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 the rabbit was short-lived. But 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.
I have run over my fair share of animals. A painted turtle. A squirrel or two. Three raccoons. A large dog. Some birds. I have few problems with this. Certainly I don't engage in popping prairie dogs with a sniper's rifle. I cannot expect myself or anybody else to make a significance in saving species. I do not ride a bicycle because cars pollute. This is the fallacy of environmentalism: that individual behavior will cause any significant improvements.
