Your Scribe has been bouncing along the blue highways of cabin country during the past week, and it has occurred to me that the nature of road kill has changed.

Not Road Kill, as in the chain of restaurants that momentarily thrived in the '90s in such outposts as Greenville and North Conway, N.H.

Nor do I mean Road Kill, the rock band, that opened for numerous acts but never came alive itself.

No, I mean the dead critters we see splattered on the roads.

To wit, there are fewer mangled turtles, frogs and snakes than there used to be.

Does this mean that such creatures are beginning to disappear?

Certainly there are fewer turtles.

In the past - and I am talking at least a decade ago - you couldn't travel a country road more than a few miles without encountering a late tortoise.

And there would be numerous cousins visible next to the road, presumably having learned a lesson.

Now it is rare to see dead turtles.

(An aside: I listen to Red Sox games on rural radio, and my station doesn't have enough ads to fill. So they use public service announcements. One such PSA is running this week, and it urges drivers to be alert for the slow-moving turtles. It even gives instructions on how to move a snapping turtle off the road. This initiative to protect turtles seems to support my point).

My unscientific observations also suggest there are fewer frogs around.

Frogs used to be plentiful on the roadways after a rain but now they are not often seen, either on the pavement or on the dirt driveway leading to my cabin.

Snakes?

I am OK with not seeing them, dead or alive.

A shift in the demographics of dead creatures does not mean that drivers in Maine have not been involved in collisions with wildlife.

According to the Department of Transportation, between 2002-2004, there were 10,400 collisions between moving vehicles and deer in the state.

And there were 2,009 crashes pitting motorist vs. moose.

Both are high numbers, and in some cases the leggy moose gave as much as it got.

Your Scribe has not unearthed any DOT statistics dedicated to high-speed interactions between moving vehicles and turtles. Or frogs.

But anecdotal evidence suggests that the population of these creatures is falling, and I am wondering why.

Do any readers know?

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