A few weeks ago I came as close as I’ve ever come to getting my Naturalist Card revoked.
Right there on Route 47, a little south of Plank Road, with the sun high in the sky and a hint of a breeze in the air, I had to admit to the biggest gaffe I’ve ever made as a nature professional. It didn’t involve birds or bees, snakes, spiders or any of the other usual objects nature nerds encounter. It was however a matter of life or death. Namely death, actually.
I misidentified a roadkill.
I suppose I need to back up a little bit and explain how, to road-borne naturalists, bloated remains are more than just decomposing heaps of ick. And fuzzy pancakes near centerlines aren’t just greasy spots of fur or feathers. Nosirree. Roadkill serves as an important indicator of what species are present in an area, what their relative abundance might be, and how their seasonal activities can influence their chances of survival, or demise.
Soft brown lumps near wet areas in spring? They let us know that muskrats are breeding. Last year’s offspring, which have enjoyed the protection of living under mom and dad’s roof, need to hit the road, so to speak, to make room for this year’s young. Inexperienced and nearsighted to boot, many don’t survive their first trip across pavement.
Gray-brown and reddish-orange feathers in summer? They indicate more breeding. Robins, in their haste to provide foods for their broods, at times miscalculate the speed they need to fly from one side of the street to the other.
Gray or orangish-brown lumps in fall? That means squirrels are more focused on gathering food for winter than on looking both ways before crossing a street. As scatter-hoarders, squirrels don’t stockpile food in one location. They put a little bit here and a little bit there—a great strategy for avoiding total loss should one site get raided or otherwise become unavailable. But scatter-hoarding involves a lot of scurrying, often across streets and sometimes with dire consequences.
Turtles on the move in spring, hormone-addled deer in fall, skunks scavenging on garbage night…the list of correlations between behaviors and consequences goes on and on.
Over the years I’ve become a bit of a roadkill connoisseur—not in a culinary sense, mind you, but more along the lines of being able to recognize decaying lumps at 35, 45, even 55 miles per hour. So when, that fateful day on Route 47, I saw a sizable gray-brown lump, with a white stripe down the face, my brain went right to the only mammal I thought it could be: Taxidea taxus, the American badger.
If we were to assign point values to local roadkill, badgers would rate at least a 9. While their numbers seem to have increased over the past decade or so (we even have a roadkill badger in our freezer at Hickory Knolls) they’re still not as common as squirrels and raccoons.
So you can just imagine the thrill I felt, bittersweet as it was, when I saw that badger on the east shoulder of Route 47 in Hampshire. Normally I would have stopped to take a picture, but as I was running late to a program at Pingree Grove Forest Preserve, I figured I’d wait til afterward to grab a pic—and maybe the whole carcass. (Note: Even when dead, all native wildlife belongs to the state of Illinois. If you want to start collecting roadkill, you’ll first of all need a good reason and then second a permit from the IL Department of Natural Resources.)
The program was on pollinators, about as far a topic from badgers as can be, but that didn’t stop me from announcing—to the ENTIRE GROUP—that a badger had been hit along 47. And no, I didn’t stop there. I went on for several minutes about badgers’ roles in local ecosystems. Badger this, badger that…I’d probably still be standing there babbling about badgers if my friend and colleague, Valerie Blaine, hadn’t steered the discussion back to beetles, butterflies and bees.
Still, I was buzzed about what I’d seen, and vowed to return to the roadside after the pollinator program concluded.
As luck would have it, Valerie appreciates roadkill too. And so do Lee and Corey, two program participants who were gung-ho about fetching the badger. So, afterward, the four of us made a beeline back down 47 to get a look at my exciting discovery.
As we passed Plank Road in the southbound lane, I took my foot off the gas. The last thing I wanted to do was pass up the badger and have to make a u-turn. I told Lee to keep his eyes peeled as we coasted along, peering at the east-side shoulder in between vehicles zipping along in the northbound lane.
It wasn’t long before we spotted the grizzled lump, a haze of flies buzzing above its distended form. But this time, coming from the opposite direction, I saw something I hadn’t noticed before: a ringed tail. The “badger” I’d spotted was a raccoon—one of our area’s most common roadkill species.
In an instant, my life as a naturalist flashed before my eyes. Montana glaciers and Smokey Mountain waterfalls, Arizona deserts and Maine coastlines. Torrey pines, Pinus torreya. California condors, Gymnogyps californianus. So many great nature experiences gone in an instant, replaced with the haunting image of one Procyon lotor.
Valerie, Corey, Lee and I pulled into a nearby parking lot to confer, briefly, on what we’d seen. Their comments, which I’m sure they self-edited before speaking, were said through suppressed smiles. “Not a badger,” said one. “‘Coon,” said another. “Maybe someone replaced the badger with a raccoon,” Lee said, with just a wee hint of a smirk.
We turned our vehicles around and headed out onto the highway, passing the “badger” one last time as we drove back north to Pingree Grove. The white facial stripe I was sure I’d spotted earlier was nowhere to be seen. As we drove past the ringed tail flapped in the breeze, a final salute to a monumental fail.
Next week: All is not lost, after all!
Pam Otto is the manager of nature programs and interpretive services at the Hickory Knolls Discovery Center, a facility of the St. Charles Park District. She can be reached at 630-513-4346 or potto@stcparks.org.