On my way home last night, residential side street, a cop car passed me and then ran over a squirrel that had darted across the road. Cop didn't stop. I stopped and saw that the squirrel was still conscious but immobile - no blood or guts but his limbs weren't moving. His eyes were lucid and his mouth was quivering. It was mildly disturbing and the memory of seeing him there stays with me.

I figured somebody else would run over him and that would be that but I didn't wait. Talked myself out of running him over with my bike.

Assuming the cop knew he'd hit the squirrel, think he should've stopped and run over him again or something?

Saw the squirrel again this morning - a flattened carcass like dozens of others I see every week.

Life is short and precious.

Squirrel life is more short and less precious than human life.

Reminds me of when my college roommates and I had mice in our apartment. We set out poison and one time there was this one mouse taking his sweet time to die, slowly scrabbling his way across the kitchen floor. I put on my wafflestompers and put him out of his misery because my roomies were all too chicken.

Oh yeah, I would've hacked the bastard to death if I'd found him in my vegetable garden. But looking him in the eyes all helpless and scared there on the pavement was kind of emotional.

A guy I know caught a pretty amazing video on his phone of a gopher he had shot through the gut with a crossbow, pinned it to the ground. That thing was chewing on the bolt trying to get free.

To him, certainly, his life was precious!

When I moved up to the mountains years ago, I was given the advice to never brake for the squirrels. Apparently many people do and end up causing accidents.

Sometimes life is like the proverbial sausage factory, and you don't really want to look to closely.

And no, I don't think the cop needed to stop after hitting a squirrel. I can imagine the police report and law suit that would happen when another car, or (god forbid) a bike runs into the back of his car while he's dealing with the squirrel.

This.

I had an incident today on an interstate where something fairly large ran in front of me; hit it, slam on brakes, squeeze in front of the semi truck to my left? My rearview camera in my peripheral vision saw the front of the truck so the squeeze it was. Don't think the truck driver was too happy.

My brother, who is a bike messenger in S.F., claims to have heard loud popping sounds when pigeons get run over, particularly by buses. Anyone care to corroborate that?

Probably weasels (although pigeons might be weasels with wings).

Not all squirrels are created equal

I see dead and dying animals on almost every ride, especially on rural routes. I'm not indifferent, just pragmatic. That's life. Turkey vultures, ants and scavengers gotta eat too.

My main soft spot is to move them off the road. If the critter is dying, at least they can be a bit more comfortable. If the critter is dead I move it off the road so the turkey vultures don't get hit while doing their jobs. Depends on the carcass and condition. I don't want to get deer ticks or parasites so I don't touch some carcasses.

I save my compassion for humans. I often stop to check on vulnerable looking homeless and street people I see in town, or hitchhikers along the rural route to see if they need to make a phone call, etc. Sometimes I'll get them something to eat and drink if I can spare a few bucks and there's a store or restaurant nearby. Sometimes I photograph them if they consent. It's not idle curiosity or my usual approach to street photography. Family and friends might be looking for them. Adult protective services and other agencies might help if the homeless or street person has physical or mental disabilities -- many I meet are schizophrenic, some are older with dementia or other problems. A photo can help these agencies too. Often I blog about the homeless and street folks I meet.

* * *

From Tuesday afternoon's ride. It caught my eye because I happened to be wearing the same color jersey -- hi-vis yellow. Just one of those things. I moved the bird to the roadside so scavengers wouldn't also be struck and killed.

Try to avoid deer (or moose) while driving. Tree rats? Keep going!

1) There's no way for you to know that the officer was aware they hit the squirrel. It's not like they hit a moose.

2) You don't know where the officer was headed. Perhaps they wanted to stop, but were en route to a priority call. Officers must make judgment calls all the time. If this officer prioritized a domestic violence call over a squirrel, can you blame them?

Heck, I will try to avoid worms if it's not dangerous to do so. I will also swerve to intentionally kill gypsy moth caterpillars, but to avoid wooly bears.
I've dispatched critically injured animals before.

[MENTION=418370]canklecat[/MENTION] nicely seen photograph.

Yeah, I heard a NYC taxi take out a pigeon a few years ago. The sound was not what you normally think of as "pop" but then again I can't give you a better term for it. Pop, whop, shbop, something like that. A whole lot of feathers falling like snow in the taxi's wake.

