Road carnage

[pauline]

Have you noticed that this year is very bad for the amount of wildlife killed on the roads. From Suffolk to Hertfordshire I saw 2 deer, 2 badgers, 3 foxes (they were quite small), several pheasants and 1 squirrell. My country road, although very narrow has a 60mph limit and the wildlife pays a heavy toll. Why won't they slow down for these lovely creatures. So sad.

[Janet Swan]

Yes, Pauline, it is just heartbreaking to see wildlife killed by car drivers. Even a squashed hedgehog upsets me, particularly near my home as I encourage them to visit my garden. I've a horrible thought that some people do it deliberately ...

Janet

[gloria townsin]

There's a main road that goes up to Norfolk, not sure what number it is as I haven't travelled it for years, there are so many pheasants laying by the side of the road it makes you feel quite sick. I know they are silly birds but non-the-less.

[Gill Bilcliffe]

The Norfolk road you mention Gloria is the A11. It is dreadful travelling on this road early in the morning and witnessing the amount of dead birds & mammals lying along and on the road. The other week we were travelling home along the A11 and a Muntjac deer was grazing on the grass verge near Thetford. He looked very vulnerable as there was so much traffic using the road. We hoped he was safe.

Hello Pauline & welcome to the forum. I live up the road from you in Norwich.

[gloria townsin]

Gill I did wonder if it was the A11 as I'm sure we started off on the M11. We were going to see a pony, what else?, in our pony seeking days. By the time we got there I felt really sick at the sight of so many dead birds.

[Kath Mulligan]

We had a similar experience when we went over to Anglesey a few weeks ago. All along the A55 trunk road through North Wales from Conwy to Bangor the roadside verges and even the central reservation was littered with dead pheasants. It was very distressing.

Driving down to Ashford-in-the-Water on Thursday for my brother's wedding, we went via the back roads rather than the main A6 and saw one dead fox, a badger and several rabbits which put a bit of a damper on an otherwise very happy day.

But on a much more cheerful note, the girls and I were down in the Goyt Valley this afternoon and I sat for ages watching both swallows and swifts swooping down over the reservoir, presumably catching flies and midges, of which there were plenty!! There was also a bit of a "domestic" going on between a group of Canada Geese - much honking, snapping of beaks and pecking at feathers going on for a while!

Kath

[jane jackson]

That last bit sounded much better Kath, watching the birds at the reservoir. I saw a dead hedgehog the other day on the road but haven't seen many dead animals or birds around here. There was a particularly bad stretch of road near us on Exmoor where there were absolutely loads of pheasants meandering around in the road and lots of them got killed but they certainly brought it upon themselves as they seemed to suddenly fly up and crash into the windscreen.

We used to hear about the fallow deer in Ashridge in Herts being injured and killed on the roads when we lived there but luckily I never came across any. A lot of it happened at night so they put up posts along the edge of the road with a reflective device on them a bit like cats eyes so that the cars' headlights lit them up in the hope of warning/frightening the deer into not crossing the road.