splat

I was driving to work yesterday on the Dulles Toll Road and realized that there was something in the fast lane that I needed to avoid... it turned out it was a deer's leg, followed closely by parts of the deer's ass, and followed closely again by another dead deer, this one on the hard shoulder.

I know that the local deer population is a bit out of hand but this takes the cake. At the toll booth by the office something else had been severely flattened. 'Tis the season though; just as spring brings a patchwork of flattened juvenile raccoons and possums, so does the autumn bring dead deer. Sometimes I think people shoot them in their yard and dump off the body by the side of the road...

In any case, Virginia's Department Of Transportation had managed to do some cleaning -- they had moved the intact half of the dead deer to the hard shoulder next to the whole dead deer. They're probably still arguing about who has to actually haul the carcasses away. Not a job that I would want.