helping wildlife – Ryann O'Carroll

How Roads Impact Wildlife – Raccoons in Our Neighborhoods

rocarroll Wildlife June 10, 2020June 10, 2020environmental issues, helping wildlife, humanized landscapes, impacts to wildlife, raccoons, road ecology, roads, wildlife 0 Comment

It’s the end to a wonderful day. You just finished cleaning up from a delicious dinner and start getting ready to take the trash from the day outside. As you walk outside to your trash barrel, you notice a pair of eyes peering out from inside the barrel. Pausing, you slowly grab your phone to turn the flashlight on, only to be met with a bandit: a raccoon! Raccoons are known as trash pandas or bandits, sneaking into people’s yards and going through their trash, only to disappear into the night. What people are not aware of is that we are attracting raccoons right into our suburban and urbanized areas. How you might ask? Read on to find out why!

Image of a raccoon standing on a tree stump.

Why Raccoons are in our Humanized Landscapes

Raccoons are very smart and intelligent creatures, seeming to be increasing in their abundance within urbanized landscapes; the question to ask is why? Why are these creatures becoming established in our urban landscapes rather than hiding in the forest where they are from? The answer to this question is one that has been discussed among wildlife biologists for years, and the reason seems to be that humans are unintentionally participating in the education of raccoons. Over the past 80 or so years, raccoons have made this astonishing surge in their populations, having their highest densities within suburban areas and slowly increasing in cities. Raccoons have well-adjusted to living with and among human beings, and this has what’s resulted in raccoons increasing domination of our humanized landscapes.

How This Issue was Established

Researching this issue lead me to Suzanne MacDonald, a biologist and psychologist from York University located in Toronto, Canada. She has been researching this issue and her work suggests that raccoons living in cities may actually be smarter than rural raccoons due to them forced to navigate man-made obstacles, such as roads. Using GPS collars to track raccoons, MacDonald found that these raccoons started to avoid major roads that crossed, almost suggesting raccoons have learned how to avoid cars. From this, it seems humans have inadvertently created a mini classroom within our cities for raccoons to learn from and become “perfect urban warriors” within human landscapes. But the question still remains, how do these creatures navigate their way into our human landscapes?

Crossing the Divide

Raccoons typically live in forested habitats that are heavily wooded with access to many trees, water, and vegetation. They make dens out of hollowed out trees or abandoned burrows made from other animals. When they search for food, they can travel up to 18 miles per day while foraging. However, over the past several decades, we’ve seen these creatures make there ways into our humanized landscapes and become successful at living quite efficiently within cities and the suburbs. The question still remains, how did raccoons make there way into these landscapes, away from their natural habitats? The answer to this question is roads; have you ever been driving down a road and noticed two glowing eyes peering out from a storm drain? More than likely, this pair of eyes belongs to a raccoon, as they use storm drains as a safety underground tunnel before crossing a road from one side to the other. Storm drains, also called culverts, were originally created for channel streams to pass under roadways. Now our wildlife creatures have found a safe and useful way to cross roads, without interacting with the traffic or cars up above. If these culverts or storm drain systems were set up on each and every road ever made, then animals would have a safe and efficient way of crossing our man-made obstacles without the repercussions of things such as mortality or vehicle collisions.

Family of raccoons in a storm drain on a roadway.

An example of this was seen on a highway in Maryland, where a researcher noticed raccoons using the storm drains for coverage and wanted to investigate why. Low and behold, other species such as reptiles and small mammals also use these storm drains to cross under roads as well, with a study being conducted showing 57 species of wildlife using all 265 culverts in Maryland. From this, road ecology researchers can now understand how drainage structures can be formed to allow for channel streams to pass under roads as well as wildlife; this will in turn help to decrease the amount of roadkill we see on out highways and roads, especially with raccoons.

Raccoons are intelligent creatures, finding ways to to stay safe and efficiently move from place to place through our drainage systems implemented in our roads. More roads need to have the features that drainage systems pose for our wildlife if we want to keep the amount of mortalities and wildlife-vehicle collisions at a decreasing rate. Wildlife are beginning to learn the ways of our man-made obstacles, and if we research how they are doing so, we can effectively ensure that the proper features of roads are in place so our wildlife are safe.

