Last night somebody hit a deer and the body was lying on the road right in front of the driveway. You could see red lumps all over but the body seemed whole. I guessed it was brains. Ma called the city and they came out and got the body. They lifted the body and from the neck up was just skin.
I went outside and the road and our driveway is full of skull and jaw shards with brain pulp which I had to remove so as not to be driving over them or getting stuck in the snow blower. I used a stick and old shovel to remove as many bone shards as possible. There are just some parts that won’t come off until it thaws. Winter roadkill is so much nastier than when it’s above zero and you can remove all the meat and wash it with a water hose. I absolutely am grossed out by fresh bones, so I’m still feeling all shaky. You’d think after 3 hours my adrenaline would go down.
We had a roadkill deer next to the ditch last summer; it was in a spot where I walked past it twice daily, as I went for a stroll. It was interesting to watch the progress: it was starting to bloat a bit a first, but then apparently some coyotes or dogs found it, because one day the whole carcass was gnawed down. It was wierd, as the entire ribcage was basically intact, but bloody-looking. Then the little critters got to work and the flies laid eggs in the head, which slowly turned into a writhing mass of hungry fat maggots. Something dragged off most of the remnants of the body, but the head stayed there as the skull emerged. I kept an eye on it and started thinking that in a few more days, it would be picked bare enough to take home and clean up as a yard ornament. Maybe put it on a stake like Vlad or something. But it disappeared! Damn, I guess there was still something to eat. Cut to a couple months later, talking to my neighbor. His son is standing behind him and starts laughing when I mention my regret on not acting more quickly to grab the skull. Turns out, the kid was watching it, too and beat me to it. He was just a little less squeamish than me, and he won.
Around here, it’s nearly Deliverance. A deer gets hit, and within fifteen minutes people start coming out of the woodwork, sidling up to the driver, muttering, “You gonna keep that deer?” Bambi’s in the freezer before you can blink. My eldest daughter and her boyfriend hit a deer last spring late at night, and he called me about 11:30 to tell me that they had hit it, but they were okay and she would be home late. My first question after making sure no one was hurt was, “You gonna butcher that deer at your house, or do I need to get up and get the knives out?”
People around here want roadkill deer too. Our household doesn’t.
This just had to be right at our driveway with bone fragments all over about a ten foot long splatter area. I would have left everything had it been fifteen feet further down the road. Had it been meat chunks and not bone splinters I would have left it alone. These pieces could go through a tire. I know the chunks I couldn’t get off the road will get flung at our property by the snowplow.
At least I’m not so shaky anymore. Maybe I’ll be OK in another two hours.
A couple of winters back, my car alarm went off one night. I looked out the window, but couldn’t see anything wrong with the car, or anyone near it, but it was partially obscured, so I couldn’t see all of it. I reset the alarm and sat back down.
A few seconds after getting comfortable, the alarm went off again. Again, I looked out but couldn’t see anything. So I put some shoes on and go out to take a look.
And almost get run over by a deer.
It seems it had been hit by a car, and slid down the embankment to land next to my car, where it was shakily trying to regain its feet, using my car for a prop, causing the alarm to keep going off.
There was a blood streak down the side of my car, but otherwise no damage.
It was a doe so no buckeyes. There are no eyes anyway. There is just bone, brain, teeth and I assume eye goo. The whole contents of the head look like they went through a wood chipper and sprayed out across the driveway.
I go cold when I see road-kill of any sort. Some might say it is removing the stupid ones from the gene pool, and in a pigeons case that would seem to hold water, but in general, I reckon it is killing off the more adventurous animals.
Where I used to live, there was a vixen with 6 cubs that I’d seen a couple of times while out walking with my dog, and one morning coming back from the shop, I saw it lying dead in the road. I never saw the cubs again after that.
I was once driving the “sweep car” for my husband as he rode his bike along a country route. At one point I passed a couple of lady cyclists, and then further down the road a very messily squashed, widely spread out deer. I pulled up about 100 feet past the deer and waited for my husband to come along.
The lady cyclists arrived first. They weren’t paying attention to the road at all (not a smart thing to do if you ride a road bike) and they were jabbering away to each other nonstop. They were right in the midst of the far-flung deer detritus before they noticed it at all, and I suppressed laughter at their expressions of horror when they discovered they were coating their tires with emulsified doe.
Then after a few minutes, my husband came along as well. He, however, spotted the carcass at a great distance and of course avoided it easily.
I suppose I shouldn’t have laughed, but really, the deer carcass was quite large and you’d have to be pretty clueless to not see it.