IT MIGHT be gruesome, but counting road kill could be a quick and effective way to spot local changes in wildlife populations.
In 1984, 1994 and 2005, Bob Brockie and Richard Sadleir, two retired ecologists, drove the length of New Zealand’s North Island, counting dead animals along the way. Then, along with of Victoria University of Wellington, they compared their data with road kill counts going back to 1949.
In some cases, the counts agreed with known changes in a population. For instance, the number of dead possums on the roadside fell by 60 per cent between 1994 and 2005, thanks to a . However, the team also noticed an 82 per cent drop in dead hedgehog numbers between 1994 and 2005 (). “Interestingly, the decline coincides with a nosedive in hedgehog numbers in Britain, so perhaps a disease could be responsible,” says Brockie.
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Similar work in Australia has shown that bandicoot road kill numbers tally well with known population densities.
