species list after hunting just struck a massive blow to their population. And now there's less than 250 Florida panthers in the wild.

10% of their entire population is killed each year in crashes with cars. Florida Panthers don't deserve this. They should be going on motorboats 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 discuss later. I'm not just trying to bum you out. Who comes to your book readings? I gotta 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 you ask that. I have compared myself to a priest taking confession on multiple occasions. Because, yeah, 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 distressed

bewildered and confused in the moment that he just panicked and called 911, 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 attests 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 critters. 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, Allie?

Well, I hit a deer once in 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 911. 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

to have a look at it. And I remember its belly was covered in ticks, but he showed us what to do with it, which was...

uncommon and 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 going to do? But what if you don't have an OD in your life and you definitely shouldn't call 911, what, what is the best protocol if there's been a collision? Yeah.

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, certainly you could call the local 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 going to 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 species

possum 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 road

Road ecology, this term that was coined in the 1990s by Richard Foreman, an ecologist 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 road 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 field.

discipline in its own right that increasingly has people who self-identify as road ecologists. 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 moose 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. Mm hmm.

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 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 that was actually one of the places that I went and working on this book was Tasmania, the roadkill capital. And there, 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 Tasmania who just drive around the countryside looking for dead animals, checking their pouches and extracting the joeys, the babies within, and then raising them to adulthood over a couple of years, which is just this amazing, heartbreaking, beautiful, inspiring practice. We're so used to just driving past roadkill all the time. It 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 they're ambassador species? No, they do get released back into the wild. Yeah. And I definitely talk to rehabbers or they're actually known as carers in Tasmania, which is the phrase that I love. I talked to carers who said, 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

that prevent roadkill. You know, the state itself is kind of relying on all of these volunteer rehabbers 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 of a

out of an animal. Did you ever have to do it? You know, Ellie, 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 males. It was surprising. I mean, I think that'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 in many mammal species, especially. And often it's those young dispersing males who get hit. They're setting out for their own territories and looking for females. Hello, ladies. So 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

carer centers at all? I got to see so many wallabies and wombats and padamelons. I'm sorry, who? Actually, I love padamelons. That's an animal that most people haven't heard of, but they're almost like if you took a kangaroo and miniaturized it, you would have a

and they're basically as cute as you'd imagine. And one of the places I went, it was pretty wild. It was this couple, this wonderful couple who have extracted and raised so many padamelons to adulthood and they released them into the wild. But the padamelons 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 padamelons emerge from the forest and congregate in their backyard. And it was just this really fascinating

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 were pretty happy. Yeah, they were living out in the bush in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by their hordes of padamelons. There's definitely worse ways to live. Imagine a life with your love. You're surrounded by animals that look like less stoned version of quokkas. The pea 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 its ass-to-head ratio. A pea melon's got a caboose easily 10 times the size of its head. But sadly, it's still not enough cushion to soften vehicular cushion. What a life. Just critters coming out of the bush to be like, hey, mom.

Oh, that's the cutest 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 got to befriend them on MySpace or something. Okay, so you said males more than females. What animals tend to...

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 and P-22 and all of that we did an episode about P-22 with Miguel and Beth oh cool yeah and uh

It was so emotional. I mean, he was really an L.A. 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 those guys are awesome and they're in my book as well. And certainly there's a lot of P-22 stuff in there. So P-22 was this beloved puma that lived in the hills beneath LA's Hollywood sign for years. He died last year. And I was able to interview the wildlife biologist who discovered him in this special episode. We'll link in the show notes.

there is crying. You know, there are kind of two main classes of animals that are really susceptible to roadkill. 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 low 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 10% 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 low densities and patrol large areas. You know, I definitely consider those some of the most endangered species

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 frogs and salamanders that have to migrate to breeding ponds every spring and cross roads en masse 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 Road Ecology, Science and Solutions, which was written by a host of authors, including Dr. Richard T. T. Foreman, now 88 years old and a professor of landscape architecture at Harvard. And he is considered to be the father of landscape ecology.

