What happens to animals who venture beyond our gardens? It’s a dangerous world out there, but road ecologists are working to reconnect broken habitats. Ben Goldfarb’s captivating new book explains how.
“We inhabit a world as angular and broken as a corn maze, all edge and no heart.”—Ben Goldfarb, Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet
On my bookshelf sits a bleached box turtle shell, about the size of the palm of my hand with a chunk torn from the side. The life story of the animal who once walked underneath this mangled armor is a mystery. I imagine she snacked on slugs and wild strawberries, spending her summers ambling through patches of urban forest and her winters deep in the ground under a warm layer of oak leaves. Maybe she narrowly avoided an encounter with a raccoon or fox during her first decade before her shell fully hardened.
But those are just guesses, as are any thoughts about how she died. Her ghostly remains were a gift from wildlife biologist Susan Hagood, who thought our turtle friend likely met her end by tractor, mower, or car. In the years since Susan gave me the shell in 2009, I’ve wanted to ask her more about it, but I can’t; two years later she also died, far too young, from cancer.
I’ve kept the shell to honor both Susan and the turtle I never knew, and as a reminder of all that we’ve lost and all that we still can save. Like the turtle’s death, Susan’s passing was untimely; at the age of 54 (only a year older than I am now), she had more plans to pursue. And like the turtle, she had a thick shell. She was kind and thoughtful, but she was also tough in a way that enabled her to take on formidable cultural and political barriers, testifying against everything from captive hunting of penned foxes to killing of coyotes under the guise of senseless “predator control.”
In her later years, Susan confronted more tangible barriers in the form of asphalt and concrete that sliced through the heart of wildlife habitat. Her devotion to saving animals from under vehicle wheels culminated in a PhD thesis about the impact of roads on genetic diversity. It also manifested in hands-on campaigns. In a rural pocket of Montgomery County, Maryland, where a park ranger had observed turtles hit repeatedly in the same small patch of road, Susan helped lead a crew of dozens of volunteers to erect silt fencing that diverted animals safely through an underground culvert. It worked, drastically reducing turtle mortality and also becoming a popular crossing for everyone from skunks to birds to chipmunks.
In another part of the county, Susan rescued turtles who had the misfortune of living in a forest doomed by an impending highway project. With the help of her turtle-tracking chocolate Lab, Drew, she and a team of field assistants scooped up hundreds of vulnerable animals and tagged and relocated them. The work was painstaking, and Susan knew their long-term survival was far from guaranteed; box turtles are wedded to their home ranges and may not survive in new environments, even when initially confined in large pens for long periods to acclimate to their new surroundings. But she also knew the turtles didn’t stand a chance once the bulldozers arrived.
“People ask me, ‘Why box turtles?’—and I have yet to come up with something that is satisfying to them and to me,” Susan told me as we drove to the site one day. “They’re so vulnerable, and they face such challenges in the world we’ve created, yet require so little of us to survive.”
I first got to know Susan while writing her story, “Turtle Trackers,” for the membership magazine of our employer at the time, the Humane Society of the United States. We discovered we had much in common—including the fact that both our fathers had been plant pathologists, a rare job we’d spent our lives fruitlessly trying to explain to others. Susan was now pursuing an arcane profession of her own and explaining it to me. Even the phrase “road ecology” was a recent invention, entering the U.S. vernacular just 15 years before. The pioneering wildlife overpass in Canada’s Banff National Park— the most famous ever built—was only a decade old.
For years I’d been well aware of the heartbreakingly high mortality rates caused by roads, forcing myself not to look away as the body counts of dead foxes, raccoons, squirrels and turtles accumulated where too many drivers raced along the rural roads guiding me to work. But thanks to Susan, I was inspired to learn more about population-level impacts. I read about how roads were inhibiting salamanders from returning to their natal ponds to breed. I spoke with researchers in southern California studying the dwindling genetic diversity of increasingly isolated populations of mountain lions who couldn’t or wouldn’t cross highways. I interviewed an ecologist in Florida who had managed to save more than 9,000 turtles from the crush of trucks and other vehicles before finally securing federal funding for a permanent tunnel system.
