Road Kill

I was noticing the amount of roadkill recently. It seems as though every time I go rollerskiing or biking on the road, I'm seeing dead animals pretty frequently. Over 35 miles of rollerskiing last Saturday, I saw a dead bat, two dead frogs, countless dead salamanders, two dead birds, a dead mouse, many dead earthworms, a slug or two (squashed dead), and a dead racoon. The racoon was in the middle of the road, so Ken moved it. I wish I'd had a camera on me, but since I didn't, I'll leave you with my strikingly lifelike interpretation:



But all this roadkill makes me wonder. If there are so many dead animals on one 35-mile stretch of road, can you extrapolate and say that there are this many dead animals everywhere? I'm not going to go all PETA (that's People for the Eating of Tasty Animals, right?), I'm just saying, roads have a helluva bigger impact on our world than we'd like to think, and roadkill is just the most obvious one.

Nothing beats the suicidal chipmonk when I was riding the gaps last summer, though, that *tried* to run through Blazar's wheel... it didn't make it. We call that natural selection.