The Curious Case of the Italian Missing Roadkill

I spent the better part of the day traversing Liguria and Tuscany, climbing into the Apuan Alps before descending once more to the Ligurian coast. My objective was not scientific, but by day’s end I found myself making observations worthy of a naturalist.

The principal finding was negative.

Despite hundreds of kilometers of careful observation, I failed to document a single specimen of Roadkillus europaeus. Not one squirrel compressed into a two-dimensional proposition. No snake rendered into an accidental bas-relief. No fox, skunk, raccoon, opossum or armadillo in varying stages of philosophical reflection. In North America, roadkill is so dependable that one could almost estimate the distance traveled by the diversity of flattened fauna. Here, nothing. The asphalt was immaculate, as though every passing automobile had signed a non-aggression pact with the animal kingdom.

The absence became more intriguing as the day progressed.

It was not simply that there were no dead animals. There appeared to be no live ones either.

No squirrels ricocheting through the trees. No deer hesitating at the forest’s edge. No rabbits making impulsive career decisions. No bear, no fox, no hedgehog. Apart from birds and insects, the landscape appeared to have been surrendered almost entirely to Homo sapiens.

The explanation, I later learned, is historical rather than biological. This is a landscape that has been cultivated, hunted, terraced, quarried and inhabited for more than two millennia. Wild boar, roe deer, wolves and foxes still exist, but in comparatively modest numbers, are largely nocturnal, and have acquired the good sense to avoid humans whenever possible. Should one of them lose an argument with an automobile, municipal authorities apparently remove the evidence with remarkable efficiency, preserving the comforting fiction that nature and modern transportation coexist without incident.

Toward late afternoon, however, I finally identified one large mammal flourishing in extraordinary abundance.

The Panda.

Initially I was delighted. Here at last was a species displaying remarkable ecological success. Pandas occupied medieval piazzas, mountain villages, seaside promenades and supermarket parking lots. They traveled singly and in family groups. Their coloration varied, though white remained common. They demonstrated extraordinary adaptability to steep terrain and narrow streets, and exhibited little apparent fear of humans.

Closer examination forced a revision of my field notes. The Panda is not, in fact, a mammal.

It is an automobile.

Curiously, the locals dispense with its formal taxonomic designation and refer to it simply as “La Panda,” as though no clarification were required. The name honors a bear native to the bamboo forests of China—an animal with no discernible evolutionary interest in the Apennines. Yet while the biological panda remains famously endangered, its Italian namesake has colonized virtually every available habitat from the Ligurian coast to the Tuscan hills.

Perhaps this is Europe’s quiet achievement. It has not eliminated wildlife so much as curated it. The truly wild creatures have withdrawn into the forests, leaving behind names, symbols and representations. The quarries yield marble instead of forests, sculpture occupies the piazzas where trees might once have stood, and the Panda has become the continent’s most successful visible mammal despite possessing neither fur nor pulse.

I remain optimistic.

Somewhere in these mountains there is undoubtedly an actual squirrel. It has merely demonstrated a level of discretion that its North American relatives have never considered worth acquiring.