How Roads Impact Wildlife – Turtles Finding Nesting Sites Across Our Roads

rocarroll Wildlife May 30, 2020May 30, 2020helping wildlife, impacts to wildlife, road ecology, roads, turtles crossing roads 1 Comment

As warmer weather approaches for the summer season, it always seems to wake everyone and everything up in the world to a brighter and cheerier day. This is a time too where people want to be out and about in their cars with the windows rolled down, sunroof open, and music ready for cruisin’. Picture this as your driving around during this time of the season: As your driving down your street on your way to go on your errands, you notice on the side of the road a turtle who’s attempting to cross the street. You don’t think much of it, just another animal crossing a road, and pass by it. That’s when all of sudden you see in your rear-view mirror the car behind you run it over. This may be a morbid scene to think about, however, this was the first incident I saw with a wildlife animal that made me realize the dangers roads pose for them and how we need to act to help.

Reading Between the Lines

As you read the title of this post, you’re probably thinking why do turtles matter, how are they so susceptible to roads, etc. This post was inspired from a Facebook post I saw scrolling through my newsfeed about a turtle being purposefully run over, and made me realize the awareness that needs to be spread about how susceptible turtles are to roads, especially as the summer season approaches. The Facebook post set the scene of a woman about to get out of her car and help a turtle cross the road, however, as she gets out of her car, someone comes out of nowhere and swerves to hit the turtle before taking off. Hearing the crunch of it’s shell, the woman soon realizes that the turtle is probably either paralyzed or dead now. Turtles take between six to ten years to reach full maturity, and many cross roads to find nesting sites for their eggs. Anywhere between two to eleven eggs can be laid, but most lay five to six, with the chance of 90% becoming susceptible to predators when they are eggs, and hatchlings even more so.

Importance of Recognition & Awareness

Turtles being hit by vehicles on a road is a very significant source of mortality for this species, mainly due to most turtles being hit are pregnant females looking for a nesting site. Turtles are even removed from the wild, meaning there’s an even more reduced chance for the species to successfully reproduce due to reducing the ability of the population to maintain itself in the wild. There needs to be more awareness from the human population when it comes to recognizing and seeing a wild animal on the road; turtles are very low to the ground when they are seen, and at times it can be difficult to see one when driving in a vehicle. However, when driving, be sure to take some time to scope out the area in front of you that your vehicle will be driving on next, especially the edges of the road; this may not stop the issue of turtles being hit, but it will help resolve this issue as people become more aware of the natural environment around their urbanized settings. If you see a turtle, you can either stop your car to make sure it crosses safely, or utilize yourself to ensure it crosses safely, too.

How to Help

Speaking for myself personally, I live in a rural area where there are a lot of forested areas filled with wildlife. Turtles are something I see often attempting to cross the road, especially as the weather gets warmer and the summer season approaches; this is when most turtle-vehicle collisions occur. When a turtle is seen in the road, there is one main thing that can be done to help save the turtle from being crushed under a vehicle: help it cross the road. This incident actually happened to me this week when I left my house to go on errands; I was driving on my road when I saw a turtle sun-basking in the middle of the road. This is what I did and usually do when I see a turtle in the road: I’ll park my car either on the side of the road or in front of the turtle (i.e., depends on the type of road I’m on and where the turtle is in relation to me and the road) with my hazards on to warn people something is going on. I’ll get out of my car and pick up the turtle by sandwiching it – basically performed just as it sounds, you place either hand on each side of the shell and encircle your thumbs under the bottom of the shell and the other four fingers on top of the shell – and then bringing it to whatever side of the road it was facing to go to. Usually if there’s a body of water nearby, such as a pond, river, or stream, I’ll bring the turtle there as well. Though this technique may not ensure that the turtle is not hit by a car – it could just as easily decide to turn around and cross the road again – it does ensure that you helped a turtle in need by preventing it from getting hit by a vehicle as much as you could. People may think interfering with wildlife in this way is not appropriate, as we are told to stay away from wildlife and not interact. However, being someone who is very familiar with wildlife rehabilitation and management, I can say for certain that helping a turtle cross a road is something that will in turn help increase the turtle population in the long-run and make for less turtles to be harmed on our roads. Helping wildlife out when we see they are in danger or in need is just one thing we can do to protect them, especially to save a turtle from being hit by a vehicle.