Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet Ben Goldfarb
But roadkill is also a culprit in our planet’s current mass die-off. Every year American cars hit more than 1 million large animals, such as deer, elk, and moose, and as many as 340 million birds; across the continent, roadkill may claim the lives of billions of pollinating insects. The ranks of the victims include many endangered species: One 2008 congressional report found that traffic existentially threatens at least 21 critters in the U.S., including the Houston toad and the Hawaiian goose. If the last-ever California tiger salamander shuffles off this mortal coil, the odds are decent that it will happen on rain-slick blacktop one damp spring night.
A huge problem on many levels. I have posted before on bridges etc. The Exerpt has some chilling data. Steve is a snake and herp guy and can likely commiserate.
The diminishment of herps is a hard problem to grasp. Utter extinction, the fate that befell the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet, is a concept universally understood. Yet extinction is rarely instantaneous, and the gradual ebbing of abundance that precedes it strains language. Some researchers have called such insidious losses “defaunation”; others know them as “biological annihilation.” The biologist E. O. Wilson favored “Eremocene”: the age of loneliness, a near and desolate future in which humankind bestrides an empty world, or perhaps drives over it.
On the nose.
The Overlooked Danger That’s Massacring Wildlife
Another good review of the book.
I saw this when it was fresh in August.
Facebook has better video,
Watch a Grizzly Bear Maul a Black Bear in Canada
The media hyped it as a kill but the black bear was road kill.
As hungry bears feast in B.C. towns, some people are taking a ‘no snitching’ stance
Meanwhile, bears are hungry and that ups their chances to be road kill.