Lana Pelletier of Allagash still remembers the day about 20 years ago when she was driving with a visitor to the tiny St. John Valley town — and they met up with a herd of bison in the road.
“I was in the middle of telling her not to believe all the weird stories she’d heard about Allagash when we met the herd [of bison] running in the opposite lane toward us,” Pelletier recalled. “My cousin was driving the pickup truck following them and my brother was on the [truck’s] hood. ‘Never mind,’ I told her, ‘It’s weird.’”
A bison roundup in the middle of the north Maine woods is an extremely rare occurrence, but in an agricultural state like Maine that is more rural than urban, vehicle-livestock encounters are going to happen.
In the case of the Allagash bison, the large animals belonged to Pelletier’s grandfather and had escaped from their enclosed pasture.
When it comes to livestock, animal escape artists come with the territory, according to Matthew Randall, agriculture compliance supervisor with The Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry.
And sooner or later, they are going to find their way onto a Maine road.
Neither Randall’s department nor the Maine Department of Transportation keeps statistics on vehicle-livestock collisions, specifically, but according to the MDOT’s online crash query tool, in 2016 there were 158 crashes involving “all other animals.”
The County is pleased to feature content from our sister company, Bangor Daily News. To read the rest of “Maine roads: where the bison, pigs and goats have been known to roam,” an article by contributing Bangor Daily News staff writer Julia Bayly, please follow this link to the BDN online.