Fifteen years later, my six-inch-deep pile of notes, articles and studies from that research project still sits in a cabinet next to the shelves holding my broken turtle shell. Road ecology is underappreciated and critically important to curbing habitat loss and fragmentation, and I thought it deserved its own book. I was hoping one day to write it.
Last fall, Ben Goldfarb beat me to it, and I’m both relieved and grateful. His 2023 book, Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, is a gorgeously written, intricately reported masterpiece. I don’t know Goldfarb, but I came to love his poignant, perceptive writing when I read his first book, Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. He navigates complex worlds with compassion, insight, and imagination without ever getting in his own way.
In Crossings, Goldfarb makes the case that roads are “not merely a symptom of civilization but a distinct disease” with far-reaching consequences, halting animal migrations while spreading everything from invasive species to pandemic-causing pathogens: “Name an environmental problem, and it’s exacerbated by the access that roads provide and the incentives they create.” The killing fields of roads, Goldfarb writes, are “an overlooked culprit in our planet’s current mass die-off, the sixth major extinction in its history.”
Through Goldfarb’s research, we learn of salmon in the Pacific Northwest who are unable to pass through a seemingly endless tangle of culverts that are too small, too jammed with debris and sediment, or too filled with rushing water—and of the successful legal efforts of Native tribes to dismantle or replace these structures and make way for a “Salmon SuperHighway” in Oregon. We discover why the navigational abilities of mule deer, “unsurpassed cartographic geniuses,” stopped short at the roadside along I-80 in Montana until the state installed wide, inviting underpasses along with fencing to guide the deer to safety. Without such help, deer were often either hit or deciding not to brave the wall of traffic at all—a slow death sentence for a species that evolved to eat in the mountains in the warm season and spend winters foraging in the valleys.
Roads, Goldfarb explains, undo age-old behaviors that are integral to survival: “Whereas other ungulates stray widely, mule deer remain faithful to their inherited pathways. Deer migration isn’t merely a movement pattern but a form of culture, transmitted from doe to fawn like family lore. And when roads thwart their treks, the loss is as thorough as the erasure of a language.”
Exploring the rise of roads as a dominating force in modern society, Goldfarb travels through time and across lands, tracing the racial injustices of 20th-century highway development as well as the U.S. Forest Service’s labyrinthine roads that still scar many remote ecosystems even as they crumble. He introduces readers to road ecologists, transportation planners, wildlife rehabbers, and advocates trying to mitigate the losses across the American West, Florida, New York, Alaska, Wales, Brazil, Costa Rica, and Tasmania. Tallying the destruction that ripples out beyond our usual sightlines as we cruise down the highway, Goldfarb writes: “The essential insight of road ecology is this: roads warp the earth in every way and at every scale, from the polluted soils that line their shoulders to the skies they besmog. They taint rivers, invite poachers, tweak genes. They manipulate life’s fundamental processes: pollination, scavenging, sex, death.”
Among the less visible consequences, Goldfarb considers noise pollution to be perhaps the “most vexing.” Roads have hard edges, but their effects can be borderless, with noise acting like “a toxic plume that drifts from its source like sewage” and emptying the landscape of wildlife even miles deep into adjacent lands. As I also wrote in my own book Wildscape, even (and maybe especially?) the smallest and least mobile creatures like monarch caterpillars are stressed by road noise.
One of the many tragedies of roads is that they can encourage attractive early-successional habitat for wildlife while also killing those animals in large numbers, and Goldfarb wrestles with the popular idea of planting wildflowers for monarchs along the very highways that may further imperil them. Larger animals like hawks, vultures, and coyotes are also at risk of succumbing to an ecological trap: though they benefit in the short term from scavenging killed animals, they might not make it off the shoulder alive. This roadside “necrobiome” has another consequence: complacency. Removal of carrion by animal cleanup crews “airbrushes our roadsides,” Goldfarb writes, “camouflaging a crisis by devouring it.” We humans rarely see the full accounting of the messes we’ve made.
