Flattened Fauna, Revised
Page 1
E.B. White quote is from “Walden” in One Man’s Meat by E.B. White. Copyright 1939, 1967 by E.B. White. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 1987, 2006 by Roger M. Knutson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for brief reviews, without the written permission of the publisher.
Ten Speed Press
P.O. Box 7123
Berkeley, California 94707
www.tenspeed.com
Distributed in Australia by Simon and Schuster Australia, in Canada by Ten Speed Press Canada, in New Zealand by Southern Publishers Group, in South Africa by Real Books, and in the United Kingdom and Europe by Publishers Group UK.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file with the publisher.
Knutson, Roger M., 1933-
Flattened fauna.
Bibliography: this page
1. Roadside fauna-United States-Identification.
2. Urban fauna-United States-Identification.
1. Title
QL.155.K58 1987 596.097386-23105
ISBN-13: 978-1-58008-755-1
ISBN-10: 1-58008-755-8
eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-81431-9
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
International Flat Fauna Reporting Form
1 Introduction to the Flattened Fauna
The Road as Habitat
History and Future of the Road Fauna
The Seasonal Nature of the Road Fauna
Mimicry and Protective Coloration of the Road Fauna
Food on the Road
2 The International Study of the Road Fauna
How and Where to Study the Road Fauna
Collection of Road Specimens
How to Use This Book
Animal Posture and Presentation on the Road
The Most Dangerous Animals on the Road
A Quick Key to the Major Groups of Flattened Fauna
3 Road Snakes
Small Snakes
Large Snakes
4 Legged Reptiles and Amphibians
Road Toads
Road Turtles
Alligators
5 Road Birds
Urban Birds
Both Urban and Rural Birds
Rural Birds
6 Road Mammals
Bibliography
Death List
International Flat Fauna Reporting Form
(may be duplicated as necessary)
Mail completed form to:
Headquarters, International Simmons Society
408 Burns Street
Charlevoix, MI 49720-1025
Date
Country
Province or State
Organism name (local)
(Latin)
Brief description of roadside vegetation (e.g., forest type, savanna, vegetation density, water sources nearby, etc.)
Name and address of informant:
Additional information:
chapter 1
This is a book about the animals that, like the Wicked Witch of the East in The Wizard of Oz, are not just merely dead but really most sincerely dead. These are animals in which even flies have lost interest.
A guide to live animals would work well as a guide to the merely dead, since the descriptions in most guides to live animals are based on dead, stuffed animals in museums. However, a guide to the animals of the road has specific reasons for being: in becoming part of the road fauna celebrated in this book, an animal loses not only its life but also its third dimension. And though it has lost most of its mass and much of its normal shape, the creature is not bereft of its interest to naturalists. It is not on the road by accident, although it certainly did not plan its abrupt arrival. The road fauna is made up of creatures who are victims of their own habits—feeding habits, reproductive habits and aggressive or agonistic behavior habits. All these habits enhance survival in the creature’s usual environment, but produce serious dismemberment, and even enroadment, on the highway. Why an animal is on the road and what it was doing there a few hours or days earlier are recorded in its flat remains as surely as the history of a tree is recorded in its annual rings.
Dead and flattened animals on the road are a part of the common experience of everyone who lives where there are roads, from the family on a drive in the country to the daily commuter traveling the same route 250 days each year. Or from the bike rider on the quiet park road to the professional truck-driver who spends hundreds of hours per month on major highways.
Much of our usual appreciation of an animal—in any condition—depends on our ability to identify and name it. For flattened fauna, however, that can be a problem. Most of these animals have been pressed to the road for several days and may have assumed unrecognizable shapes. This book is devoted to making the experience of seeing dead animals on the road meaningful, even enjoyable. With Flattened Fauna in hand, a Sunday drive can become a safari into a new habitat populated with animals unlike those you have seen before. This guide is meant to answer the oft-asked question, “That wasn’t a dog or cat—what was it?”1
We all love to look at animals. But for every mile we walk in the natural world, looking for animals, we may drive 200 miles. Much of the driving is done, ironically, in an effort to get to a zoo, park, or natural area where we can observe animals. For every live animal we may observe, we are likely to see anywhere from five to twenty-five animals plastered to the pavement. The commonly available guides to wildlife take no account of this fact. The usual picture guides and handbooks of wildlife suggest that we are more likely to see a chipmunk nibbling a nut on the end of a log than lying in the middle of the road as a patch of striped brown fur; that we more often see a rabbit bounding through our back yard than on the turnpike, with its three strangely angled legs, one ear, and white powder-puff of a tail. Those (up to now) nondescript spots and blotches of fur, feathers, and scales are the wildlife we see most often, yet nowhere has there been a guide to their identification. Flattened Fauna is meant to fill that gap and encourage our appreciation of that part of the natural world found on any nation’s highway surfaces.
