The Changing Landscape of Eating Roadkill

The article was published in bioGraphic, an independent magazine about nature and conservativism.

It is a failure of vision to collide with a deer. When the wild world is moving and human drivers are racing home from work, the photoreceptive cells in our eyes are confused by twilight. Deer have wide-set eyes that give them a 300-degree field of vision, but their poor depth perception makes it hard for them to judge the speed of an oncoming F-150. Both species are poorly evolved for modernity.

The root cause of deer accidents is geographical. Our highways tend to follow river corridors, where gentle terrain makes for easy travel, and where plentiful water, browse, and shelter attracts deer. One of the best places in the Pacific Northwest to hit a deer is the Methow Valley. The Methow River and Highway 20 connect like snakes through the valley. There are between 8,000 and 12,000 mule deer and about 2,000 white-tailed deer in this area. Between river and hayfields, apple orchards and bitterbrush stands, they frequently lead them over the road. State transportation workers removed deer carcasses from Highway 20 over a five year period. For every deer found by the shoulder, several more mortally wounded ones are killed.

I arrived at the Methow one day in March. There were bands of muleys on the hills, ghosts against a quilt of white snow and dun grass. There were brake lights in front of me. Bald eagles and ravens are in the pines.

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I came to the Methow to follow someone else. In 2016 Washington legalized the harvest of road-killed deer and elk carcasses, and what used to be a secret hobby of a few local criminals has become commonplace. The Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife Enforcement Officer said that before the law was changed, you would see dead deer on the highway. In the last couple of weeks, I can only remember two. They get taken up quickly.

The Methow is paradigmatic in this respect. Roadkill rates in North America are on the rise as more and more people move around. Law and custom forbade eating this meat once. Many rural Americans have come to rely on it for sustenance due to the number of states that allow it. The senselessness of vehicular death converted by oven or skillet into a sort of gustatory accountability may be a form of redemption. The stigma is still there. One Methow salvager told me that the venison came off the highway. Dad was a bit upset.

A driver in the United States will hit a deer. Between one and two million big mammals are hit by cars every year. In September 2020, a motorcyclist died after hitting a deer on Highway 20 and crashing through a barbed-wire fence.

It's not uncommon for vehicles and deer to collide. The roadkill surveys in the U.S. were almost completely devoid of deer until the late 19th century. The Methow was the same as every other one. Scott Fitkin is a district biologist for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. The ones that were found were killed.

Deer rebounded after hunting restrictions and forest management changes. The Methow had 30,000 inhabitants by the early '80s. Two herds have very different life histories, as the population grew. White-tailed deer and muleys spent the entire year in the valley. The majority of the mule-deer herd trekked into the mountains each spring and summer to take care of their young buds and grasses. Deer that are migratory learn their routes from their mothers and are very loyal to their ancestral pathways. One radio-collared doe barely budged from her summer pasture a few years ago.

The Methow's mule deer stopped their annual migration. Around two-thirds of the deer that were collared stayed in the valley for the entire year. Fitkin thinks people are to blame. There are ornamental shrubs, fruit trees, hayfields, and irrigation canals in the Methow.

More resident muleys means more deer crossing Highway 20 which pierces the Methow's heart. It is not clear whether the herds will be threatened by collision. According to Fitkin, there are other causes of death that claim more ungulates. He pointed out that vehicles dole out death differently. Cars are equal-opportunity killers. In Canada and Poland, researchers found that roadkilled songbirds were just as healthy as those killed by sparrowhawk. Cars and trucks may kill the animals that are most important to the herd, which is troubling in the Methow. In the Methow, deer are being affected by fire and dry weather. If the annual growth rate of your population is hanging around the break-even point, it could be enough to put it into the negative column.

