Roadside Counts

I just finished helping out Shane on the Kestrel boxes that we have along the interstate.

The activity was replacing the nesting material, clean out the old, put in new, and also note if there was Kestrel nesting activity.

While that was going on, I also decided to see what else I could learn with the basic random stops that would be done. There was a lot of trash along the road first off, and I thought about counting items of trash, but that number would have gone way too high.

At first I decided to count the dear carcasses that I saw in say a 50 yard stretch (25 yards each way of the sign). Then I decided to count if beer cans were also in that 50 yard spot. Each spot only covered one side of the highway, and ignored the middle section which doubtlessly had some stuff in it too.

The results were interesting.

Deer

We had 16 Kestrel boxes up, that made 16 stops. There were dead deer carcasses at 4 of those spots. Two of the spots had 2 dead deer. Two or three carcasses might have been left over bones from last year, so we have a range here.

If we count all 6 deer, that’s 422 dead dear in a year along the 15 miles of interstate highway. If you only figure 3 of the deer were “fresh” enough to be from mid fall then the figure drops to 211 dead deer along that 15 mile stretch of road.

If you also figure that summer killed deer were basically scattered by scavengers and disappeared, then the numbers could be still higher.

Further still, the road crews do pick up some deer for disposal. So the accuracy of the interstate deer kill count might be subject to lots of error, but I think it’s bigger than anybody would guess.