Sometimes collisions with animals are unavoidable for even the most careful driver, but as Goldfarb notes, reduced speeds could avert many more accidents. That’s not too much to ask, especially on my street, where a couple of neighbors and their visitors routinely drive twice the 25-miles-per-hour speed limit and have hit squirrels, turtles, rabbits, owls and deer—without even bothering to stop.
Years ago, as Susan Hagood described a recent rescue of dozens of turtles from an area where forest was being cleared for new soccer fields, she told me how much it wore on her to find dead hatchlings, shell fragments and carcasses of turtles mauled by construction equipment: “They keep me up at night, these turtles. You’re just haunted by the ones you couldn’t find.”
I’m haunted, too, by the splayed animals I’ve come across and tried to help—too late, after they’ve already been crushed by the relentless churn of humanity. Just last night I found a hit and eviscerated squirrel in the road right in front of our house, with only her tail left. Though so many of us are working hard to create habitat within our own patches of lands, the animals know no borders. I hope as many as people as possible will read Crossings, take it to heart, slow down, spread the word, and advocate for a world where our own freedom of movement doesn’t subsume that of all the other organisms in our path.
Related Articles:
“Roadside Assistance”: Millions of animals die in the road, and many suffer serious injuries after colliding with cars. How can we help? Read the tips.
“Slow Down for Owls”: Daylight Savings Time had ended a few days before. But there was just one problem: This little screech owl living on our road didn’t know how to turn the clocks back and adjust her timing for increased traffic. Read the story.
“Turtle Trackers”: When I interviewed Susan Hagood for this All Animals magazine article 15 years ago, she sparked my interest in the then-nascent field of road ecology. Read the story.
Eye opening read- thank you for writing this and telling us about Ms. Hagood and her wonderful work. Your humane work towards animals and nature has inspired me to also do things a little differently in my neck of the woods (nyc). Much love.
Thank you so much, Natalie. ❤️ NYC is a pretty neat place to explore urban wildlife — thank you for doing your part to help them!
Thank you so much for your articles. I have put low saucers here and there in my yard. When it is hot I see turtles and butterflies and bees bathe or getting a drink in them. The new born fawns like them too. The birdbaths are too high.
I love that you do that — it’s so important. We have a lot more on the ground this year too, rather than elevated, and it’s amazing to see who can access it better and to watch them all take turns. <3 I have not see a turtle use one of the baths yet, though - that is so cool!
I put saucers in, but one was too deep with no way to exit for an eft– and the eft couldn’t get out. Since then I’ve made to keep them shallow and check daily.
Thank you for your thoughtful and indeed humane reporting on the state of the wild world.
I love turtles and also feel a heartache when I read about development destroying their grounds. I’d like to save some too. Great article about your compatriot Ms. Hagood.
Thanks so much, Allison. The book I wrote about, Crossings, covers some community science initiatives that people can get involved with. Some of them are related to tracking animals killed in the road so that road ecologists can understand where it’s happening most when they are planning mitigation strategies. But there are also groups that recruit volunteers to help salamanders and other animals when just when they are emerging to breed and there is a road in the way of crossing to their natal ponds. I guess for turtles and development/road-building, in combination with mitigation, we have to lobby against unnecessary development in the first place. They are just so slow-moving that they have almost zero chance of getting away on their own.
This is so important and overdue, Nancy. Thanks for posting and I will read Crossings. Thank you so much for all your good work.
Thank you, Marney. I think you will love the book!
Thank you for this article. I have a bright yellow bumper sticker on my back window at driver’s eye level that says in bold black letters: “I really DO brake for ALL ANIMALS. Do not tailgate”. I had the stickers made because I wanted it to be very clear. I’ve had a lot of positive responses and people do stay back from me. I rescue wooly bear caterpillars in the road, a huge praying mantis once, turtles, birds…. Of course, safety of others is a major concern in these situations. I stopped and called authorities for a deer that had been hit on a dark neighborhood street and had fallen into a leaf pile in front of a house and was not clearly visible. I saw its ears sticking up as I passed so I circled back. It disgusted me that the person never stopped although pieces of his broken headlight were on the scene. All my passengers know that I will stop for an animal. Bless all who drive with care and vigilance and all who help.
