Tiffany Nhan remembers the time she and her partner were driving home to Worcester after enjoying a night out in Providence. They had just eaten at a tasty Italian restaurant and had a few minutes left driving up Route 146.
Then suddenly, a deer jumped over the median into their lane. Nhan braked. But at 50 mph and with little time to react, it wasn’t enough.
The deer died on impact, and the collision totaled Nhan’s car. Soon, a state trooper and tow truck pulled over. So did a few other drivers, who wanted to take the deer home for a meal, even though state law prohibits that.
“It was really sad. [The deer] just died, and now it’s gonna become dinner,” she recalled thinking at the time. “I just went over to the deer. I kind of prayed over the deer, hoping whatever happens in its afterlife, it’s OK.”
Nhan’s experience this summer is one many other Massachusetts drivers can relate to and even more people may go through in the coming months. During the fall mating season, deer tend to be less cautious about crossing roads. That leads to more struck animals, more injured drivers and more work for the people tasked with removing roadkill.
Last year, there were at least 3,886 strikes on deer, according to data from MassDOT. That’s more than any year since 2002 because of what scientists say is a growing abundance of deer in Massachusetts. And 146 of the deer collisions last year resulted in injuries.
Overall, drivers in the commonwealth have a 1 in 85 chance of submitting an insurance claim due to a collision with an animal, ranking 16th nationally, according to State Farm.
Scott Jackson, a wildlife biologist at UMass Amherst, noted that cars are deadly for a lot of animals other than deer, from red foxes and bobcats to turtles and salamanders. He pointed to porcupines as being particularly prone to road collisions since they walk slowly and react to threats by freezing and erecting their quills — obviously no match for a 4,000-pound car.
“When you think about impacts on ecosystems … it’s hard to think of something that has more of an impact than the road.”Scott Jackson, wildlife biologist at UMass Amherst
The deaths can have a lasting effect. Jackson said because porcupines only breed once a year and females have just a single baby, the population can’t recover quickly.
“Similar to porcupines, turtles in general live for a long time. They reproduce late in life,” he said. “When cars start to take their toll on populations of turtles, it can take a [species] into a decline that they will not recover from.”
Beyond cars’ effects on populations, scientists said roadkill is worth preventing simply because of its brutal nature. Jackson said for every dead animal seen on a road, there’s likely a high number that suffer “ghastly” injuries like crushed legs, and crawl into the woods before eventually dying.
Some don’t even make it that far.
One early September morning, a driver collided with a deer in a quiet residential neighborhood in Sherborn. Sean Killeen, the town’s public works director, said a police officer arrived at the scene to find the deer alive but too injured to move. So the officer put it down with a gunshot. Killeen’s team then had to remove the body.
The workers often handle roadkill multiple times a week. They dispose of the dead animals in a spot in the town forest that’s far away enough from homes that people won’t come across the bodies decomposing.
“Sometimes [the roadkill is] really gross,” Killeen said. “A couple of the guys will come back and throw up, or throw up on the side of the road.”
Wildlife conservation experts attribute high road mortality to the amount of asphalt around the state. During an interview, Laura Marx, a climate solutions scientist at the Nature Conservancy in Massachusetts, pulled up a map she made showing all of the state’s roads shaded in purple. If you compare it to MassDOT’s crash data, the picture is clear: the more roads in an area, typically, the more roadkill.
Many animals need large swaths of land to forage for food, mate and migrate, Marx said. That’s especially important now as climate change forces some species to seek different habitats. As a result, roads that animals can’t cross act as barriers, isolating populations and leading to inbreeding.
“So the animals can’t find mates that have genetic diversity. The population just gets weaker and smaller over time, and they’re much more likely to wink out,” Marx said.
Some states, including Montana, Colorado and Florida, have tried to reduce roadkill by building massive wildlife crossings above and beneath busy roads in remote areas. Massachusetts officials say the commonwealth’s suburban landscape makes it a poor fit for such a solution.
But officials say they are trying to make roads safer for animals. For example, beneath a heavily trafficked section of Route 2 in Concord is a small underpass that was installed in 2016 and looks like a tunnel.
As MassDOT biologist Dave Paulson and MassWildlife biologist Tim McGuire walked through the passageway one September morning, they spotted the footprints of deer, raccoons and a bobcat.
“No one probably realizes there’s a wildlife crossing here,” Paulson said, noting the underpass is near a stream that animals travel along. “So it really creates this landscape connectivity.”
Paulson said there are several similar passageways across the state. Officials are also trying to help animals avoid cars through redesigned water pathways beneath roads.
Jackson, the UMass Amherst biologist, said other solutions should include slower speed limits and resisting the temptation to add additional lanes to existing roads. Not only will animals keep their lives, he said, drivers will avoid injuries, damage to their cars and the emotional trauma of running over wildlife.
“It’s really up to the state to invest more to provide the funding to make these changes,” Jackson said. “When you think about impacts on ecosystems … it’s hard to think of something that has more of an impact than the road.”
