~ jan wrote:

On Thu, 23 Oct 2008 09:47:32 EDT, kathy wrote:

jan - I forgot to tell you I saw one of our bandit friends
flattened down on Columbia Drive... may he rest in pieces.
k :-)

Yes, I saw him, assuming he was the same one he was gone by afternoon....
I wonder who picked him up and not the stinky skunk 12 feet away? (Course
by that time the skunk was pretty well grounded into the roadway.)

Back when I was a kid the Wildlife people told my dad that they could give
a pretty accurate count of the # of pheasants in an area by the # of road
kill/mile. I've seen a few Rocky's hit locally lately which by using the
same calculations means there are a whole lot more out there. And now
they're ripping thru nets!

LOL. You have to consider though that Racoons are smart. Not terribly
smart about roads, admittedly, but generally _very_ smart. Pheasants,
otoh, are really, really, stupid. I hit one once - the stupid thing was on
the shoulder of the road, and when we came by it flew _into_ the car,
instead of away from...

So probably, you could compute the number of racoons from the roadkill, but
definitely not using the _same_ calculation as for pheasants.

Our local most common roadkill is porcupines (thankfully - I have a personal
beef, as I love dogs and trees, and they are really destructive of both).
I'm not even sure they're actually stupid, but their entire lives have told
them that nothing can hurt them - so they assume cars will avoid them.
otoh, of the other wildlife we see around here, I've never seen a dead deer
(that might actually be because they get immediately dressed out and
freezer-ized - you _should_ get some recompense for the expense of fixing
the car), one fox (quite common both in the urban and rural areas) and one
coyote (howling on the hill as I write), but lots of racoons and skunks.
--
derek