Tuesday, 7 July 2009

Modern Life is Rubbish. Part 4: Roadkill

Okay, so I’m stretching this with the modern I know. There have been roads for a bloody long time, but there haven’t been super speedy motors tearing about the countryside for a bloody long time, so it evens out.

I have never killed anything on the roads, primarily because I don’t drive and therefore am never in charge of anything that goes fast enough to cause a poor little critter to get dead. I do, however, get rather upset when I see ex-critters littering the sides of the roads. Especially if said dead things used to be precious, red squirrels for example. And deer, though they don’t appear to be precious to everyone, but I love deer, and I particularly like seeing them alive, not mortally wounded by some stupid 4x4 driven by someone who probably wouldn’t even consider going ‘off-road’. But, my dislike of pointless cars can wait for another day.

Roadkill is on my mind today because a friend hit a rabbit last night. He’s a little upset and while some people don’t seem to have the compassion to care, I do and I would be upset too if I had been in his place. It’s not pleasant to be driving along, minding your own business when suddenly your wheel thumps over a poor little critter that had really bad timing. I was in a car a while back when it ran over a small mammal, we could have swerved to avoid it, but as there was another car coming the other way squishing the animal seemed preferable to squishing ourselves. Apparently these are the decisions we have to make when we take on the responsibility of four wheels and a motor.

Anyway, I got to thinking about that little rabbit that kicked the bucket last night, I don’t think it died for nothing. Think about it, rabbits breed like there’s no tomorrow, and for a lot of them there really is no tomorrow. How many of them die from myxomatosis? I don’t know the exact number, something like half of infected rabbits die. Pretty grim figures, but they still seem to thrive, so it’s all good. A stoat can wipe out an entire nest of baby rabbits to feed her family. Still, the rabbits keep going.

I appear to have digressed. This is my take on last night’s events…

There’s a fox, or another carnivorous creature, and he’s got a family, he can’t reproduce in the numbers rabbits manage and back home he’s got a vixen caring for two little cubs. It’s been a hot couple of weeks, he’s been having a hard time finding food and his family is threatened. He’s out one night, feeling hungry and sniffing the air hopefully. Then he catches a scent, there’s blood on the air. Bounding up to the side of the road he discovers a slightly flattened rabbit just waiting to be taken back to his vixen. He snatches it up, leaps back into the undergrowth and disappears. The fox family eat well tonight.

Something good comes of something bad. Sure, it sucks to be the cause of something cute and fluffy coming to a sticky end, but nature has a way of making up for these things. Why do you think kestrels can be seen hovering above motorways? Roadkill. It’s an all you can eat buffet for our wildlife.

And sometimes, when your tyre kicks as you drive over something small and brown in the road, it is just a shoe!