My entirely anecdotal observation in suburbia is that dead critters or carrion seem to generally be cleaned up without any human intervention, if delicate sensitive types can wait a day.
The exception being the unfortunate flattened, stiff as a board squirrel run over in the street. Even so, I think Crow and other birds find such to be fine dining. There is more wildlife in the city than I thought.
After one particularly heavy rain, an ENORMOUS raccoon emerged from the storm sewer. Another time a very large Possum, a rather scrofulous looking individual ambled through my back yard like he owned the place. Either of them would probably enjoy some dead squirrel, too.
I, too, am in a Chicago suburb, though we have quite a bit of forest preserve land within a few blocks of us. Thus, we have a lot of scavengers in the neighborhood: raccoons, possums, coyotes, and even the occasional fox. I don’t think that a dead squirrel would be around for more than 24 hours.
We have foxes, crows, bluejays, and other scavengers in the neighborhood, so it wouldn’t last long around here. I put the mice I catch in the basement out on the patio and they are gone within hours.
However, I found a dead squirrel in a corner of my garage during my 20-year annual cleanout. No telling how long it had been there.
The moral of the story is: If you want a corpse to persist, hide it in garage garbage.
I have racoons and opossums that check out my house most nights, and enjoy the cat food I sometimes put out for the local outdoor cats. (They’re really cute, too - I put an extra Ring camera at ground level by the door just to see who visits.)
I suspect they would make short work of a dead squirrel.
We don’t have much in the way of sidewalks where I live, but carcasses appear on the side of the road quite frequently - birds, mongooses, feral pigs, feral kittens, toads. I am impressed by the speed with which they disappear, and have no idea where they’re going.
Well, except for the pigs: they probably get tossed in the back of the next passing pick-up truck and butchered. (I was once given a couple of kilos of roadkill pork when a friend’s boyfriend, a skilled hunter and butcher, found a dying pig on the road. It made a truly delicious vindaloo.)
I can tell you from quite recent personal experience that a dead squirrel found near my kitchen door, which I tossed off into a hedgerow, was promptly returned to its convenient near the house location.
I have a young dog. He thinks squirrel carcasses are lots of fun to toss around, and should be left where he can get at them as soon as he goes back out the door. Neither he, nor the cat who I suspect killed the squirrel, nor any of the other cats wanted to eat it; and Coyote apparently hadn’t found it before the dog did.
On the second time I bagged it and put it in the dumpster. The dog hasn’t figured out how to get into the dumpster. (So far.)
And don’t overlook owls, if the death occurs other than at full daylight.
And then there’s coyotes, wolverines, cats, dogs, possums (do they eat meat?), raccoons, and, believe it or not, we have several gaggles of wild turkeys that roam our yard frequently and are absolutely up for pecking at anything at all they suspect is organic matter.
If there was a corpse on the sidewalks or driveway or porch or such, I’d kick it over to the grass just to not accidentally step on it. For sure there would be no sign of it by the next morning or even early evening that day.
Okay, really gross true story for y’all–I used to live in Sacramento CA several decades back and one summer there was a bumper crop of rice (rice is a huge crop around Sac, used to be even more so but they keep building shitty apartments, but I digress) at the same time as a monumental drop in the price of said rice so a shitload of it was just left in the field. Which means an insane level of food for varmints. And there was a ten plagues level of rat population explosion which got really tense when the food ran out and winter set in. Rats travel a lot when they’re hungry, and across the ruler straight backroads of northern Sacramento county, out in what was not yet really North Natomas, the biblical rat hordes scampered like outtakes from “Ben” along roads with a 55mph speed limit on them. Yeah. To get to the original ARCO Arena you’d have to traverse this road and no matter how you tried it was absolutely impossible not to smush at least a few of them. And so many cars per night, my gosh. Anyway, had to take the ex husband out to the airport and that was the most convenient road out there so we were zooming along in the early morning light just jawdropped at the levels of carnage out there. And along the road, one per telephone pole, one per fence post, was like every eagle, redtail hawk, owl and who knows what all just waiting for the cars to zoom by before leisurely swooping down to pick their perfect little splat and take it back to their chosen post. Nature, man. Went on for weeks like this and I can neither confirm nor deny that my ex might have intentionally stocked the birdie buffet while we were returning from dinner downtown. So yeah, that’s what happens when you overfeed rodent populations. Stop with the birdseed!
I’ve secured the road while a couple guys dragged off a freshly roadkilled deer–in Oregon we’re encouraged to scavenge fresh kills, makes cleanup along the roads a lot easier. Wild critters get the offal and anything too roadrashed. It’s a little gross but everybody hunts here and that’s free meat. In this economy? Please!
So, if you’re the guy who’s responsible for its upkeep does that make you the Squire of Treelawny?
Well, I went out to take care of the dead pigeon in front of my neighbors’ house after two days, after I saw one of them take a definite detour around the corpse on the way to her car. But as I was coming up with my gloves, bag, and shovel, I saw that the neighbor on the other side was already bagging it up. So, around here, no more than two days. If I were squeamish, I’d call the city and they’d pick it up by the end of the day.
(I don’t know how much space all you “kick it into the bushes” folks have between your houses, but we’re all on a quarter acre or less, and I’m not willing to smell that and deal with the flies for a long as it takes to decompose.)
Last summer I spied a dead king snake on the street corner where a sidewalk should be had the developers bothered to put on in that part of the neighborhood. For the next ten days I was able to observe Mother Nature in all its glory as the king snake decomposed. I can only assume something was nibbling on it as it went from large intact to a partial skeleton during that time.
Last summer I also spied a dead turtle and a dead squirrel (not together) in the street and another dead turtle on the sidewalk. Those were cleaned up by the next day. (I think the turtle I found on the sidewalk died of heat exhaustion or something. It was scorching hot that day, it was a young turtle, and there were no marks on it.)
I totally agree with this. Many years ago I had a dead crow wings spread lying flat on my lawn right out of the blue. Picked it up with a shovel, into a black garbage bag & into my garbage bin. I can’t imagine leaving a dead animal of any variety around any longer than it takes to pick the thing up and dispose of it.
