Carcass removals are logged by species, location to the marker post and date, because it is a performance measure and because the ecologists want the data. Marker 182 gives us a hare a week, in a county where the hare count is in single figures.
I run a maintenance gang on a stretch of motorway. Nineteen years.
What we log and why anybody cares.
Every carcass removed goes on the sheet: species, direction, lane or verge, marker post, date and time, and the initials of the person who picked it up.
It is a contract deliverable, because animal removal is one of the response times we are measured on. It also goes to the ecology team, who use it to work out where things are crossing, and that is what pays for the level of detail.
Species matters. Badger, fox, deer, rabbit, hare, and the birds separately. My lads know the difference and if they are not sure they photograph it.
Marker posts are every hundred metres and they are how everything on a motorway is located.
Marker 182 northbound gives us a hare.
About one a week. Two hundred and forty of them since I started counting properly in 2021, and there are more in the older sheets.
There are not two hundred and forty hares in this county.
That is not me being dramatic. The county mammal group publishes a record and brown hare here is a scarce species. Their last survey put the population in the low hundreds across the whole county and they treat a confirmed sighting as worth writing down.
We produce one a week off a hundred metres of verge.
What is around marker 182.
Arable on both sides, which is right for hares. A hedge, a farm track that goes under the motorway at 180 through an old accommodation bridge, and nothing else.
The fence is a standard motorway fence and it is in good condition, and I have walked it with the fencing contractor twice.
What has been done.
The ecology team came out in 2022 and put four trail cameras on that stretch for six weeks, facing the fence line and the accommodation bridge.
They recorded foxes, badgers, a lot of rabbits, two roe deer and one polecat, which caused some excitement.
No hares. Not one, in six weeks, on four cameras, on a stretch that was producing a hare a week on our sheets while the cameras were there.
Their report says the carcass record is not consistent with the camera survey and recommends that recording practice be reviewed.
What reviewing our recording practice looked like.
I did it, because I would rather find out my lads cannot tell a hare from a rabbit than have somebody else find it out.
Hares are half again the size of a rabbit with black tipped ears and long back legs and you do not confuse them if you have picked up either.
I had everybody photograph every one for three months. Forty one photographs. I sent them to the ecology team without comment.
Their answer is that all forty one are brown hare.
The other thing in those photographs, which I did not ask about and which I noticed myself going through them in the office.
They are all in the same condition.
A carcass on a motorway is not tidy. That is the job and I am not going to describe it. What you get, over a week, is everything from a fresh one at six in the morning to something a fortnight old that the crows have had.
Every one of the forty one is fresh. Intact, unmarked apart from the injury, no scavenging, and not one of them has been run over twice, which on a motorway is what happens to everything within about four minutes.
They are lying in the same place, on the verge about two metres off the hard shoulder, at the base of the marker post.
What we do.
We pick them up, we log them, we bag them, and they go where they go.
The response time on 182 is the best on my stretch, which is a joke among the lads and which I have never found funny.
The ecology team have stopped asking. The last email on the subject is from 2023 and it thanks me for the photographs.
What I do.
The stretch gets walked once a week and 182 is on it.
The one thing I changed is that I do 182 myself now, and I do it with the vehicle parked ahead of it rather than behind, so I am walking back towards the van and not away from it.
That started in the autumn of 2022. I had a lad of nineteen on with me, first year, good worker, and he picked one up at 182 on a Tuesday morning and carried it back and put it in the bag and said nothing about it.
He came to me in the yard at the end of the shift and asked me whether it had been warm when I had done them.
I said what do you mean.
He said it was warm, and it was six in the morning in October and there was frost on the grass round it, and he had put his hand flat on it in the bag afterwards to check, and it was still warm when we got back to the depot forty minutes later.