Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
thousand—involved wildlife, most often deer. These collisions annually kill
two hundred Americans and injure twenty-six thousand, at an estimated cost
of more than $8 billion. The cost to wildlife is also extreme. In the United
States, between half a million and one million deer are killed each year, and
twenty-one species of vertebrates are federally endangered in part because of
road mortality; only three are birds. The Humane Society of the United States
estimates that more than three hundred million vertebrates die annually in
vehicle collisions. Worldwide, the annual death toll is staggering: i ve million
amphibians in Australia, four million birds in the United Kingdom, two mil-
lion birds and mammals in Canada, one hundred million vertebrates in Spain,
twenty thousand to thirty thousand badgers and sixty thousand to eighty
thousand hares in Sweden . . . the list goes on.
It's not that birds avoid all cars; it has been estimated that more than eight
million are killed annually in Sweden alone. Even birds can't help but collide
with cars in the United States, where roads cover 1 percent of the land and
stretch for nearly seven million miles. But bird casualties may be responded
to—by birds and the people who collide with them—in unique and adaptive
ways. Eddie the bald eagle thrilled Seattle commuters by regularly perching
on a roadside light. In 2011, Eddie was killed by a head-on collision with a city
bus. The public grieved and eulogies were posted, but hearts soared the next
year when his mate acquired a new partner and successfully nested. In con-
trast, few comment on the daily death toll of raccoons, rabbits, opossums,
coyotes, deer, and snakes. In fact, we often go out of our way to kill herps,
especially snakes.
Persecution is thought to drive snake declines in Nigeria, Pakistan, the
West Indies, Russia, Belize, Brazil, Canada, and the United States. Eating frogs
may do likewise in Pakistan. Some mammals even draw our wrath, passing a
cultural carrying capacity more quickly than birds. It is late summer and my
neighbors are battling the moles that burrow under their lawns of turf grass.
