If you ever find yourself in Oregon and craving roadkill for dinner, a social media group offers tips on where to find fresh meat.
The Oregon Roadkill Recovery Facebook group offers up-to-the minute reports of where deer have been smacked along that state’s streets and highways. And particularly thoughtful members will even pin the locations of carcasses.
“Deer down. Looked fresh wish I had time,” read one post from Dec. 30 – which also included a pin of the unfortunate critter’s exact location.
Wyoming Has An App For That
There doesn’t appear to be a similar social media group in Wyoming, where it’s also legal to collect and eat roadkill.
The Wyoming Department of Transportation and Wyoming Game and Fish have an app for that.
The agencies launched the 511 app in 2022, and it includes updated reports of roadkill sites in Wyoming.
However, you can’t legally just jump out of your vehicle, grab a dead big game animal and take off with it. You must get a carcass tag from Game and Fish. But luckily, the tags are available through the app.
Lander resident Matt Gubanich, his wife and some friends tagged, collected, butchered and cooked up some steaks from carcass of a freshly-road killed whitetail deer in 2023.
On Friday, he told Cowboy State Daily that he can appreciate what the Oregon Facebook is doing, but in Wyoming “the 511 app is already doing that.”
Trusted Sources
Gubanich, who is an avid hunter, hasn’t collected any roadkill since then. But he knows several people, including some non-hunters, who have.
In Wyoming, people seem to rely on word-of-mouth through a network of friends to find roadkill carcasses, he said.
And that works well, because “being able to trust the source” is important.
In the case of the whitetail deer carcass he, his wife and his friends retrieved, they heard the deer getting struck by a vehicle on a nearby highway and were on the scene almost immediately afterward.
Just randomly rolling up on a carcass and assuming it would be safe to collect and eat isn’t a good idea, he said. There’s no way of knowing how long it had been there, if it had parasites or was otherwise contaminated.
So, a Facebook group like Oregon Roadkill Recovery must rely on trust between its members, Gubanich said.
“I don’t know how you would do that if it’s a network of strangers with a shared interest, as opposed to a network of friends that you know,” he said.
App, Facebook Group Might Work Together
Even for those who aren’t keen on eating roadkill, the 511 app serves a vital function, Gubanich said.
It helps keep WYDOT and Game and Fish informed about how many animals are getting killed along Wyoming’s roadways. That might help determine where future wildlife crossing projects are most needed, he said.
“Every roadkill animal I see, I report to 511, because I want the state to have good information on where animals are being killed,” he said.
And if a trusted network of roadkill connoisseurs ever launches a Facebook page similar to Oregon’s – it might complement the 511 app, Gubanich added.
“You could have that Facebook group helping to tell people where the animals are, but whoever was the first one there could get it cleared for collection through the 511 app,” he said.
Contact Mark Heinz at mark@cowboystatedaily.com
Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.
