SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Checking on her furry patient, animal care manager Sandra Foreman at the Wildlife Care Association in Sacramento said when it was first brought in, she was unsure it would survive.
“Her whole face was completely submerged in blood,” Foreman said. “She was not able to breathe. She came in, in a pretty critical state, and I knew she wasn’t going to eat for a few days.”
The injuries the female possum sustained resulted from being hit by a car.
“She didn’t look like a great case,” Foreman said. “But at the same time, we have dealt with these animals getting hit by cars so frequently that I knew when I first didn’t feel any type of breaks [in her bones], I wanted to give her a chance to see if she can work herself out of these types of injuries.”
This possum was lucky, but many animals hit by cars often aren’t. As unfortunate as roadkill is, Fraser Shilling, director of the Road Ecology Center at UC Davis, said they can provide important data.
“It’s really critical because you never know when you’re going to encounter it [roadkill],” Shilling said. “And there are all different kinds of species and wildlife, and every little piece of information helps us make decisions about where roadkill’s occurring and what we can do about it.”
Fraser’s latest report pulls from law enforcement and public submitted roadkill data. It indicates mule deer and coyote populations are declining.
“We’re seeing a decline in the number of roadkill [deer and coyote], which indicates a decline in the population,” he said.
As far as a reason for the decline,“There’s a lot of possible causes,” Shilling said. “Obviously a lot of animals get hit by cars on roads, so that could be the cause.”
From the data he collected and confirmed on mule deer, Shilling said there were around 4,000 deer hit in 2022, down from 7,000 about 8 years ago.
Shilling said that although the number being hit and killed is much likely higher as the insurance industry in California reports around 22,000 insurance claims a year involving deer.
“That’s kind of our minimum [22,000],” he said. “Because not everybody who hits a deer makes a claim, and so we can guess that it’s going to be several times higher than that. Maybe up to 40 or 80,000 a year.”
Shilling also said his report shows more bears and mountain lions are being hit.
“If the deer population is going down, then mountain lions have to move around a whole lot more to find those deer,” Shilling said. “And it makes sense that they’re going to get hit on roads more often.”
As far as solutions go, Shilling said fencing along roads is the best option to save animal and human lives.
A mile of fence on a highway cost around a $100,000 per mile, he said, and since you need to fence both sides of the road, it would come to $200,000 per stretch of mile.
The costs may sound high, but Shilling said those costs pale in comparison to the costs of a collision.
“An average crash where nobody is injured is about $15,000 to $20,000 with a deer,” Shilling said. “If you have somebody injured or somebody dies, that [cost] exponentially increases into the hundreds of thousands. So, just preventing one major injury or crash with fencing, that fencing immediately pays for itself.”
Finding solutions to sustain a healthy wildlife population is certainly a good thing, Foreman said, as animals such as possums are very important to the ecosystem.
“They take care of a lot of pests, rats, mice, cockroaches,” she said.
The possum, Foreman said, is likely to be a survivor with a bit more care and will be released to continue its good work in the ecosystem.
Anyone from the public can report a road kill sighting by following the prompts and uploading a picture to the California Roadkill Observation System.