Photo courtesy of Brewster Bartlett, a.k.a. Dr. Splatt

Unlike, say, lichen, road kill statistics don’t just grow on trees. Creating reliable data takes a team of dedicated researchers with an eye for detail and a nose for samples. Enter Brewster Bartlett, a ninth-grade teacher at Pinkerton Academy in Derry, New Hampshire. Since 1993, Bartlett, better known as Dr. Splatt, has been organizing, instructing, and inspiring just such a band of researchers—generations of them—first locally, and now all over the globe. Book of Odds’ Zachary Turpin asked Dr. Splatt about the RoadKill Project.

Who gave you the name “Dr. Splatt”?

The students, actually, came up with it. When I did the RoadKill Project, they said, why don’t you come up with a name? I didn’t know what to choose, so they said, “How about Dr. Splatt?” Which I thought was fantastic.

What gave you the idea for Project RoadKill?

It’s a long story. I was one of 40 people in New England selected for a National Science Foundation grant, at Simmons College in Boston, to learn to use email and integrate it into the classroom. In ’93, email was used by very few teachers, very few people, and we wanted teachers to use it to find out how powerful a tool it could be. The goal of the grant was to take an environmental issue and use email to get students excited about technology in the classroom. We trained on the email system for a week and as we trained, we also learned about environmental issues. The teachers were mostly biology teachers so they came up with lichen monitoring.

Lichen, as in the mossy, fungus-y…

Right, it grows on trees at a rate of about 2 millimeters a year. Can you imagine 9th graders coming back to a tree 6 months later, and “Oh, it grew a millimeter!” That doesn’t work very well. But when we left Simmons, that was the agreement: a lichen-watching project. I kept thinking this was not going to work, I’m not going to do this—I was very upset—when I saw a dead animal in the road. It was a skunk. I said, “Oh my God, I’ve got it! Why don’t we—” well, they monitored bear and deer, at the time, now they monitor moose—but I said, “why don’t we monitor other animals?”

I called Fish and Game to see if they did. They said no, and I asked, why not? They said they didn’t have the people power for it. This was it. I came up with the RoadKill Project right then.

Did it grab your students immediately, or were they squeamish? I would assume they love that stuff.

All of the students accepted it very quickly, it was other people who questioned what I was doing. [laughs]

It seems like road kill is a fact of life we tend to avoid thinking about.

Oh, a lot of people think about it, believe me. Every kid’s had the experience, whether his granny’s hit one or his father’s hit one or his mother’s hit one, a squirrel or what have you. We’ve all seen some sort of creature get hit and killed by a car. So I told my students we’re not going to touch the animals because of disease, but we’re going to count them. In ’93, we started counting animals on particular roads going in and out of Derry. And what happened? Oh my God, everything happened. The first thing was that the press came up. Crazy radio DJs who would like a story like this, but then newspapers and things I thought were worthwhile. That’s how the RoadKill Project got through the first year, and it’s still ongoing.

17 years, right?

17 years. I started the first Web page, believe it or not, in ’95. I saw my first Web page, and I said, “This is what needs to happen for the RoadKill Project.” The next year, we put it online. And it’s been up there ever since.

It’s all user content, anyone can contribute—

Right. And many people do. It teaches an activity. You can do a lot of things with this project. You can do math, you can do data analysis, you can figure out which roads are targets for some of the road kill, you can do all sorts of things. Once they get into it, they start to see the value of it.

What are the most common animals your students find?

It’s the squirrel. The grey squirrel. It accounts for about 50% of the animals killed—

Fifty percent?—

Fifty percent. Grey squirrel. A lot of people say, why are animals being killed on the road? Well, the populations of these animals are out of control because we are not hunting or trapping as much. Because of that, animal populations are growing rapidly. Animals are going to get killed by disease, or they’re going to die of starvation, or they’re going to die under a big wheel. Basically, the car is the new predator for a whole population of animals.

The automobile is a herd-thinner? How Darwinian.

[laughs] No, it’s a different theory. We are building more and more roads and we’re fragmenting areas with those roads. The more roads we put in, the more animals have to cross, because they’re after food or water or mating. They’ve had their trails for years. In fact, there’s an article out today about the wild turkey in Mexico. They’re afraid it is going to go extinct because it can’t get over the 18-foot-high US border wall. That’s similar to what we’ve done with our roads. The bottom line is, it could change the population dynamic.

Tell me about the “URP,” this category in your classification system.

An “urp” is an Unidentified Road Pizza. If it’s dark, if it’s a blob on the road, nobody knows what it is: it’s an URP.

What do you hope your students take away from all this?

The kids are aware of road kill, but I’d like them to think about what we can do to minimize it. What can we do to roads, for example? It’s already being looked at, by the way. They’re putting in culverts and things like that. The New Hampshire Department of Transportation has put 3 culverts in and is monitoring the number of animals that go through the culverts instead of over the road. Or in Chicago, because of a rising deer population, insurance companies are starting to investigate incidences of deer hit by cars, since accidents, each of which might run to thousands of dollars, end up costing them quite a bit. Plus safety: with the big moose population we’re having in New Hampshire right now—we have an estimated population of 5,000 moose—you know, you hit a moose, you’re not going to walk away. You’re going to walk away injured, or you’re going to be dead because those suckers are anywhere between 1,000 and 1,300 pounds—and what happens is, when you hit the moose, they fall over the hood and fly in through the windshield. Then you’re in trouble.

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