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Road Kill Gourmet

By Michael Engelhard

Found in: | Wildlife |

Returning late from outings in the Needles district of Canyonlands National Park, I often encounter mule deer along Highway 191. They stand paralyzed in the bright arc the car's headlights cut from darkness, eyes aglow like Halloween gadgets. My worst fear is that one of those dusky specters could make up its mind to cross the road, while we're going 60 miles an hour. During the day, I see the remains of deer that did follow this unfortunate impulse. Shredded, they bleed in the ditch, with limbs bent at awkward angles, or quietly rot on highway shoulders, haggled over by ravens.

My friend and former roommate Bart is a latter-day mountain man. He works for Outward Bound and sometimes at an outdoors survival school near Escalante. He also hates waste, and salvages dead deer to feed his family. Like other aficionados, Bart became a road kill gourmet by default. As the founder of a school for primitive skills, he needed furs, hides, feathers, antlers, and sinew in order to teach tanning, arrow fletching or tool hafting. Highways seemed like the best places to procure these materials. Bart started by calling the Colorado DOT for recent deer kills, and there were usually a few in the Boulder vicinity. Skinning the carcasses, Bart found that much of the meat was still good. A roster of Bart's "trophies" reads like a Who's Who of southwestern wildlife. My friend admits to having boiled and eaten a Great Horned owl once. "I ran it over and felt I had to do something with it," he says. But generally, he sets aside the "exotics" - coyote, skunk, fox, beaver, otter, badger and rattlers - to transform them into hatbands, mittens or arrow quivers.

While Bart dodges traffic to avoid suffering his dinner's fate, he does well to remember federal and state laws. It is illegal, for example, to collect certain animals, from the road or elsewhere. Only Native Americans with a religious permit are allowed to possess an eagle feather. The state of Utah issues a permit each time an individual wants to retrieve a killed animal. And whereas motorists in Arizona are entitled to keep meat from a deer they have hit, the same act can land you in prison in Oregon.

Bart may strike some people as eccentric or a throwback to fur rendezvous times; but more and more Americans are discovering the potential of road kill. Taxidermists fix flattened pelts for natural history museum exhibits. A gallery owner in South Dakota plucks porcupine quills to fashion into jewelry. A New Mexico sculptress and tattoo artist assembles bones into motorcycles or "Gnarleys." An Arizona state biologist prepares skulls and other skeletal parts to be used as educational kits in schools. Frozen corpses serve him as models for scientific illustrations; fresher meat ends up on the barbecue grill or feeding his boas and pythons.

Despite their entertainment value and utility, creative uses of road kill can hardly disguise the social and ecological costs incurred daily on U.S. highways. Aside from abetting habitat fragmentation, pollution, or noise, roads take a more direct and bloody toll on biodiversity. Vehicles kill hundreds of millions of animals every year. Snakes and amphibians - including many endangered species - take the brunt of this onslaught. Not even our National Parks are safe. On Yellowstone's roads alone, 1,559 large mammals died between 1989 and 2003. To wit, the boundary between victims and perpetrators becomes blurred. Two hundred people died last year in about 250,000 collisions with animals. The average repair of an automobile damaged by deer (or more specifically, by reckless driving) runs around $ 2,000.

Perhaps, like our fellow creatures, we humans are not hardwired for life in the fast lane.

A major tenet of sustainable living admonishes us not just to recycle but also to curb wastefulness in the first place. Unfortunately, a society obsessed with driving is unlikely to ever fully embrace measures that reduce wildlife mortality on its roads. Speed limits, better signage, fencing, or animal crosswalks all could prevent unnecessary deaths. Tight budgets and narrow minds, however, ensure that ecological attrition will continue. Short of all-out solutions, we can at least honor the casualties with a token gesture. Sharing the mangled flesh in a form of unholy communion, we acknowledge their sacrifice. So, let us show some respect. Let us neaten our highways a bit. Let us break the mold of culinary routine. To connoisseurs tired of French, Thai, Mexican, or even Denver Omelets, Bart recommends the chef's special: grille gopher in crankcase oil, with a side of creamed coyote - guaranteed to tickle the palate while sparing the wallet. (Do yourselves a favor though, and skip the muskrat mush.)

Bon app�tit!

Michael Engelhard is the author of Where the Rain Children Sleep, and commutes between Alaska and the Colorado Plateau.