Various historical estimates place the density of flattened animals at from 0.429 to 4.10 animals per mile of prime highway habitat.2 This means that a trip of 1000 miles (1600 kilometers) could be the occasion for seeing, identifying, and even enjoying anywhere from 400 to 4000 animals.
Of course numbers will vary with season and location, but the adventure of seeing and identifying this truly stationary wildlife in large numbers can now be available to anyone who travels roads and byways. The flattened fauna of our highways—road fauna—allows everyone to discover and describe animals in a habitat that is abundantly available. A cross-country family trip, once a test of parental patience and ingenuity, can now be nearly as exciting as a visit to the Serengeti Plain. The logbook of a dead-animal aficionado in California, on one 480-mile trip in the spring of 1984, revealed a total of nine reptiles, 58 birds, and 161 mammals. A late summer vacation along the highways of almost any country will provide an even larger number of sightings. The current world record for one day’s observation, dating back to 1933 (when rabbits may have been less highway savvy) is 598 rabbits on 50 miles of two-lane asphalt road near Boise, Idaho. That record will not be broken on any busy four-lane highway. High speed and heavy traffic are not compatible with a high density of flat animals. Some animals are smart enough to stay off a road frequented by large numbers of fast-moving vehicles.
The Road as Habitat
Compared to places where animals live, the road is an unusual habitat. Most animal habitats
(forests, marshes, prairies, and sand dunes) have been part of the natural world for millions of years. The creatures that live in those places have developed more or less precise adaptations to their particular niches. The road fauna, by contrast, occupy a habitat that is almost unique to the twentieth century. An unwary prairie dog (Cynomys ludivicianus) may have worked its way into the soil of the Oregon Trail under the wheels of a nineteenth-century Conestoga wagon. A reliable 1897 report3 from North Dakota gives evidence of at least one large snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina) flattened under the steel-rimmed wheels of several loaded wagons. Even more rarely, a European brown hare (Lepus capensis) may have been unable to avoid an onrushing Roman chariot. But until the twentieth century, the roads and vehicles that have been the major molders of road fauna were so rare that they scarcely concerned biologists interested in the relationships of animal to habitat. Fast cars and hard-surfaced roads have produced the entire flattened fauna described here in less than an eye-blink of evolutionary time.
How have animals responded to this modern habitat? Will they evolve appropriate adaptations to the road? Evolutionary theory tells us that the organisms of any recently developed habitat will show characteristics of instability and local variation. (As a new habitat is invaded by any species, the prior restraints on its reproduction and variation relax, usually resulting in a multitude of new forms.) The reproductive potential of the flattened fauna is, of course, very low, but variation in form is certainly characteristic. While the road fauna does show a multitude of unique, two dimensional forms, it has existed for less than 100 years—insufficient time for adaptations or discernable evolutionary development. It is most probably the case that, like the Shakers, the road fauna depends completely on recruitment rather than reproduction for its “survival,” and cannot be expected to show evolutionary changes no matter how much time has passed.
Yoram Yom-Tov’s 1997 paper on “The Evolution of Two-dimensional Vertebrates,” from the Israel Journal of Zoology, offers an alternative point of view. He suggests that the evolution of the road fauna is proceeding at an accelerated pace, going through a period of extremely rapid change. This suggestion requires, however, that the new organisms found on the road are in fact unique species, derived from earlier forms. Taxonomists will always disagree on strict classification, and I cannot support the ideas that all the road forms are new species: varieties, maybe, but not new species. To quote, more or less accurately, our President, “I’m a lumper, not a splitter.”
If the road habitat and its major selective pressure—fast-moving vehicles—were to persist, a field guide written a few thousand years hence might show the beginnings of characteristics specifically related to long-term survival on the road. When roads have been a dominant feature of the natural environment for many centuries, we might expect turtles with very sturdy, nearly flat shells to emerge by the normal processes of natural selection. Animals that tunnel under roads would certainly be at some advantage as road habitat becomes more and more abundant; so would those organisms that have managed some cooperative co-evolution with birds that could ferry them across highways. Any dramatic increase in animal speed would not be very useful and is not expected.
Precise evolutionary adaptations have always been difficult to forecast, although the history of life on earth suggests that, given enough time, most habitats—even the most hazardous—develop their own distinctive assemblage of animals. Indeed, that development may have already begun. Victor B. Sheffer’s book, Spires of Form, Glimpses of Evolution, quotes a friend in England who believes that “hedgehogs have learned genetically, within our century to run from approaching automobiles instead of curling up in the defensive posture of their pre-auto ancestors.” If English hedgehogs can do it, we should expect animals anywhere on earth to follow suit. By contrast, Professor Yom-Tov writes that hedgehogs are more likely to develop two-dimensionality than any other mammal.