ecology and road 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 little 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 were

would play it. And girls and women were a trash demographic. And this was in the early 1980s. 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 dicks 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-frogger advocate was named Elizabeth Falconer, who was a lady executive.

in the early 1980s. So if you've played Frogger, you have enjoyed a road ecology 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 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 10 years ago. It was in 2013. My wife and I were driving through Yellowstone National Park early one morning. It was a beautiful morning. It was kind of mist rising off the pavement. Just 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 branches 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 was, I think that was why we shed some tears over this squirrel. I don't blame you. It was Karen, a pinecone. It was really hard. It was really hard to see. I bet it was so excited about the pinecone.

Oh, what a- Allie Toad, you're trying to make me live this traumatic incident. No, I'm sorry. I'm just here. I'm processing this for the first time. Get it together. Well, I mean, okay. You've written also beautifully about anteaters 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 U.S. are doing stuff about this problem. If you talk to, you know, Miguel and Beth about the P-22 saga, you know, you heard the story of the Liberty Canyon overpass, right? This giant wildlife bridge that's going to reconnect mountain lion populations in Southern California. That's incredibly exciting and I think is galvanizing lots of energy around California.

Building infrastructure that helps animals safely cross roads. I mean, I think a lot of cool stuff is happening in countries that aren't the U.S. You know, we think of ourselves as such leaders in infrastructure and conservation, and yet one of the problems we face is that we have such old, kind of calcified systems.

highway systems, right? We built all of our major highways, you know, in the 1950s and 60s and early 70s 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 and

takes 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 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. In India, for example, they built a highway through a tiger sanctuary. Unfortunately, ideally, the highway wouldn't go through there at all. But 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 2015 study, mitigating reptile road mortality, fence failures compromise eco-passage effectiveness. Even with a 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 roadside 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

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, is reducing speed limits helped? Or I wonder also if the oil crisis in the 70s, when...

speed limits went down a lot, at least in America, to 55 miles an hour. If that reduced roadkill... You know, the speed limit thing, 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, right?

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...

street freeways that basically make you want to go fast. And there's lots of research showing that people tend to drive a road's design speed rather than the posted speed limit, right? I mean, how many times have you been like flying down a straightaway and you just kind of glance at your speedometer and it says, you know, 85 and you're like, oh crap, I didn't realize I was going that fast.

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 U.S., 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 waves. It felt sort of like being at sea. We 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 sensors and LED lights and solar lights for the evening? Are there any places that are trying to at least 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 road ecology, right, is that our most common innovation or our most common attempted solution for dealing with road kill is

signage, right? That classic yellow diamond with the leaping black buck that says, you know, watch for wildlife next 40 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

a Florida Panther crossing a 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 roadside. 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 50% roadkill reduction rate typically, which is definitely better than nothing, but not as good as a wildlife crossing with fences that keeps the animal off the road altogether.

So systems using radar or laser tripwires can give this technological heads up that says, hey, unless you want to think about the time you killed a deer for the rest of your life, maybe slow down because you got one coming up, buddy. And you don't want to meet up with it in hell. What about myths in roadkill ecology? 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 Lyme 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 animals

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 U.S. that have actually done these white-tailed deer culls where they hire sharpshooters to control the population, at least partly as a roadkill reduction strategy. Boy, howdy. I think a much cooler idea than increased human predation is actually increased

natural or wild predation, right? There are 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 deaths.

which is pretty amazing. 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 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 a Puma 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're 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 same paper about cougar reintroduction in the Northeast estimated that cougars would save many lives.

over the course of 30 years. So yeah, these are seemingly dangerous animals when in reality, you know, the most dangerous wild animal in the country is the white-tailed 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 whitetail deer densities, you know, is going to save some lives.

