45,000 mammals a year in St. Lawrence County alone. That works out to about a kill every other year for every person 18 and over in the county.
The number, an estimate based on a year's worth of weekly surveys of typical roads in the area, comes from a study in the journal Biodiversity and Conservation by a prof and a student at St. Lawrence University. Conservation Magazine has more:
The average observed roadkill rate was 3.8 mammals per 100 kilometers each week. But the actual number is probably five times higher, the team says, because the weekly surveys did not account for carcasses that were removed by scavengers between observations. For example, another experiment showed that squirrel carcasses usually disappeared after about two days.
According to a university profile, study coauthor Margot Brooks '08 likes to do other things besides drive around looking for dead raccoons.
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