Road Kill
Maybe it’s something I’ll have to get used too.
Boston the biggest animals you’d find are rodents like squirrels. But this hog even without the back legs looks to be bigger than Oatie! The vultures were working at their meal hard though - by sundown I’m sure that won’t be the case.
Yeah, you'll have to get used to it, sadly.
Living in Tampa Bay, I even wrote poems about it, because it was so depressing constantly seeing dead animals on the road, of all sizes.
But it wasn't until I moved to Tennessee that I started seeing far larger animals dead by the road. I haven't seen any hogs as road kill, but I have seen a number of deer, one f which had been ripped in half by the car or truck that hit it.
The largest and most surprising I've seen, to date, was a large male cougar off the shoulder on eastbound I-40, between Nashville and Lebanon.
Considering that Eastern Cougars were recently listed as "extinct," which having worked with wildlife in the field, I consider a complete fallacy, I was surprised that the big guy never even made the news, or the local "sightings" websites.
Guess they only record what they want to, considering that he was on a heavily traveled road, and I saw him in broad daylight.
About a week ago, though, I did see a partially denuded rib cage sticking out of a black plastic garbage bag, roughly a mile from our home. I did check it out, and even took a couple of photos, but from the slant of the rib cage, it was definitely a quadruped, and may well have been a hog.
Whatever it was, it had been butchered and cleaned, which makes it being left at a turnout by our waterfall that much more strange.
Wow an entire cougar!? Thats wild!! Its weird that you saw the butchered animal as well, wonder what someone was up to there. Hopefully there was no water contamination. I've seen some button nose deer as well as smaller game around here so I always keep a slower pace at night. I also hadn't heard of the word quadruped so I've got a word for day as well. Thanks for your post!
Yeah, the cougar was really wild! I grew up in Los Angeles, where they are fairly numerous, but it is rare to see one in daylight, and even researchers studying them can go days without seeing one.
Although we have a tiny building lot in Taos County, New Mexico, next to the Colorado border, and a woman near there told us that she sees cougars trekking across the high plain on a regular basis. Of course, in that area, most of the brush isn't tall enough to conceal them.
The butchered animal was in a turnout next to our little bridge, over the Calfkiller River, but there's no way it could have ended up in the river unless someone physically threw it in. Then again, who knows?
And, although I didn't get close enough to smell it, it was clearly fresh, and looked as though it might even have been smoked.
It was gone when I checked it the following day. My guess is that someone stopped there in a pickup, with the tailgate down, and it fell out when they accelerated out of there.