Every year, thousands of animals die on massive roads. There is a lasting impact.

Tiffany Nhan remembers a time when she and her partner were driving home to Worcester after a night in Providence. They had just eaten at a nice Italian restaurant and had a few minutes to drive down Route 146.

Then suddenly the deer jumped across the median and into their lane. Nhan braked. But at 50 miles per hour and with little time to react, it wasn’t enough.

The deer died on impact, and the collision destroyed Nhan’s car. Soon a state trooper and a tow truck pulled up. So did several other drivers who wanted to take the deer home for a meal even though state law prohibited it.

“It was really sad. (The deer) just died and now it will be dinner,” she remembered thinking about it at the time. “I just walked up to the deer. I kind of prayed for the deer, hoping that whatever happened in its afterlife would be okay.”

Nhan’s experience this summer is one that many other Massachusetts drivers can relate to, and even more may benefit from it in the coming months. In autumn, during the mating season, deer are less careful when crossing roads. This leads to more animals being hit, more injured drivers, and more work for those tasked with clearing road accident victims.

Last year there were at least 3,886 deer attacks,
– according to MassDOT data. That’s more than in any year since 2002, driven by growing deer numbers in Massachusetts, scientists say. Last year, 146 collisions with deer resulted in injuries.

Overall, the odds of filing an insurance claim following a collision with an animal in the commonwealth are 1 in 85, which ranks 16th in the nation, according to State Farm.

Scott Jackson, a wildlife biologist at UMass Amherst, noted that cars are deadly to many animals other than deer, from red foxes and bobcats to turtles and salamanders. He pointed out that porcupines are particularly susceptible to road collisions because they walk slowly and react to threats by freezing and erecting their spines – which, of course, is no match for a 4,000-pound car.

Death can have a lasting effect. Jackson said that because porcupines only breed once a year and females only give birth to one baby, the population cannot recover quickly.

“Like porcupines, turtles generally live a long time. They reproduce late in life,” he said. “When cars start taking a toll on the turtle population, it could lead to a collapse (of the species) from which it won’t be able to recover.”

In addition to the impact of cars on the population, scientists have found that road accident victims are worth preventing simply because of their brutal nature. Jackson said for every dead animal seen on the road, there are likely a large number of animals that suffer “ghastly” injuries, such as crushed legs, and crawl into the forest before ultimately dying.

Some people don’t even make it This far.

One September morning, a driver hit a deer in a quiet residential neighborhood in Sherborn. Sean Killeen, the city’s director of public works, said a police officer arrived on the scene and found the deer alive but too injured to move. The officer suppressed it with a gunshot. Killeen’s team then had to remove the body.

Employees often deal with road accident victims several times a week. They dump dead animals in a place in the urban forest that is far enough from homes that people won’t come across the decomposing bodies.

“Sometimes road deaths are really disgusting,” Killeen said. “A couple of guys will come back and throw up or throw up on the side of the road.”

Wildlife conservation experts attribute the high road deaths to the amount of asphalt across the state. During the interview, Laura Marx, a climate solutions scientist at the Nature Conservancy in Massachusetts, displayed a map she had made in which all of the state’s roads were marked in purple. If you compare this to MassDOT crash data, the picture is clear: the more roads in an area, the more fatalities.

Many animals need large tracts of land to forage, mate and migrate, Marx said. This is especially important now, when climate change is forcing some species to seek other habitats. As a result, roads that animals cannot cross act as barriers, isolating populations and leading to inbreeding.

“So animals can’t find mates with genetic diversity. Over time, the population becomes weaker and smaller, and the probability of extinction is much greater,” Marks said.

Some states, including Montana, Colorado and Florida, have tried to reduce road deaths by building huge wildlife crossings over and under busy roads in remote areas. Massachusetts officials say the Commonwealth’s suburban landscape is not suitable for such a solution.

However, officials say they are trying to make the roads safe for animals. For example, there is a small underpass underneath a very busy section of Route 2 in Concord that was installed in 2016 and looks like a tunnel.

As MassDOT biologist Dave Paulson and MassWildlife biologist Tim McGuire walked down the corridor one September morning, they noticed signs of deer, raccoons and a bobcat.

“No one probably realizes there is a wildlife crossing here,” Paulson said, noting that the underpass is near a stream where the animals travel. “It really creates landscape connectivity.”

Paulson said there are several similar crossings across the state. Authorities are also trying to help animals avoid cars by redesigning water paths under roads.

Jackson, the UMass Amherst biologist, said other solutions should include lower speed limits and resisting the temptation to add additional lanes to existing roads. Not only will the animals be preserved, he said, but drivers will avoid injuries, damage to cars and the emotional trauma of running over wildlife.

“It’s really up to the state to increase investment to provide the funding to make these changes,” Jackson said. “When we think about impacts on ecosystems, it’s hard to imagine anything having a bigger impact than a road.”