Hi Kathleen,
I love your bumper sticker idea! I think I’ll get a bunch made so I can share at native plant events and with friends. Great to know that other drivers are respectfully keeping their distance from you (tailgating unnerves me on any account). Thank you for the idea, and thank you for caring.
~Johanna
Glad to share the idea! I used Zazzle to make the stickers and they have always been done well and last a long time. And you can design your own fonts and colors. I’d love to see them on more cars! Take care!
I love that — and it makes me so happy to know that you’ve gotten a good reaction to it. Before my old car gave up the ghost, I drove for years with a sticker we used to produce at HSUS that said, “Give Wildlife a Brake.” I need to get another sticker for my new car. Like you, I’ve come across so many animals who’ve been hit and left there without concern, sometimes still alive. Once about 10 years ago, I was driving up to the grocery store and was behind a pickup that had one of those huge-lettered things in the back window. It said something like “I speed up for wildlife” or “I speed up to hit animals.” I forget the wording, but it was very clear. Thankfully I haven’t seen that again. In Crossings, Ben Goldfarb mentions that there are a certain number of people who do intentionally hit animals. Thankfully they are likely in the great minority. I appreciate so much that you stop and help and spread the word. <3
My sticker:
‘I brake for turtles, frog, sticks and big leaves!’ I’ve long wanted to amend it with, “Go ahead, test me.”
LOL! Yeah, there are a few who test me….
So glad people are working on roadside ecology. For years I’ve wondered, how can we prevent wildlife from being hit by cars? Is there any way of defining a road that might deter some species?
It’s really fascinating to learn about all the different strategies–fencing, overpasses, underpasses. Your question also makes me think of a section in Crossings, where the author writes about a road that was built to be intentionally very winding so that people have to drive much more slowly, and therefore far few animals are hit than would be otherwise. I think we need more of that sort of planning — where we’re deterring our own species, essentially — because a lot of animals still need to cross in order to get to other parts of their habitat, and so that their populations don’t become too isolated.
Of course I’m a huge fan of over- and under-passes, especially in areas where, for example there’s annual crossing of newts or turtles. While costly, it’s such a good project for biologists/ecologists et al. to measure a population and its activities, and see where the best spot is for a pass.
I’ll look forward to reading Ben’s book!
Gosh, Nancy, you did it again. Struck at the heart and mind in equal measure. I just ordered Goldfarb’s book and look forward to reading/sharing. Such a tragedy that Susan passed so young, but what a legacy (and what a pooch!).
I’d never thought of roadside ecology as a discipline and am buoyed that it’s gaining attention. Going to send this article to my Sustainable Saratoga group in the hope that something can be done here (maybe something is simmering already).
The photo in “Turtle Trackers” of the Florida turtle caravan is so beautiful. 9,000 saved thanks to their efforts, wow.
p.s. Going to email you a short doc about teen efforts in Iceland to save pufflings from the hazards of light pollution.
Wonderful and timely article, Nancy. As always! I am tense already as I drive across what I know is a yearly turtle killing field come spring. Do you know if there are any Maryland specific resources to employ – DNR turtle fences, roadside Turtle crossing signs, groups engaged in turtle protection, or more? Thank you again for bringing life to issues like this one.
I LOVE Kathleen’s bumper sticker idea!
I designed it at Zazzle. It’s a great site and you can get creative! The stickers are good quality and last a long time.
Perhaps the crux of the matter centers on how much value we place — or are willing to place — on life. By “life”, I mean every life, regardless of species. In the “Road Assistance” article, Nancy wrote “Each year, an estimated 365 million vertebrates fall victim to vehicles in the U.S. That number doesn’t include bees, snails and others without backbones.” What if 365 million humans were hit every year by motor vehicles? Would that number be acceptable? What if it was “only” 10 million people? Would we find ways to prevent statistics like that from happening?
