Corn snakes make colorful windshield wipers | ECOVIEWS

Global warming. Habitat destruction. Pesticides and pollution. Environmental forecasts and reports are all too often full of grimness and gloom. But ecology has its lighter moments, and I take solace in remembering them, such as a field trip many years ago.

I was teaching herpetology at the University of Georgia and one of my goals was always to have students see up close as many different kinds of reptiles and amphibians as possible. One way to expand the list of available animals is to pick up roadkills. Handling dead animals has its yuck factor, but roadkills offer the opportunity to observe seldom-seen creatures.

I was on my way to pick up the students when I saw a roadkilled river cooter, a turtle unlikely to be caught on a field trip. Although I could see more of its insides than I cared to, I decided to bring the specimen along to show the students. But this educational opportunity had spent the previous day dead on the highway and was not welcome as a passenger.

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So I pitched the turtle, which was the size of a meat platter, on top of the van. A few miles down the road I found a road-killed corn snake. Why not? On top of the van went the snake, along with a dead bullfrog a few miles later. To my surprise, all show-and-tell items stayed in place. I had specimens to show the class even before we left on the field trip.

The students were standing around the meeting spot, excited about a toad they had found. Their enthusiasm increased immeasurably when they saw what I had already collected. Since roadkill can sometimes smell bad (really bad), the students were also glad the cargo was atop the vehicle not in it.

Soon everyone had piled into the van and we were off. I was gratified to see that I had taught them the value of watching for roadkills. How did I know? Because when they saw a dead armadillo, they wanted to stop and take a closer look.

As we got back in the van, I heard a loud thump on the roof. Someone had thrown the armadillo on top of the van assuming that this was what herpetologists did with roadkills, even mammals. Not wanting to quell their eagerness, I said nothing.

We caught many live animals that day and continued to stop for roadkills. Each roadkill stop was accompanied by a thud on the top of the van. As we approached Cordele, Georgia, the van was heavily laden with a bizarre assortment of carcasses. I checked for buzzards in the rearview mirror. When we reached the traffic light in town, I was answering a question from a student in the back and probably going too fast. Someone shouted that the light had turned red. I stopped. Our payload did not.

We watched the armadillo slide across the intersection and stop in front of the walker of an elderly woman preparing to cross the street. A 6-foot gray rat snake slithered to a standstill alongside a patrol car that had stopped for the light on the other side. The street was littered with a high biodiversity of interesting, but very dead, critters. Our final observation was the corn snake dangling from the top of the van, its body swishing back and forth across the windshield.

As on any good field trip, the teacher learns as much as the students. That day, we all learned that dead armadillos moving 30 miles an hour slide a long way on a city street. Corn snakes make colorful windshield wipers. And Cordele has a small, polite police department that actually helped us pick up the carnage.

I couldn't possibly find Cordele again without a road map, and I'm sure some of the residents who remember our field trip are glad. I doubt they want another lesson in the educational value of roadkills

Whit Gibbons is professor of zoology and senior biologist at the University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory. If you have an environmental question or comment, email ecoviews@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Corn snakes make colorful windshield wipers | ECOVIEWS