About This Blog: Researching Roadkill

So, by the time this is posted, we should be already in the rental car and on our way up to Maine. But we did want to make sure we put a little blurb on here about what we're doing on this trip. While we'd scheduled this as an adventure just for the two of us to enjoy and spend time together, we knew we wanted to try and do something with it. That's part of the reason why we set up this blog, so we would at least be chronicling our journey and sharing the experience with others. But we also wanted to try and provide something positive for the world outside of ourselves - some sort of small part to make the world a little bit of a better place.

On a practice ride through a wildlife refuge, we noticed quite a bit of roadkill, which seemed like something that shouldn't really be happening in such a place. After some talk between the two of us, we figured that maybe we could track and discuss our own experiences with roadkill and living wildlife on the trip, comparing tallies of the two. Well, as it turns out, there's actually already a research project tracking this sort of thing, organized through Adventurers & Scientists for Conservation. Awesome, right?

Once we learned about this, we signed up to provide data for their Roadkill Project, which is partnered with UC Davis' Road Ecology Center. There's a mobile app we use to take photographs of roadkill we find, note our observations (road type, speed limit, animal, etc), and upload it to their dataset. It'll automatically register the GPS metadata, too. So that's all pretty exciting, and hopefully we can get more involved with ASC on this project as the months progress. It's important to remember that even though roads can feel like they aren't wilderness, they are still very much living spaces enmeshed with the ecology surrounding them.

Because we'll be on the road a great deal, we'll be posting blog updates via the Blogger mobile app. This could lead to messier postings, since I can't access the HTML to correct for any formatting weirdness that may occur, but we'll see. But we've got a nice little GoPro camera for the trip, so hopefully we'll have lots of pictures and videos to upload. A GoPro made sense because it has built in wireless capabilities, doesn't take up space, and is easily mountable. I'm also hoping to update the google map that spans the top of the blog with our location at the end of each day. Currently, only our starting point of Bar Harbor is marked, so it's kind of boring. In a few weeks though, it should be a bit more interesting.

So that's that. Wish us luck everyone!