Thanks Gary for another great read!
I think my worst roadkill incident was shortly after picking up Hecht Peter who was visiting me for a month of NZ fly fishing, coming from Easy Germany. A very nice guy who, despite being a professional body builder in his youth, wouldn't hurt a fly.
After picking him up from the airport we proceeded to drive to Lake Benmore quite a ways from Christchurch. As we were approaching the lake we were driving down a gravel road, foot to the metal, in the Red Herring. It was dark and a wallaby jumped across in front of the headlights and we collided. Wallabies were introduced to NZ some years back and there is a small population of them still. One less.
Unfortunately the wallaby was still alive but in a bad way. So the most humane thing to do was to drive over it a again to put it out of its misery. Which I did.
Unfortunately this didn't work, and so I had to drive over the poor thing a third time to finally kill it. And so Peter was introduced to NZ. He'd never seen a wallaby before and I explained that they're not native and he was lucky to see one because sightings are pretty rare.
I have another interesting story too. Back when I was around 16 or 17 I used to cycle to the local reservoir. There was one spot on the very edge of town where I found a roadkill squirrel. So I did what we would all do and chopped off the tail. Amazingly the next day I found another and in the same place, so chopped the tail off too. And then on the third day I was lucky enough to find a third! All in the same place. Now I had three squirrel tails from the same spot. I only took the tails however and left the rest of the carcass there. But each day the previous tail-less carcass had gone. I've often wondered what the person who buried the squirrel bodies had to make of finding three tail-less road-kill squirrels outside their home
Cheers, Paul