It’s impossible to get “practice” for something that’s your first encounter and nobody ever taught you about. For many animals who become roadkill, their first time seeing an automobile was their last time seeing an automobile. There was no 2nd chance to learn from the 1st encounter.
Not long ago, I was driving at a steady 40MPH on a rural road, when a deer dashed out from the forest about 20 feet away. It didn’t run in front of my car, it ran into the SIDE of my car, which was not accelerating. Since deer can’t dash thru a forest, it must have been waiting for a car to come along (there was no other traffic at all), then suddenly accelerated, not walked, directly into my car.
Needless to say, the deer did not survive. My car did, with considerable body damage.
This is quite different from a deer innocently wandering into a roadway and being surprised by a car. It seemed the deer was waiting and targeted the car with precision. Is this merely stupidity?
Believe me, nothing comes on to my back deck and carries away a 6 or 7 pound opossum without the kids (dogs) going nuts. And the ones she definitely DOES kill stay put.
When that happened to me, the deer that ran into the side of my truck was following a group that had crossed safely in front of me. I started slowing when I saw the first 4 of them cross, expecting a straggler was possible. Turns out it was more than possible; it was a certainty. Bang! I never saw him coming. Trashed one rear quarter panel of a full-sized truck & ran off.
But I did get my ounce of flesh. And hair. And skin. Which was embedded between a wheel and tire. That had to hurt when it got ripped off that idjit deer.
I don’t know that it’s stupidity, but motor vehicles are simply not something their brain seems to process. They’re out doing their deerly thing in the forest and as far as they can tell, with no warning suddenly they were smitten in an inexplicable way for an inexplicable reason by some jealous god.
Good to know. We’ve certainly had threads on “Why don’t you ever see dead bodies of small animals in the woods?” Scavengers & predators are both pretty efficient.
We have a fenced back yard and two exterior video cameras covering most of it, including our back deck. The opossums usually end up on the back deck because she wants to bring them through the dog door. (It’s a race to see if we can get the dog door shut when we spot her dragging a victim in from the trees.) Because of this, most of the temporarily unmoving marsupials end up right outside our door on the deck. With a bit of coaxing, the kids come inside without their prizes. We go read a comic book, come back, and the marsupial has arisen! No 3 days required.
The miracle of re-animation. A gift that keeps on giving.
How would you know if it did? You only encounter the animals that haven’t learned.
There is a clear bias here, both among posters and observers in situ: We see the animals that haven’t adapted. Not all the individuals that have.
We need a reliable source where we get statistics about # of animals crossing x miles of roads of Y width and correlate fatalities over time.
Also: evolution works a lot faster than most people think. Recent examples are African elephants and tusk sizes.
So far, this thread skews heavily towards IMHO, not FQ.
But the first, untaught encounter is excellent practice in itself, to be used the next time around.
Maybe. If the animal sits by the roadside for whatever natural reason while a car happens to go by, does the animal even have the opportunity to learn that it avoided a life-threatening collision? Or is the animal simply oblivious?
Maybe it darts across the road & the car maneuvers or slows a bit to avoid it. Is that a learning opportunity or is the animal oblivious?
It takes a certain amount of imagination to look at a situation and say to yourself: “If I’d been standing there, not here, I’d just have been smashed.” It also takes understanding that in a critter/car collision, the critter is much less durable than the car. I don’t know what the animal psychologists say about animal’ ‘ability to imagine counterfactuals, but I’ bet it’s pretty limited in even the smartest of animals. And the ones we roadkill en masse are generally not the smartest of species.
I’ll suggest that the minimum criteria for a learning opportunity is the animal forms the intent to cross (or enter) the road, starts to do just that, is scared by the onrushing car, and changes its plan / trajectory in response to the fear, and is uninjured by the close encounter. IMO that’s the least severe situation that affords the opportunity for an aversive stimulus.
The next worse outcome is the animal is just brushed by the car sustaining no injury except maybe a bit of lost fur or skin. Can happen, but it’s a real narrow window of opportunity.
Up from there is fatally injured. There are not that many injuries an unassisted wild animal can recover from. Either they die promptly from their wounds, or they die slowly from inability to walk or feed or hunt competitively. Or they’re attacked by a predator that in their damaged / weakened condition they can no longer successfully escape from.
OTOH, every time the animal crosses a road and there are no cars close enough to be dangeours or even close enough to be alarming, it learns that roads are just as safe as forests are. Which is unhelpful learning.
Which is also why we harp at kids to “look both ways” every damn time, over and over until it finally sinks in. Kids can run into the street a lot of times without incident, and if we relied upon just their own experience to teach them, we’d lose a lot more children. Which children are critters inherently much more able to learn from experience than your typical forest or woodland creature.
I don’t know if the deer in my residential neighborhood actually stop and look for cars before crossing but they do stop and listen? Granted the speed limit is 25-30mph and at dusk can be seen in the front yards of the neighborhood so have become accustomed to cars and people. They will come up to the curb, stop for a moment, but don’t turn their heads like they are looking, then cross if no cars are moving nearby. A car coming 1/2 block away they will wait for it to pass.
I’ve had at least a dozen squirrels race across the road in front of me, get clear just in time, and then reverse direction and end up under the wheels. I think it’s either instinct or learned behavior to avoid hawks and other predators. A jink just as the predator almost gets them must have a decent chance of success. An while it doesn’t work with cars, it isn’t a good behavior to lose unless cars outnumber predators.
That’s a really good point. If cautiously stopping to study traffic maps to cautiously stopping to study a threat from an active predator, it might not be a survival trait in the broader sense.
Elephants with large tusks are poached?
A larger percentage of elephants are born that do not develop tusks at all. Early studies suggest that elephants without tusks are poached less often than elephant with tusks.
“When you don’t get what you want, you get experience.”
Birds seem to have the mostly figured out. In they don’t stand in the middle of the road with a car coming at them. But that is probably just natural instinct to RUN/FLY AWAY.
They have more options for escaping than non flying animals - I imagine ‘take off quickly’ is a fairly good general purpose strategy for evasion of an unassessed threat.
Larger birds, pheasants in particular I am thinking of, are especially terrible at evading cars - they tend to try to run away along the road, in front of where the car is going. If they manage to get airborne, they fly in a straight line away from the car and then land again on the road a little further along; repeat a couple of times, then they often panic and get hit.
Odd, because with short sturdy wings, pheasants are VTOL.
I guess I’m talking about various species of crow type birds.
As mentioned upthread in the context of land animals, the best way to run away from a predator is straight away from them so they’re dead astern from you. Any other course invites the predator to cut the corner and gain on you more easily. Critters don’t know that cars are constrained to stay on the roadway.
Around here we have lots of shorebirds that are quite used to humans. Anything from tiny sandpipers to 3 foot-tall cranes. It is funny as you’re walking along the water’s edge and come up on one also standing / walking / hunting at water’s edge. They’ll take off, fly 20 feet further in front of you and land again right at the water’s edge. Lather rinse repeat. About the 3rd or 4th time you’ll see them sort of shrug, say “screw it”, then take off, climb a bunch and fly a couple hundred feet in another direction, often behind you.
I interpret that as them trying to be lazy/efficient the first couple of times before deciding you’re a relentless pursuer they need to seriously avoid. Flying is hard work best avoided unless absolutely necessary.