THE R102 running alongside the TC Robertson Nature Reserve is a beautiful killing-field: Sometimes two, sometimes three lanes of poorly-laid asphalt traversed day and night by fast-moving traffic through verdant bush.
Instead of slowing to take in the beauty of the last patch of pristine indigenous coastal forest left in Scottburgh, we seize the opportunity of every overtaking lane to put foot and damn the hindmost!
I have no idea of the number of forest creatures that have died on this stretch of road. I do know it’s significant. I have been able, over the years, to save a miraculous few.
Two flap-necked chameleons, a single brown house snake, a spotted bush snake and a handful of guttural toads somehow managed to dodge the wheels of death and make their way to the relative calm of the centre line. Plucked from imminent squashing, they were safely released in the far depths of the reserve.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, haven’t been so lucky. Spotted eagle-owls, yellow-billed kites, banded mongooses, vervet monkeys, blue duiker and countless other wild birds, mammals – and especially reptiles and amphibians – have paid the ultimate price for trying to cross that road.
Take a walk on that pretty road – I dare you. Preferably armed with a big black bag to collect the rubbish that the filth of our consumer society tosses out of their vehicles and the municipality won’t deign to collect. But do be careful: face oncoming traffic and be prepared to leap for your life into the bush. It’s a racetrack out there.
The number of flattened, dried-out carcasses of road-kill victims carried to the verge – both original and successive (the creatures that attempt to scavenge off the freshly-killed and are themselves flattened) – is truly ghastly.
Our remaining wildlife, even in protected areas like TC Robertson Nature Reserve, has such a hard time surviving. We humans set snares, run packs of hunting dogs, abandon unwanted cats, set fires and generally treat their natural environment like a dump site. How sad it is that we kill them so effortlessly and efficiently on our roads too.
Please, folks: keep an eye out for wildlife on our roads, especially near natural areas. And if you do inadvertently run over an unfortunate creature, do stop and move the victim off the road so that its predators don’t suffer the same fate.
For more information on this significant threat to biodiversity, see the Endangered Wildlife Trust’s excellent website: roads@ewt.org.za.
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