Thousands of animals are killed every year on roads in Massa. There is a lasting impact.

Tiffany Nhan remembers the time she and her partner drove to Worcester after a night out in Providence. They had just eaten at a tasty Italian restaurant and still had a few minutes to drive onto Route 146.

Then suddenly a deer jumped over the median and into their lane. Nhan braked. But at 80 km/h and with little time to react, that wasn’t enough.

The deer died on impact, and the collision damaged Nhan’s car. Soon, a state trooper and a tow truck pulled up. So did a few other drivers, who wanted to take the deer home for a meal, even though state law forbids it.

“It was really sad. (The deer) just died, and now it’s going to be dinner,” she remembered thinking at the time. “I just went to the deer. I prayed a little for the deer, hoping that whatever happens in the afterlife would be okay.”

Nhan’s experience this summer is one that many other Massachusetts drivers can relate to and that more may experience in the coming months. During the mating season in the fall, deer are less careful when crossing roads. That leads to more affected animals, more injured drivers and more work for the people charged with removing roadkill.

Last year there were at least 3,886 attacks on deer,
according to MassDOT data. That’s more than any year since 2002, due to what scientists say is a growing abundance of deer in Massachusetts. And 146 of last year’s deer collisions resulted in injuries.

Overall, motorists in the Commonwealth have a 1 in 85 chance of filing an insurance claim due to a collision with an animal, which ranks 16th nationally, according to State Farm.

Scott Jackson, a wildlife biologist at UMass Amherst, noted that cars are deadly to many animals other than deer, from red foxes and bobcats to turtles and salamanders. He pointed out that porcupines are particularly sensitive to road collisions because they walk slowly and respond to threats by freezing and erecting their quills – clearly no match for a 4,000-pound car.

The deaths could have a lasting effect. Jackson said porcupines only reproduce once a year and females only have one baby, meaning the population can’t recover quickly.

“Like porcupines, turtles generally live a long time. They reproduce late in life,” he said. “When cars start to take their toll on turtle populations, it could send a species into decline from which they will not recover.”

Beyond the effects of cars on the population, scientists say traffic fatalities are worth preventing simply because of their brutal nature. Jackson said for every dead animal seen on a road, there are likely a large number that suffer “horrendous” injuries, such as shattered legs, and crawl into the woods before ultimately dying.

Some don’t even make it That far.

Early one September morning, a driver collided with a deer in a quiet residential area in Sherborn. Sean Killeen, the city’s public works director, said a police officer arrived on the scene and found the deer alive but too injured to move. So the officer put it down with a shot. Killeen’s team then had to remove the body.

The workers often deal with traffic fatalities several times a week. They dump the dead animals in a place in the city forest, far enough away from the houses that people will not encounter the decomposing bodies.

“Sometimes (the roadkill is) really disgusting,” Killeen said. “A few guys will come back and throw up, or throw up on the side of the road.”

Conservation experts attribute the high traffic fatalities to the amount of asphalt in the state. During an interview, Laura Marx, a climate solutions scientist at the Nature Conservancy in Massachusetts, pulled out a map she had made showing all the state’s roads shaded purple. When you compare it to MassDOT’s crash data, the picture is clear: the more roads in an area, the more traffic fatalities there tend to be.

Many animals need large areas of land to forage, mate and migrate, Marx said. This is especially important now because climate change is forcing some species to seek other habitats. As a result, roads that animals cannot cross act as barriers, isolating populations and causing inbreeding.

“So the animals cannot find partners that have genetic diversity. The population just gets weaker and smaller over time, and they are much more likely to fade away,” Marx said.

Some states, including Montana, Colorado and Florida, have tried to reduce traffic fatalities by building huge wildlife crossings above and below busy roads in remote areas. Massachusetts officials say the commonwealth’s suburban landscape makes the country poorly suited for such a solution.

But officials say they are trying to make roads safer for animals. For example, under a heavily trafficked section of Route 2 in Concord is a small underpass installed in 2016 that looks like a tunnel.

As MassDOT biologist Dave Paulson and MassWildlife biologist Tim McGuire walked down the hallway one September morning, they saw the footprints of deer, raccoons and a bobcat.

“No one probably realizes there’s a wildlife crossing here,” Paulson said, noting the underpass is near a stream along which animals travel. “So it really creates this landscape connectivity.”

Paulson said there are several similar passageways throughout the state. Officials are also trying to help animals avoid cars through redesigned water paths under roads.

Jackson, the UMass Amherst biologist, said other solutions should include lower speed limits and resisting the temptation to add additional lanes to existing roads. Not only will animals preserve their lives, he said, drivers will also avoid injuries, damage to their cars and the emotional trauma of running over wildlife.

“It’s really up to the state to invest more to provide the funding to make these changes,” Jackson said. “When you think about the impact on ecosystems… it’s hard to think of anything that has more impact than the road.”