Cars are bad for the deer population in the Methow. Lay people don't pay much attention to the welfare of specific animals. Everyone in the Methow has a story about seeing a deer in distress. Betsy, a sheep rancher who lives near a roadkill hotspot that she calls "slaughter alley," told me that she often finds drivers parked near her property in a state of shock. They sometimes knock on the door and ask to use the phone. They would like to use a gun. Skip Smith usually performs the mercy-killing herself or sends her husband to do it.

The deer's death obviously outweighs any metaphorical one. Let's just say it's really sad.

She said that she has a friend who will pick up the victims if there is a saving grace. He will come get it when the freezer is empty. Dead deer are usually unclaimed in the Methow.

After arriving in the Methow, I set out at first light with a local photographer in hopes of recovering a carcass. It was a great roadkill season because migratory deer hadn't yet left the valley for their summer range, and sub-freezing overnight temperatures would help preserve the meat of any unlucky enough to fall to a car. We went past cottonwood galleries and brittle hayfields. Many of the trails leading to the road's edge were beaten by hooves. On the south-facing slopes, the labyrinthine paths were particularly dense.

Most of the meat we found was for non-humans. The snowbanks along Highway 20 had just begun to melt, releasing the deer they had killed over the winter. The ravens ripped at glassy eyes and nose. We stopped at at least two, four, and a half-dozen deer. One doe, killed within the last couple of days, was borderline, her flesh cold and firm to the touch. Bell advised against it.

One deer was already in its bucket when a highway maintenance worker rolled up in a front end loader. He was asked where he would dump the carcass. He said he felt like wherever he wanted to. Bell showed me a popular dumpsite, a steep embankment filled with skulls and buffalo bones. A recent Sunday morning, the worker said, he helped a mother and two kids load a pair of deer into their minivan. The family decided to go home to butcher after the clock ran out.

The harvest of roadkill in the Methow is pervasive. If it wasn't dangerous, salvage used to be considered a class of thing. Dave Barry commented on the consumption of squirrel in the Miami Herald, saying that a person who eats road kill rodents deserves to die. New Jersey residents can claim deer, moose, bison, and turkeys. West Virginia is a comparative free-for-all where anything can be found.

A free source of organic, high quality meat is available to communities that share the land with wildlife. Thousands of moose were given to poor, elderly, disabled, and Native households in the 49th state. Laurie Speakman, a long time Federation driver known locally as Laurie, said, "They were like, 'We just put our last meal on the table, we didn't know what we were going to do.'" The Federation closed in 2020 due to budgetary issues. Speakman said that he was able to sleep again. People don't like it very much.

Affirmative has its critics. The Humane Society frets that legalization makes drivers more likely to run down animals. There are no documented cases of roadkill-to-human transmission in the scientific literature. According to an attorney, serving roadkill in food banks implies that poor people don't deserve the same food safety standards as rich people. It's possible that a free-range venison steak is healthier than a hormone-pumped hamburger raised in a feed lot.

It's supporters acknowledge that road kill creates regulatory headaches. The enforcement officer for the Washington wildlife department, who is pro-salvage, told me that legalization made the job more complicated. If we found deer parts in the woods in February, we would say, "gee whiz, I don't think a cougar boned out that deer with a knife" It would have been obvious that's been done. We don't know Day is certain that illegal deer are laundered by hunters.

It can be difficult to comprehend roadkill's scale. States generally require harvesters to report their finds; together, these submissions comprise a vast citizen-science database that transportation departments could use to identify collision hotspot and install wildlife bridges and underpasses that allow animals to safely cross highways Not every harvester fills out the required forms Fitkin said he used to get reports from highway maintenance staff or volunteers who picked up dead deer and shipped them to tribal food banks. He said that the data is no longer meaningful because of the law. I don't have a good idea of what's happening. Rather than revealing the extent of roadkill, salvaged may hide it, sanitizing our roadsides and concealing a biological crisis.

