How does one relearn how to see something so common yet gruesome that it has become second nature to ignore it? For Stronza, the answer lies in art.
But Amanda Stronza, an anthropologist and professor in ecology and conservation biology at Texas A&M University, thinks we need to stop being so blithe about the fate of wildlife.
The corpses of animals dot American streets. Every day on my 30-minute commute along the forest-flanked highways of southern Connecticut, I see a body or two of a struck deer, squirrel, raccoon, or the occasional cat or dog. Because this is so common — each year American cars kill more than one million large animals, 340 million birds, and billions of pollinating insects, according to Ben Goldfarb’s book “Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet” — most people don’t give this carnage too much attention. My eyes glance at a dead animal on the road before snapping back to the yellow lines ahead. Better not to think about it.
When she spots a dead animal on the road, she pulls over and, using a blanket she always carries in her car, lifts it off the road. Then she creates a memorial for it. She decorates the body in a roadside mandala using pieces of its habitat, such as flowers, seeds, leaves, grass, and rocks. She then shares an image of the memorial on Instagram, on her website, and in art exhibits. Beneath each image she writes a few paragraphs about the specific encounter. She has created memorials for hundreds of animals, from squirrels, raccoons, and snakes to honey badgers, bobcats, and hornbills.
A memorial Stronza made for a skunk. In a post on March 4, 2023, she wrote: “I know it looks like the flowers are floating above her. I believe they were. Somehow holding her, in the bright soft of the new spring.” Courtesy of Amanda Stronza
Each memorial is unique: wisps of dandelion seeds circling a cardinal, yellow and red spring flowers on the neck and horns of a stag, tufts of Spanish moss resting beneath the head of a red-tailed hawk, dried flowers and straw creating a nest around a skunk. She covers the animal’s often gory wounds, Stronza says, not to sugarcoat death but rather to “invite viewers to dare to look at the beauty of who [these animals] were when they were alive.”
While the immense statistics of roadkill are mind-numbing, nothing is numb about Stronza’s words. She describes picking early spring wild phloxes and placing them on the soft fur of a skunk she lifted from a roadside. She writes about how she honored two baby blue jays who fell from their nest onto a busy street in Austin, their mother still flying down to feed them even as they were moments from death. Under a memorial for a rat snake, she wrote, “Death shows me who we are, all of us, and how we are connected.”
A memorial for a cardinal, posted on April 21, 2024. Stronza wrote: “I will never understand how a being as light as a bird, as free as a cardinal, can be struck by a car, can be yanked from the sky, can fall still to the ground, can die alone on the road, can be left in the noise, ignored on the asphalt, invisible as she lies there, holding her last breath, so tiny in her bones, so delicate in her beauty, upside down now, unable to stand, unable to fly, losing her last breath, faltering again now, falling forever, surrendering to the pavement, her last place. The last place she should be.” Courtesy of Amanda Stronza
Stronza has dedicated her career to understanding and supporting sustainable human-wildlife coexistence. She cofounded a nonprofit organization, aptly called Ecoexist, which aims to support both humans and elephants in northern Botswana, the home of the largest free-roaming population of elephants on the planet. When it comes to the subjects of her roadside art, she prefers the term “road-killed animals” to “roadkill,” which she thinks is demeaning.
A memorial for a squirrel in Austin, Texas, posted on June 27, 2024. Courtesy of Amanda Stronza
She says the practice was inspired by Barry Lopez’s “Apologia,” a book describing his experiences pulling killed animals off the road during a road trip. Stronza made her first memorial in 2019 when she saw a dead squirrel on a running trail in downtown Austin, Texas. She was struck by how people streamed past the dead body as if it didn’t exist. She felt compelled to honor the creature’s beauty and show that it was an individual and not merely “just another dead squirrel.”
Stronza says she isn’t out to make drivers feel guilty. She knows that accidents happen, and she herself has killed animals on the road. Rather, she says, she hopes the memorials will alter our belief that the value of our lives and those of our pets outweigh the value of the lives of wildlife. “We love our cats and our dogs like family,” Stronza says. “Part of my hope in creating these memorials . . . is [that people will] consider that maybe the armadillo is part of our family too.” And just maybe, Stronza hopes, that once we see these animals as more than dispensable objects we will drive and live more sensitively.
A memorial for a young bobcat found in Bastrop, Texas, posted on Sept. 19, 2022. “I’m sorry, little one,