I wonder, do you think they're even more dangerous than mosquitoes 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 Americans are killed by mosquito-borne illnesses. I don't know. Okay, yeah, I checked this out for us. And while over a million people worldwide succumb to mosquito-borne illnesses every year, it is a low percentage in the U.S. So the CDC reported just

79 human deaths last year. But deaths in America from deer collisions, around 450, which is the same number of American fatalities from salmonella or acetaminophen hepatotoxicity, which is the medical term for a Tylenol overdose. But that's still 450 funerals because of deer.

And, you know, they say 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 theologist choosing, which this week is wildlandsnetwork.org, which uses the principles of conservation biology to identify the core native wildlife habitat areas and the corridors that 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.org. And thanks to sponsors of the show for making that donation possible.

When U.S. Bank says they're in it with you, they mean it. Not just for the good stuff, the grand openings and celebrations, although those are pretty great, but for all the hard work it took to get there. The fine tuning of goals, the managing of cash and workflows, and decision making. They're in to help you through all of it.

because together they're proving day in and day out that there is nothing as powerful as the power of us. Visit usbank.com to get started today. Equal housing lender, member FDIC, copyright 2024, US Bank. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. And as I record this, my dog, Gremmy, is snoring. Gremmy.

Sometimes you gotta stop and smell the roses. Sometimes you gotta stop and record the snoring. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's hard to make time for it. And when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever. So if you were thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. It's designed to be convenient and flexible.

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This episode is brought to you by Merrick Pet Care. And y'all know I have a little dog named Gremmy, which is short for Gremlin. And y'all helped me name her. And there's nothing that we like more than seeing her happy, which means tasty dog foods. And Merrick has been crafting high quality dog food for over 30 years. They were founded in Hereford, Texas.

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Okay, so think about your childhood and think about some highlights. I bet they were probably out essentially tinkering. This is why I love KiwiCo. Each month, they send a kid a crate. It's packed with these engaging hands-on activities. They introduce them to science and technology and art concepts.

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All right, let's wild out. Let's tear through your Patreon questions. To submit questions for the Ologists ahead of time, you can just go to patreon.com slash ologies. It's

It's a buck a month to join. And we're going to hit your questions, specifically a few audio questions asked by the BFF tier on Patreon. But this first topic of inquiry was a popular one. It was also submitted by Jenna Briner, Rachel J, Alicia Smith, John Burbridge, Mara Schoener, Kyla C, Chandler Willerington, Alina Litton, Alana Wood, Alyssa Gregory, Nicole Kleinman, Elizabeth Newman, Taylor, and Danoa. Okay, let's hear it. Call or you're alive.

You're absolutely not live. Not to try to put an ologist 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, Natch Butte, Jackie Michelle Johnson-Sheehan, calls herself a niche over 30 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 so good. It's the best. Yeah. Yeah. It's just like, I used to think like, oh, this is so old of me, but I'm like, no, this is luxury. Are you kidding? In bed with a book by nine? Yeah. It's the fucking best.

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 can 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. I've actually, I have been an exclusive flip phone user for the last five years. Oh!

So we'll have to do another flip phonology 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.

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 or you can silence your notifications and congratulations on that. But I cannot trust myself around a browser because I blink and it's 2.40 a.m. 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 to be hyper aware, especially during dusk and dawn. 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 honky it. You can honk your horn. You can do a little tap dance on the brakes to let anyone behind you know that there is some shit going down on the road ahead. And if you see an animal, you can flick your high beams, which is the universal signal for go honky it.

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 a rollover. So don't veer off the road. Call 911 if it's a big critter that you hit that could endanger others or if it needs humane treatment. Insurance companies are also like take pictures so that we don't wrap your claim up in a lot of bullshit.

So, okay. Now you know how to avoid it or what to do. I'm just your internet dad here asking you to drive safe, kiddos. Want to have you around for as many episodes as possible. Okay.

