Environment – Deadly roads for nature

In Silverdale and Millwater, some pilgrim geese had a transport problem. The big wandering geese naturally have no road sense, and cars sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally, run them down. That can be bad for a car, but it’s definitely bad for the geese. Just recently, good people managed to re-home 43 of them, away from road hazards and they’ll live happily ever after in a big safe pond.

There’s debate in the area about who came first, the geese or the subdivision. But even in more rural communities, the same problems persist. A concerned local on a windy dead-end road asked on Facebook if people could please slow down. She’d seen a dead adult and two pukeko chicks and a dead kotare, or kingfisher, on one day. Her polite request got all the vitriol FB pages are known for, as well as other myths: ‘pukeko aren’t native’ (they are, just not endemic), ‘pukeko are a pest, you’re allowed to just kill pukeko’, ‘pukeko lives don’t matter’.

As well as being wrong, all that missed the point. Roads cut through animal habitat and a bit less haste means we can all co-exist.

Roadkill is on my mind too, besides those charming geese toddling along the motorway. Every day when I ride my bike, I avoid a scattering of dead and sometimes dying animals, and contemplate the lives they had, their families, the ecosystems cut to death by the road I’m on.

So far this year on my ride around my rural route, I’ve counted over 25 dead pukeko, a kingfisher, two pheasants and a ring-necked dove. There were three chaffinches, four sparrows, silver eyes, a magpie and a mynah. There were also a dozen rabbits, 10 possums and five hedgehogs. We might say their lives didn’t matter, in the scheme of things, but they mattered a lot to them. Endemic, native and introduced animals are killed without distinction.

There are researchers who look into the scale of roadkill and its ecological impacts. And there are artists like Viivi Häkkinen, Marian Drew and many others who honour roadkill animals. They make bowers for the animals, garlands and little shrines, so that the collateral damage of our transport systems don’t go ignored. They remind the world these animals aren’t objects, but lives.

I don’t make bowers or garlands for roadkill. But if it’s not too squelchy I move it aside, lest a feeding hawk is turned into roadkill, too. Sometimes I just move the carcass to avoid the animal the indignity of turning to shapeless mulch. Also to avoid riding my bike over it in the future.

But it’s clear to me, as it is to the geese, the pukeko and the legion of disappearing species and individuals, that high speed cars on ubiquitous roadways are incompatible with nature. It’s impossible for local populations to withstand that sort of attrition. As our area ‘develops’, where does nature go? Under the wheels of our cars.