Roadkill Is Put To Work Along Md. Highways

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Making Roadkill Useful

Area motorists kill scores of deer every week. In Frederick County, state highway workers have begun hauling dead deer to compost stalls to turn them into mulch.

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In the 1960s and 1970s, state police in Frederick would lash deer carcasses to the trunks of their cruisers and haul them to the Catoctin Wildlife Preserve and Zoo, where they were fed "primarily to the big cats," said Richard Hahn, director of the preserve.

"We almost always got the animals the same day they were hit," Hahn said, "sometimes within hours."

Hahn said he doesn't feed his big cats roadkill deer anymore because of concern about viruses, bacteria and parasites.

In 2001, Maryland highway workers in Carroll began experimenting with deer composting. Workers there use front-end loaders to rotate the composting piles, which keeps temperatures high by feeding oxygen into the mixture. Workers then cover any exposed body parts, such as leg bones, with the wood chip-manure mixture, said Jim Jones, a manager in Carroll.

After six to eight months of composting and curing, the deer are reduced to large bones such as skulls and hips, Jones said. The big bones are sifted out, for aesthetic reasons, before the compost is applied along roadways, Jones said.

As of late last year, the Carroll operation had composted more than 3,360 deer and applied 180 cubic yards of deer compost, some of it on wildflowers in the median of Route 295, just south of Route 100.

In many jurisdictions in the region, highway workers haul dead deer to landfills or have private contractors pick them up.

In Loudoun and Prince William counties, contractors take carcasses to local landfills, said Mike Salmon, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Transportation. In Fairfax County, landfills don't accept roadkill, so contractors haul carcasses to the Prince William dump. In recent nine-month stretches, haulers picked up 460 dead animals in Fairfax and 996 deer in Loudoun.

Along the George Washington Memorial Parkway, dead deer are hauled to an undisclosed location in a wooded area. "Essentially, the deer become part of the forest again," said Dana Dierkes, a spokeswoman.

In Montgomery County, dead deer are placed in a refrigerated facility in Gaithersburg and then picked up by Valley Proteins Inc. At its headquarters in Winchester, Va., the company places the carcasses into a cooking unit the size of a backyard swimming pool -- 40 feet long, 15 feet wide and 10 feet deep. Two products are produced: a protein meat and bone meal, used as chicken feed, and a fatty oil, which can be used as a lubricant or alternative fuel, said Mike Smith, vice president and co-owner of the company.

State officials have said they are planning to operate an incinerator in the Frostburg area, in Western Maryland, to burn roadkill.

At Cornell University, Jean Bonhotal, has studied roadkill composting for 11 years. Among her research projects: inserting sacks of pathogen-laden material into composting roadkill deer and demonstrating that composting reduces them to safe levels. Bonhotal, a vegetarian, holds roadkill composting seminars and publishes guides.