Roadkill

Today's subject has no clever wordplay or hidden meanings to it. The reason for broaching on such a grisly subject is that just today I have seen one; not dead and rotting in the sun, but the actual deed itself. Well, to call it a deed implies a purposeful malice towards inducing harm onto oncoming organic traffic. I shall however give the driver the benefit of a doubt as, from my point of view, it seemed as accidental as it can possibly be.

I was driving home along one of the less developed roads the country has to offer (although to be fair, there have been efforts to widen some parts of this road resulting in roadwork induced traffic jams) when I spotted several Egrets of some sort (the Yellow-billed Egret or Mesophoyx intermedia if I'm not mistaken) flying low. As their flight path intercepted my motor route, I lifted my foot from the accelerator and reduced the car's speed as is customary when dealing with nature in a vehicle or sorts. Whilst I was admiring the Egrets' flight (while taking care to drive carefully of course!) a green saloon car approached in the opposite direction. The green car accelerated mercilessly, into one of the Egrets causing a burst of feathers and the Egret to fall onto the road limp and lifeless while the car drove on. Looking back I believe that the driver may not have seen the flock until too late, or might not have even noticed the flock at all up until the collision (as the feather explosion was too graphic not to have been memorable). I could not identify the car through it's license plate, a testimony to how low the Egret was when the car rammed into it. The speed of the car I estimate was around 60, maybe 70 km/hr (~37.2 - 43.4 mph), so naturally a full on collision meant that the Egret had little to no hope of surviving that accident.

As I have mentioned, this is the first time I saw an accident resulting in roadkill. Normally around here I see corpses of dogs, cats and the occasional monitor lizard and snake; all decomposing under the blazing equatorial sun. This is the first time I've seen a bird as roadkill and added to that having being witness to the whole process of it... my stomach lurches and I'm left with a queasy feeling that sits heavily in that bodily region.

Just a note, this is however not the first time I've been witness to an accident firsthand but the second. The first was when I was at university in Cambridge while walking to the Chemistry department from my college. A car hit a jaywalker, though the driver managed to hit the brakes in time thus preventing any fatalities that day. I will have to say though that seeing ragdoll physics in real life was quite a weird experience, for that was what the victim performed as she (I think, it's been several years now) fell onto the road sustaining relatively minor injuries for such an accident (minor as in she walked off after that, presumably towards the nearest GP).

~Onery