Once seen, some things cannot be unseen. That happened to me when I was driving on the 101 in the evening near Gaviota.
The car ahead of me suddenly encountered a horrible scenario, and I watched it happen. A pack of coyotes ran out onto the road to cross it, just as the car rounded a bend and bore down on them with no room to slam on the breaks.
It happened so quickly. The critters were in a string across the road, and the driver had to decide instantaneously whether to swerve off the road and smash into a mountainside or take out at least one of the coyotes.
The driver chose survival and, in my estimation, did an admirable job of maneuvering the car so that only one of the coyotes was hit. I was right behind that driver, and, in my opinion, there were no other courses of action available.
That driver stopped and I also stopped on the side of the road. The coyote was thrown off the side of the road by the impact and was indeed dead. The other coyotes hung about for nearly a minute sniffing their pack mate and looking around before the leader determined there was nothing they could do for their dead companion and by staying longer the rest of the pack was in potential danger.
After a last look back at their pack member, they sadly and silently trotted away up a brushy ravine. I consoled the driver, and we checked the car for damage and found very little. We shook hands sadly and went on our separate ways. I’m sure that memory continues to haunt her as it does me.
I wish we could make safe critter crossings under our roadways. I’d like to see them on our local roads, too, because I see way too many dead skunks, possums, raccoons and other critters on our roads and city streets. I care about critters, like most of you do.
We can’t very well decide to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make critter crossings every hundred yards, which is probably what it would take to even make a substantial dent in the problem. But I do wish we could do something constructive to help critters coexist more safely with us as neighbors.
Creating such places would be a trade-off at best because we would also be creating opportunity hotspots for predation, where hungry critters can wait for target critters to emerge. I understand the natural order well enough to know that even if we could come up with enough money to do something, figuring out how to engineer such places – considering both traffic and predators – would be a daunting task. But I’ve seen enough roadkill to make me sincerely wish for a solution.