Over the past 50 years, the Methow has changed dramatically and roads have been an important part of it. The somnolent valley was connected to Seattle and OLYMPIA by Highway 20 in 1972. The Methow became a weekend destination for urbanites who lacked deer-awareness. One summer, when he saw a smashed Mercedes-Benz at a gas station, Jim Mountjoy realized the valley was changing. The owner of the car admitted that he hit a deer near the town of Pateros and then hit another one 20 miles down the road. Mountjoy chuckled and said that he hadn't learned anything from the first deer.

As recently as 2016 most stretches of Highway 20 were traveled by only a few thousand cars per day due to the Methow's remoteness. There was a traffic surge in 2020 as Seattleites fled the city for rural refuges where they could live closer to nature. On one day in October, the Forest Service counted 732 cars. Mountjoy said there was no more off- season.

It's possible that the increase in visitors could mean more deer accidents. Research suggests that the wall of cars deters deer from crossing highways when traffic is high, and that herds stop moving altogether when traffic is low. Mass starvation has caused deer and other ungulates to die. It is perversely encouraging that the Methow's herds are still able to access their seasonal habitats despite their chronic collisions.

Getting deer to cross the highway in the Methow is more important as cars grow in the area. Washington's transportation department hasn't tried a lot of solutions in the valley. The changeable CAUTION sign was put up by Mountjoy 20 years ago. The body count between January and March was 142 and the costs had already reached more than $300,000. Most drivers ignore deer signs and even Mountjoy isn't sure what his efforts have done. He said that he was not sure if it worked or not.

In places with catastrophic roadkill, transportation agencies have installed wildlife crossings, along with miles of roadside fencing. After Wyoming built six underpasses along a muley migration corridor, they paid for themselves in five years. Washington is one of the states where transportation departments and environmental organizations are jumping on the crossing bandwagon. Roadkill plummeted after a bridge was renovated on Highway 97 just east of the Methow to allow deer, coyotes, and other animals to pass. The organization's executive director said that the issue has gone from being baiting right-wing backlash to one where these things are embraced.

The Methow is a topic of debate. Scott Fitkin pointed out that the Methow's resident deer don't follow predictable pathways; instead, they wander across Highway 20 willy-nilly. The entire highway corridor would have to be fenced. It would be very difficult to arrange. The Methow's roadkill isn't random. In 2020, researchers at Washington State University analyzed the valley and found that carcasses were disproportionately concentrated inZone 5. The scientists said that there are various sites along its length where over- and underpasses could be engineered. Zone 5 is the place to begin if the Methow wants to solve its roadkill problem.

The valley's residents can't do anything else until then. I visited a deer harvester named Nils Knudsen. Knudsen started his salvaged career after his wife hit a deer on Highway 20. They decided to eat the deer to make them feel better. The moose hunter gave them a crash course in butchery. They had not eaten meat in a long time.

It wouldn't be the final one. Over the years, roadkill has become a reliable source of calories for the Knudsen's. He said he gave it the doctor's patdown. The guts and stomach might be rolling around if you open the animal. Knudsen looks through the fur for signs of bruise. One deer struck broadside may have one undamaged flank, and another may have rupturing organs. A hundred pounds of meat doesn't last long under the August sun. Knudsen said he wouldn't bother salvaging a deer in the summer unless he saw the crash.

The Knudsen's ethos of self-sufficiency and localism is reflected in the roadkill harvest. The property was mostly buried in the snow. The chickens they bred for their sky-blue eggs were used in the building of the Carport. They used to get dinner from their vegetable patch and the highway. Knudsen likes to use venison in bigo. They bury what they don't eat in the garden. Things seem to grow well after a couple years.

Humans are scavengers. We used the kills of large cats before hunting. We knelt to the carcasses of zebras after lions ate their fill. Knudsen had slipped back into an ancient role when he became a rescuer. A deer was hit in front of Knudsen's house and died in the woods. The body was protected from the cold by a coverlet of snow. Knudsen was able to carve out a few cuts for the stewpot after he found the neck meat and backstraps still good. A hominid and a felid, uneasily sharing carrion once more, were replanted by the road when he returned after a week.

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