A question: what if each of us drove 1/2 as often as we typically do, by combining trips, by carpooling, by just NOT GOING every single time we might and stay home instead? Could reducing the number of times we’re in our killing machines reduce the number of impacts with living creatures of any species? It seems possible, maybe even 50%? The actions of each of us combine to produce the state of the world we’re living in. Every choice we make does matter.
Nancy’s comment, “We humans rarely see the full accounting of the messes we’ve made” is so true. Indoor plumbing rinses away chemicals, weekly trash collection conveniently makes whatever we don’t want/need any more just “disappear”, shopping in stores or online for any foods or other consumer goods with no/little awareness of the associated environmental impacts is quick and easy, etc., etc.
The alternative is to take true responsibility for our actions and their consequences. Can we be perfect? I don’t know anyone who is. But can we do better? Yes, we can consciously minimize our impact (e.g. drive 50% less); we can learn to care; we can place value on all life; we can share this Earth because we are not entitled to have it all.
Thanks so much, Debbie. I’ve thought a lot about this too. Even though some people wouldn’t be able to cut down on trips due to life circumstances, many can, especially when we can meet virtually and such too. I was saddened when companies and government agencies started trying to force people back to on-site work because remote work is such an easy way to cut down on travel.
I’m wondering what effect the use of many more “silent” electric vehicles will have on collisions with wildlife (and pets and people) that aren’t alerted to the approaching threat by NOISE? That seems like a potentially significant negative consequence of “going green” with our vehicles.
It’s a good question — and Ben addresses this in a chapter on noise pollution. Noise pollution of roads has a huge negative impact on wildlife of all kinds, and of course electric vehicles are touted as at least one way to quiet things down. But it’s really the tires that apparently make the most noise at 35 mph or over, whether the cars are electric or not. Here is what he wrote in a footnote: “Although the silence of EVs has allegedly caused a few driveway cat flattenings, I’d wager that it won’t lead to more wildlife roadkill since most animal collisions happen at the higher speeds at which tire noise makes electric cars audible.”
I wish our nation’s highway system , if it is to remain, could be elevated enough to allow all wildlife to pass through without the constant onslaught of vehicles decimating their habitat, migration routes, and the sheer numbers that die on said roads.
I am someone who will pull off the road to remove an animal that has died attempting to cross. The variety of species is staggeringly heartbreaking. I keep a “kit” in my car ( gloves, paper, plastic bags ) , to safely carry these once beautiful, once living animals : birds, deer, squirrels,turtles,snakes, cats, raccoons,foxes,opossum,woodchuck,owls,turkey,vultures ….dear god,its endless.
The least we as a species could do is to stop this senseless destruction of wildlife.
Thank you for such a sensitive essay .
Thanks so much, Melody – I really appreciate that you take the time to see the animals. As for the elevated highways, it’s really neat to read Crossings and learn about what other countries are doing. The author mentions a raised highway constructed in 2019 in India through a tiger reserve and how the government built it all on pillars. He makes the point that many countries with less existing (older) infrastructure have opportunities to show us how to do things right, since a lot of roads were built before most people were thinking about the disruption to habitat and animals.
I am starting a movement to stop and remove the bodies of dead animals from the road (where it is safe to do so). I put them in the grass or forest off the shoulder so their body can go in dignity and not get smooshed over and over again. Please join me to at least give the animals we’ve let down with roads and speed a natural place for their afterlife. Dignity for all animals!
That is lovely, thank you. <3 Do you follow Amanda Stronza on Instagram? She lovingly moves killed wildlife to a spot off the road and creates beautiful tributes/memorials with plants.
Oh, and when I move the animals to the roadside, I leave them with a little blessing.
Thank you for such an inspiring article. We all have to do our part make this a better planet!
I’ll follow your advice and read Crossings. Although I’m sure I’ll agree with every word, I’m curious to learn more about the solutions being undertaken to help fix the problems of highways and roads.
Great piece. I’ll look for his book.
Condolences, too, to you over the loss of your friend. Women who go all out for turtles have something very, very deeply special about them.