Roadkill Salmon

A short piece on the impact of roadkill

I'm driving along an uninhabited stretch of Eaglemount when I see a huge black bird standing in the middle of my lane. It's too big to be a crow, and it hardly seems worried about my car as I hit the breaks, finally spreading its wings and awkwardly flapping up and out of the way as I get within ten feet. It's only when I see those wings that I recognize it. Turkey vulture.

I pull over right where the vulture had been and get out of my car. Looking around I see the assembly. Two other vultures perch nearby. Above them a bald Eagle surveys, and off to the side a crow lurks. I make my way into the ditch where I know roadkill must lie.

Instead I find a pile of salmon, their dead eyes peering up at me, bony filleted tails splayed white against the grass. Some fisherman must have tossed them into this ditch far from anyone's home, thinking there was no harm in it.

But I know the harm and grow angry as I go back up to my car, pull a cardboard box from my back seat, and begin putting the stinking salmon into it. Whenever you have food close to the road it creates a chain reaction of death. Even an apple core tossed from a window might attract rats, which attracts owls, swooping fast and low across the road on silent wings. You can't avoid hitting something like that.

A dead body on the side of the road attracts scavengers, and as I pick up roadkill, it is these I most often find. Raccoons, possums, coyotes. No animal is evolved for the danger of something moving as fast as a car.

Throwing the body into the ditch isn't enough. The body becomes a beacon, drawing everyone near. Like the carrion birds that balefully glare down at me as I steal their salmon supper, they spread around the kill, each waiting their turn to get in and drag a piece out from the epicenter.

I wrinkle my nose against the smell as I stick the box in my car. I tell the vultures they can follow me if they like, I'm not going far, and drive to the nearby clear-cut, where I can get further than 50 feet from the road, the least distance you ever want to leave a kill, and dump my box of salmon heads and tails into the abused soil.

I'm sure the fisherman didn't know. They must have thought it a harmless act, an easy spot to dump their waste which will decompose into the soil as these things do.

But still I curse their ignorance, as I curse every car that speeds past me every time I stop to pick up the untended dead. Some roadkill I can honor, using fur, feather or flesh as best I can, others are too far gone but I still wrap them in stinking plastic to move somewhere they can decompose without inviting more death. I do not enjoy this work.

But this is their land, and I borrow the right to live here. I have the knowledge of the right thing to do, and that obliges me to act. I only wish I wasn't doing it alone.