Dead Skunk In the Middle Of The Road

Well not exactly, as the entire trip never produced one dead skunk.  However, there were all kinds of dead animals and it was interesting to see how each state or county (not sure which) handled the cleaning up of said dead animals.

After seeing all of that I came up with a great idea.  I thought it would be interesting to see how many of each type are hit in each state.  So, I tried to convince Pat to keep a log of each type of animal as we proceeded down the road but for some reason she refused.

I know night time is prime time to hit animals and for that I can be fairly certain I wont be hitting any, unless it is late to get off the road in the morning or happens to be laying in my path and I cant avoid it.  While there were no skunks, there were lots of dead deer in the middle of the road, particularly in Ohio so that was the worst.
In fact I suspect there is no government agency in Ohio responsible for clearing up carcasses as the roadways are littered with them.  Some are clearly from the night before, while others look like they have been laying there for days or weeks.  I have no idea how long it takes to turn a 100 pound deer into what looks like a fur coat laying on the road, but there were a lot of them.

You would think Kentucky, Illinois and Missouri would have a fair number of animals hit but there was not much evidence of it if there are.  The few we did see had been there a while so likely there are not that many in general and they leave them unless they are on the roadway.

The absolute best state for lack of any evidence was Oklahoma.  At first it was so noticeable I thought perhaps there were no wild animals left in Oklahoma but throughout the entire length I did eventually see one Possum and one Coyote about a mile apart.  Possible coincidence.  The morning we departed from our overnight in Oklahoma we came across an Oklahoma DOT truck with a large trailer on the back with - you guessed it - all the road kill from the night before.  So they obviously want to keep their highways clean and have dedicated crews to pick them up.  Oklahoma does a good job so Ohio needs to take some notes.

Texas, New Mexico and Arizona dont appear to have any roadside cleanup personnel as there are dead animals on the side of the road, some recent and some quite old - but nothing bigger than a small deer or coyote.  In the case of these three states, I would think the lack of many animals would be more indicative of the lack of animals in general.

Of course this was one trip through one section of each state so not indicative at all of what is out there, but I found it interesting how each state managed wildlife.