Okay, this next one is another audio question from the BFF tier on Patreon, but it was also on the minds of patrons Anna Thompson, Scarlett P, Jen Baker, Katie Murray, Ashley Dent, Sidoni S, Jenna Congdon, Chris Curious, Jason Lowenthal, Destiny, Becky the Sassy, Seagraph Scientist, Petaluck, and Emmy Dahl-Rimple. Let's roll the tape. This is Emily in Michigan. I was wondering...

Who comes and cleans up the roadkill, and what do they do with the roadkill? Where do 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 know, sometimes they're private contractors as well. And, you know, most of those carcasses get landfilled or incinerated. Some just get, like, taken to some random dump site and shoved off the side of the highway. Oh, dear. Yeah.

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 30 states now have legalized roadkill consumption. You know, typically you have to obtain a permit, which are 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 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 30 minutes of the notification. Time.

Times a tickin'. Now, Wyoming people, as of January 2022, there is a 5-1-1 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. So maybe hold off on just having a flip phone because a bison buffet could be just at the tips of your fingers. But do you

Would you want to? Do you? Will you get a disease that you'll regret for the rest of your life? Or is it scrumptious? So patrons, Jessamy Ritchie, Elsa Sparks, River Canina, Melanie Jakamovic, Shielin Whippert, Laura Bruner, Jessica Fowler, Rosalind Hesby, Savannah McGuire, Jen, Andrew McAdams, Tessa, John Mitchell, Gregory Hayes, Margo 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? RJ 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 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...

decompose 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

One thing that, you know, a lot of guys check for is they check for bruising. If an animal's, you know, badly bruised by a collision, its meat's not as good. And, you know, maybe the internal organs have kind of been scraped.

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 I did plenty of digging 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 happen, and certainly there are actual

Oh, okay. That's good to know. So there are hunter training programs that advise of wildcats.

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

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 are the hate? 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, served some prison time for that. And a security camera caught him doing that. You did. Meat.

which is pretty wild. That just seems like a really dangerous and expensive way to go about it, right? I mean, you don't have a rifle in your car or something? I don't know. Yeah. If you're going to do something illegal, make it at least easier, I guess. Right, exactly. A guy in Wisconsin, 2013. Misdemeanor illegal deer hunting charge. Pleaded 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 roadkill is this free-range organic wild meat that in some ways might be healthier than an animal grown in a feed lab. I always wonder about that too, because 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

Shaylin Whippert, Kai Kishimoto, Megan Yountz, Connie Connie Bobani, and Jen Squirrel Alvarez, 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 roadkill without looking like a serial killer? And is it okay to pick it up and taxidermy it?

Yeah, it depends on the species and it depends on your local or state regulations. I don't want to give any advice that'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 or your state fish and wildlife agency before picking up and taxidermying any wildlife. Good call. Google it. Google it in your area, people. Kind of a cop out, but that's what I'm going to go with.

Hey, you're avoiding people getting arrested. I don't want to be aiding and abetting 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. And I wondered how PETA would feel about this whole episode. Like, am I going to get letters? Yeah.

Next time I go to the mall, is someone going to douse me in red paint? And people for the ethical treatment of animals weighs in via their website and woo 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, PETA 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 in that animals killed on the road were not castrated, dehorned, or de-beaked 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 slaughter line. Perhaps the animals never knew what hit them. Wow, okay, so animal activists are like, hey man, it sucks, but it's unalived already. So when it comes to a dead feral pig, go hog wild. And patron Shailene Whipper wanted to remind us of a person who called into Fargo, North Dakota radio station, Y94 Playhouse with questions

concerns about deer crossing signage. Why are we encouraging deer to cross at the interstate? I don't get it. That's such a high traffic area. I mean, I understand that deer are wild animals and they need to travel across the streets occasionally to survive and of course to find food, but it seems to me that so irresponsible of us

