The Scent of death
 

Just had to vent after the ride to work today. Riding out from my house there are fields and open land and there are always what is left of marmits and rabbits on the road and the smell lingurs for a couple of miles(phycologicly only). Anyone else have a problem with road kill?

I'm familiar with the scent, as you come across all sorta carcass types here but I just utter an, "Ugh", hold my breath for a sec and peddle on ...

i had to ride past an exceptionally foul manure mountain for about a week as it baked into the sun. seems to have gone away. road kill + 90 degrees + humidity = foul stank

eww hate it. always hold my breath and look the other way

Roadkill? And here's me thinking it was the guy I was draftings' lentil and bean habit!

Seriously though....around here, it's hard to spot the road for all the dead kangaroos, potaroos, tassie devils, crocs.....German tourists....

Come on now, do you really see dead crocs on the road?:D

Steve
-I was in Australia once, and I missed my chance to hold a kola in the zoo, bad timing. I'm still bummed about it.

My favorite roadkill occured just the other day; a brand new Porsche 911 on the shoulder of the road, it's engine cover up, it's owner on his cell phone, giving me the old stinkeye as I passed by the stricken carcass of his $90,000 pile of junk on my flawlessly-functioning Orbea ;)

On our 57 mile loop, there's a dead deer that's been there for over a month, and each time we pass it, it's in various stages of decomposition. It's gross, it reeks, and I refuse to look at it anymore. Jess, who is fascinated by forensics, can't look away.

Yep, i guess when you have the same problme a cyclist will go by thinking the same thing. Man soceity today poeple never want to give a helping hand any more. They just want to laugh at poeple's misfortunes.

Nothing beats the scent of decaying wombat or kangaroo on a 40C day....

There's this nasty hill we do at school, and the one time I was at the top gasping for air and there was a nice dead deer on the side of the road, i almost threw up

Dead possums are some of the worst stank in the known world.

And wouldn't you know it seems to be a banner year for dead possums here in Kansas City. I swear I see a half-flattened one of those nasty little buggers every day, different locations. It seems like the sanitation crews can't pry 'em up as fast as they're getting mowed down.

Been seeing and smelling a lot of flat squirrels, too. Flat squirrels are plenty disgusting, but they don't linger like a possum does. They get dessicated pretty quickly; they're only good for a couple of days of smell, whereas a possum is like the Duracell Bunny of stink.

If I know where a carcass is, I will plan my route to skip a block or so over and miss it, but sometimes, you know one will catch you unawares. It's worst when you've decided it's time to stretch your legs a little and hammer up a hill, and you're really laying into it, sucking air, and "hooof" you pass right past something very dead and very ripe. I darn near yakked one night last week, in a situation like that. Nasty is an inadequate word.

I saw a decaying groundhog that was covered with butterflies, and a dead butterfly a few yards down the road.

Last week I went for a ride around where I grew up and the weather was great (80F, S wind about 5 mph). About 10 miles out I meet an animal byproducts truck on the road. For those of you who haven't had the pleasure, imagine a furniture moving truck with no roof, filled with dead animals from area farms. I was headed into the breeze as the truck overtook me. I spent the next 3 miles breathing the stench of dead animal. That was by far my worst experience on a ride.

The skunks have really started to multiply in my area. Every so often one will end up dead in the road.

The smell doesn't bother me at all.....then again, I work in the morgue! :eek:

I almost ran over a dead squirrell the other day, other than that nature has to feed the buzzards and I understand that but it is not a pleasing site looking at road kill.

It doesn't bother me.

Of course, the other day a mother cat was hanging out with her dead kitten in the middle of a highway and I stopped and picked the dead (stiff, and sort of flat) kitten up and moved it to the side of the road so that the mother wouldn't have the same fate.

Yup. A dead wombat is the worst.

Esp. on a long, Victorian alps climb when you go past at 18kmh....

i actually saw two people stopped to change a flat once and i almost stopped...but i didnt. (in my car). if it was just one person i would of stopped undoubtedly but it was two people. so that put some sense of false reassurance in my mind :rolleyes:

A couple years back Colorado had a 100 year drought, riding from Montrose to Gunnison is scrub brush and arid high plains in the best of years.
During the droughts the deer road-kills go way up. (I figure its natures way of weeding out the weak deer when predators are scarce.) Anyway, a dead deer on the side of the road, "popped" in the sun smells nasty. One every 5-10 miles is epically tormenting to the nostrils.

Two words. Dead horse.

Slowly decomposing, carcass to bare bones, dead horse.

when I come accross road kill, I hold my breath, and dodge it, by making sharp turns on the bike, god only knows what kind of damage could be done to the bike if you hit a dead animal, not to mention how nasty it would be.

RacingPain

.....and the really great thing about dead wombats is that they stink for weeks and weeks. I think spent plutonium breaks down quicker.

Sounds like an Australian wombat and a Yankee possum have a lot in commen as regards stench.

Only darn marsupial we've got, too!