What follows, then, is a systematic look at a very recently developed habitat and its unusual animal inhabitants: squashed squirrels, flat flickers, battered badgers, mangled marmots, and retrorse rabbits.
History and Future of the Road Fauna
At a time when the total world fauna is surely shrinking in both absolute numbers and species complexity, the road fauna is clearly increasing. Before 1900 in the United States, its presence was recorded by only the most fragmentary references to the occasional horse-stomped snake. With the development in the twentieth century of a much elongated road network and dramatically increased traffic speed, the flattened fauna has increased in both species and total numbers. There is little published research before 1930, but in 1938 Thomas G. Scott measured a density of 0.429 organisms per mile and estimated that a total of 39.1462 animals entered the flattened fauna annually per mile of Iowa highway.4 Mr. Scott recorded fifty-seven different species, nearly half of them birds. In his 1938 classic, Feathers and Fur on the Turnpike,5 New Englander James Simmons documented species numbers as great as those from Iowa. By 1944, in a thorough examination of the Nebraska road fauna based on 77,000 miles of travel, H. Elliott McClure6 was able to find 101 species and a total of 6,723 specimens. (Again, half the species were birds.) Obviously the road fauna was expanding rapidly, with forty-four additional species in only six years. This was happening, moreover, even with lowered (35 mph) speed limits imposed to save gasoline during World War II. Extrapolating this six-year increase over the decades from 1945 to the present, 2005 may reveal well over 500 species in the flattened fauna of North America—a truly robust phenomenon. Current research to verify these predictions is incomplete.
Information from outside North America is even more sparse. China and India are not only adding people to the world, they are adding roads and vehicles. (See Chapter 2 for an international perspective.) Worldwide public attention to the growth of the road fauna may be the most important environmental issue of the twenty-first century. Even as we face large-scale animal extinction over much of the world, the flattened fauna grows. It deserves international attention.
In order to expand our understanding of the world’s road animals, we need a society modeled after the most successful educational and information-gathering organization in zoological history: the Audubon Society. If the flattened fauna is to have a patron saint, we could do no better than J. R. Simmons, whose immortal and nearly unavailable work, Feathers and Fur on the Turnpike, brought to the attention of all who read it vital information about the road fauna of New England.
An International Simmons Society has been established with headquarters at 408 Burns Street in Charlevoix, Michigan. There have been semi-active chapters of the society in Boulder, Colorado, and in Leeds, England. Interest in the organization has been expressed in Australia and in Germany. A network of dead animal fans is growing, even as the world’s network of roads is expanding.
The most important early function of the Society has been routine semi-annual counts of road victims. The Labor Day count and Memorial Day count coincide with the most abundant presence of road animals in temperate climates, and the highest traffic totals. Any pattern of seasonal distribution in tropical regions is yet to be discerned. Documentation of changes in the number of individuals and species will serve to alert the lovers of dead things to the increases or decreases of some favorite species in the flattened fauna—information that is now recorded only sporadically and compiled only by the Simmons Society. Active members of the society are expected to maintain an up-to-date death list, which also helps to document any increase or decrease in species number. (See this page for suggested format.)
The Seasonal Nature of the Road Fauna
Even the casual North American observer is aware that the road fauna is more abundant in some seasons than others. For a few species such as toads and frogs, migration for spring breeding produces that seasonal flurry of inactivity on the road. For most mammals and birds, however, the largest number of new specimens piles up in mid- to late summer. Though this peak might appear to be
only the product of hordes of summer vacationers and busy weekend trippers, the truth is more biological. The proliferation of road fauna in July and August is a direct result of the abundance of animals living near the road at that time. Most of the surplus consists of young, naïve creatures—those with only the most limited experience of the road and its hazards. McClure’s study of the road fauna in Nebraska revealed that sparrows flattened in July constituted 63 percent of the total flattened sparrows for the whole year. Young sparrows are most numerous in July. Thirty-one percent of all the redheaded woodpeckers found for the whole year were found in August, just when the young are beginning to fly and feed for themselves. And those young woodpeckers seek out food in the drifts of dead insects found along any highway.
For beginning temperate zone students of the road fauna, late summer will certainly be the best time to initiate their study. Anyone wishing to specialize in reptiles might well reserve time during September and October, as nights cool and the road is warm (see snakes, this page). The pursuit of flattened forms of nearly all birds and mammals will be most productive in July and August.
In winter, the road fauna is seriously depleted in those places where many creatures have either migrated to warmer climates or are in hibernation. In colder climates, the general level of inactivity reduces absolute numbers, but the preservation effect of cold may compensate by retaining specimens on the road for longer periods. The only exceptions to this bleak winter picture of life without flattened animals on the road are some of the winter-active flocking birds, which will seek sand, salt, or grain along the roadsides. Sometimes dozens of individuals of the same species are found within a few hundred yards of one another—an abundance of flat birds seldom rivaled in quantity even during the most active summer seasons.