To allow these deer crossings to be in areas where these deer are so likely to be struck by oncoming traffic. I mean, wouldn'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 ologite 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? Yeah, 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. Sort of where crashes have occurred in the past or where deer have been observed or a 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 there are just so many of them on the landscape. Again, we habituate to them. 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. I wondered that too, like if there was a deer that was just hanging out behind the sign being like, is it safe to cross? Yeah. If we could train them to cross at the signs, that would be really effective. Right. As someone who has been hit by a car crossing the street, I trust deer to have...

better instincts than I do. I survived, obviously, but it wasn't a fun experience. I was like 12. Yeah, that's awful. I'm sorry that happened to you. I know. A Mercedes sedan hit me and they're like, here's the deal. We'll give you 500 bucks not to sue us. And I was like, 500 smackers? That's a lot of money. I'll take it. Oh, man. So I guess I benefited slightly and I

From what I know, I didn't have any lasting traumatic brain injury. You sure about that? We had some great questions. John Verbridge 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 learning to just like, uh-uh, I don't cross that? That's such a good question. There are 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 avoiders. Grizzly bears are kind of one of the archetypal examples of that. You know, there are studies showing that even six cars an hour, so one car every 10 minutes, right, a really low traffic rural road is enough to prevent a grizzly bear from crossing a road. But, you know, there are other kind of bolder 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, the,

Chicago's of Coyote, or what did I just say? The Chicago's of 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. I didn't

There are carrion crows in Japan that will drop nuts at intersections and 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 if the car doesn't hit the nut, they'll reposition the nut by a few inches so the car gets it the next time around. So 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 LA streets several times, and the internet is chock-a-block with video footage, including a bear lumbering about in downtown Asheville, 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. An Alaskan moose waiting for the light to change. There's footage of Middle Eastern boars 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 Thailand who can smell the approach of raw sugar cane 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 like 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 built their nests on cliffs, right? That's how they got their name. But, uh,

you know, not as 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 1980s 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. Yeah.

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 get out of the way of a barreling 18-wheeler. So over time, all of those long-winged swallows got weeded out of the population, and the crook swallows became shorter-winged as a result. So that's

you know, evolution happening really in 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 pass under them. I was like, who's living in there? Those are the cliff swallows, yeah. Just a fun fact to bring up while everyone chews 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 see an underpass turned into a hipster enclave for birds, say, hey, way to go. I love it. Make me one. Erin Burbridge and Emily Staffer raised a great point about seasoning the roads. Erin lives in Nova Scotia, Canada, and we apply salt brine to the roads ahead of winter storms. And I've heard that some animals are attracted to the salt, and that brings them closer to roadsides.

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. I mean, certainly roads can become these ecological traps. You know, salt is this

super stimulant that animals crave and our profligate salting of highways does lure them to the roadside and create trouble as a result. I mean, there was 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 I guess that's a problem. How do you have boundaries with a 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 you're toast. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's been lots of studies showing the different costs to hitting various animals, 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 $9,000. And the average moose collision costs more than $40,000 because they're just such an enormous animal that does so much damage. And I'm sure that sort of per moose crash, I would imagine that they're the most dangerous animal in the country. Do halogen lights...

help at all? I know that there are some new cars that are blinding, but do better bulbs help? From a driver visibility standpoint, 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 was a cool study done by a guy named Travis DeVault, 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, a giant

roof-mounted set of fiberglass antlers, maybe just to intimidate other ungulates like, dang, that dude's on the juice. See ya, I'm out. Because as patron Tara asked, are deers part moth for headlights? And in Natalie Rousseau's words, why do deer want to die so bad? And I can't believe I forgot 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, they're basically blinded. 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 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 your predator is a hawk or a coyote. But, you know, against an F-150 barreling down the interstate, they're not only 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 this unnatural brightness. That's just another example of evolution kind of gone awry thanks to

I didn't want to keep him, but I had to ask skunk questions from Jenny Rounds and Linnea Brink-Anderson. I swear two more and then I'm letting you go to cough and take more D-Quil. I'm so very sorry. Julie M. wants to know, is it weird that I like the smell of skunk while 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 listener. You might be alone in that one. I don't know for sure, but my assumption would be that when they're hit, the scent gland that they use 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 there.