[MENTION=418370]canklecat[/MENTION], your photo reminds me of the time I crossed a busy CT road on foot and there in the crosswalk was a Baltimore Oriole. It looked perfect, lying there, but was going to get smashed by the next car. It was the first and only Baltimore Oriole I've ever seen, so much bigger than a goldfinch, and it seemed a shame for it to get destroyed, even though I assumed it was dead. So very irrationally I tried to nudge it over to the side of the road with my foot.

As soon as my foot touched it, it stood up, shook out its feathers, and flew away.

Is (was) that a tropical kingbird?

[MENTION=347046]wgscott[/MENTION] -- I think it's a yellow breasted Western Kingbird. I'm not much of a birder but that's the nearest match in the Texas bird guide.

Beautiful thing, that's why I stopped to photograph it. I wanted to look it up later.

(Correction: Some guides call it a yellow bellied Western Kingbird, with the color description in lower case.)

Heh! Last week I tangled with a small bird, probably a sparrow or starling. Darted out of the brush at wheel level, got whirled around in the wheel, then squirted out the other side. I checked the mirror for cyclists behind me and slowed to turn around, but in the mirror I could see the little bird shake it's head and fly away.

Birds are both remarkably fragile and tough. If you've ever tried to rescue wild birds, especially babies, you've probably experienced a 90% failure rate. They rarely recover or survive. My only successes have been with injured adult grackles, among the toughest of birds.

And birds tend to go full power until they suddenly drop dead with few warning signs of illness. I've kept many pet birds, especially cockatiels, and only one ever showed any signs of illness before it died. The rest seemed perfectly fine, then dropped dead off their perches. Probably a defense mechanism to make it difficult for predators to isolate a weak bird.

I once banged myself up nicely, avoiding a squirrel on a local bike path. I was still glad to have missed it. I do have an "I ran over a critter" story with a different twist......

About 1985 I went surf-casting one morning and failed to land any fish. Driving home I suddenly saw a brown blur streak into the road, followed a split second later by a thud from the rear wheel. Crapcrapcrap, I thought, I've killed someone's cat.

I pulled over with dread to find not someones tabby but a big fat cottontail rabbit, rendered instantly dead as Caesar by a perfect albeit accidental head shot. The body was untouched. Now, at the time I had a big goofball of a golden retriever who loved chasing rabbits and squirrels, I suspect only to play with them. I was curious to see his reaction to one up close, so I put the carcass into my fish bag. I got home and called out "Hey, Barney(the dog), look what I've got." Barney gave a sniff and was supremely uninterested.

Not so my 85 year old Grandma. "What are you going to do with it" she asked in her unique English/Italian mix. I said I would put it in the trash. Oh no, she said, "you give that to me." In a minute flat she had tied it by the hind legs to her beloved mulberry tree, whipped out my Grandpa's pocket knife, and was EXPERTLY dressing that thing out for cooking. I could never, and still can't, do it that fast.

She explained to me that as a little girl in the mountains of southern Italy, she would hunt with her teenaged brother. Being a girl, times being what they were, the shooting was man's work. She was allowed however, to field dress the rabbits, and one other task...... Judging by the speed with which she was doing the dressing out, she learned her job well. She continued to tell the story in her sometimes hard-to-follow language.

I realized that she was telling me, in amazingly accurate detail, the cumbersome procedure required to load the obsolete blackpowder muzzle-loading shotgun her brother used. THAT was her other job. Now, she didn't know this, but I had and still have just such an obsolete shotgun, an Italian one at that. I went and got it out, along with the loading paraphernalia. She welled up with tears, and said "Maybe THIS was my brothers?" I could only say "Maybe it was, Grandma".

And don't you know she proceeded to load up that old cannon like a pro, 75 years later.

The rabbit hunting ended when Grandma's brother died, aged 20, on Sept. 8, 1917 in an Italian Army forward field hospital, of wounds received in the fighting on the Isonzo River.



Back to biking........I very often ride past the spot where that rabbit met his demise, and never fail to remember Grandma.

Great story!

I get what you mean, I had a similar experience with a young rabbit last week. It's not pleasant to see, but in nature animals such as squirrels and rabbits are rather low on the food chain with high odds of meeting an unpleasant demise.

It was the beginning of my roadkill eating career.

The middle and the end of it, too.