When I focused my eyes from the rear-view mirror to the road, a kit fox, small and brown was in front of the truck. I swerved, broke hard and looked in the rearview mirror again. David Quammen compares man's development to the creation of island bio-zones. Highways across Montana, for example, may create barriers to long-evolved migration patterns for mammals, who find the well-traveled routes impassable.
Passenger pigeons, he describes, once the most populous bird species, migrated along the Atlantic Seaboard in a collective of three billion. In the twentieth century, when the atlantic megapolis began to take hold, North Americans grew tired of 3 billion bird's shit and literally, shot them to extinction. A highway of sorts.
Somehow, the kit fox made it between my tires, and dazed, walked off into the flats. My guilt for almost hitting the kit-fox lasted the entire five hours to Los Angeles. Really, the two species are quite similar in terms of their biology. What differentiates them is availability - the San Joaquin Kit Fox is endangered, and prone to coming out the back end of cars. It is an isolated species, profoundly unique and rare.