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 olfactology 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 skunks, first off, they have not one, but they have two anal glands.

and they can spray up to 15 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, "Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum." 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 2021 study, "Contextual Variation and Objectivity in Olfactory Perception."

Or maybe because it smells like the ganja, according to another recent paper titled Identification of a New Family of Preniolated Volatile Sulfur Compounds in Cannabis Revealed by Comprehensive Two-Dimensional Gas Chromatography. So researchers found that it's not cannabis terpenes, but rather a 3-methyl-2-butene-1-thiol via C3.

or volatile sulfur compound number three that gives weed its skunky aroma. And VSC3 is also found in brewskis exposed to UV light, which

which you might know as skunked beer. So VSC3, 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 lip liner outside of your lip. It's better at a distance. But up close, skunk musk smells apparently like someone farting garlic nougat.

near a tire fire. And the smell is so bad that it's been used as inspiration for 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, Erin Ryan wants to know, do you ever cry when you see very 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 asking for a friend questions. Very much. Yeah. No, I mean, yes, I have definitely stopped for many sticks and tire...

fragments and all kinds of stuff. Yeah, especially for snakes. I definitely stop for snakes very often and shepherd the snakes off the road. I did that the other day and 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 15 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 bungee cords and branches and all kinds of things. And the snake was alive? The snake was alive. 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, um,

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, um, And 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, uh,

people and foxes and all kinds of other critters, but your Subaru 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 were a lot of

roadkill-related moments, certainly seeing a giant anteater or a tapir, all of these amazing, just majestic, exotic animals dead when I visited Brazil for one of the chapters. I think that the toughest thing was

writing a book that 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 real road ecologists that I was just fortunate to translate, basically. So writing a book that dealt with a dark, challenging topic, but 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 Road 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 wryly funny, full of cool stories, and a deeply researched and compelling read.

What about a moment that was uplifting or one of 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

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-90 in Washington State, in 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 it was just so cool to see the significance

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 requirements

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 of this native vegetation and they'd even inoculated the soil with native mycorrhizal 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 easier.

difficult or more difficult and more dangerous and harder, you know, and here was this beautiful multimillion 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 it through scent? 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 thing

in terms of getting them to actually use the crossing, really the fences. 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 to get across this thing. But the really wonderful thing that happens over time, and there's 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 the

create game trails, you know, little animal paths, all of those hooves 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 road ecologist 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 2021 Federal Infrastructure Act, $350 million, 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 money.

$500 million 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 it's not enough yet, right? We know this problem is such a huge problem for wildlife in this country. More than a million animals are killed by cars every day, right? So even $350 million 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. Ellie, thank you so much for doing this. I really, really appreciate it. That was super fun. So ask driven people driveling 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 Rotacology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet. And of course, it's available 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 Allie Ward on both. We have shorter, kid-friendly versions called Smologies available at allieward.com slash smologies.

You can be a patron for a buck a month at patreon.com slash ologies and submit your questions there. And ologies merch is available at ologiesmerch.com. And we have cool shit, if I do say so myself. Erin Talbert admins the ologies podcast Facebook group. Emily White of The Wordery makes our professional transcripts.

Susan Hale is our managing director, literally runs the show, and did additional research on this episode. Noelle Dilworth is our scheduling producer. Kelly Arndweyer 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 five.

I have like 15 I want to tell you this week. But the first one is courtesy of Mercedes, the person, not the car. And she said, heck, you can tell the world my secret if you want. I have eaten roadkill deer. 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 wild venison. Did it feel kind of weird?

She says, yes. Did I get 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 Teamologies, 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 Dadaist joke. But getting to the other side means to die. Why did the chicken cross the road?

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 segue 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. Yeah.

So there you go. Some automotive confessions for you. Okay, drive safe. Yeah, dude. Seatbelts. Bye-bye.

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