More wildlife getting helped across the highway

Mike Stuckey Senior news editor • Profile • E-mail

REDMOND, Wash. - Quick: Why did the grizzly bear cross the road? Yes, just like the chicken in the old joke, he needed to get to the other side. But in these days of 70 mph interstates crammed with two-ton SUVs and semi trucks, biologists and highway planners have a more urgent question: How the heck is Yogi going to get there?

Around the globe, humans are rapidly and radically expanding their efforts to help their wild friends get over and under highways more safely. In the United States, such projects crisscross the map: Washington state to Florida, Massachusetts to Southern California. The furry, feathered and scaled beneficiaries include everything from elk to turtles.

“There is a certain movement out there, and there certainly is money being spent,” says Dr. Jodi Hilty, a landscape ecologist with the Bozeman, Mont.-based Wildlife Conservation Society.

A list of U.S. wildlife-crossings includes increasingly elaborate — and expensive — projects in a number of states:

• At the top in scope and cost is a 15-mile expansion along Interstate 90 in the heart of the Washington Cascades. Still in the planning stages, one vision for the seven-year project would incorporate 14 animal passageways, adding $113 million to its final cost, potentially accounting for a third of the entire price tag.
• A 56-mile reconstruction of U.S. Highway 93 currently under way between Evaro and Polson, Mont., on the Flathead Indian reservation includes more than 40 wildlife crossings, adding about $9 million to the $133 million project.
• Eight alligator underpasses are part of a recently awarded $148 million contract to rebuild 4.5 miles of Highway 1 in the Florida Keys. And Florida, already successful in using crossings to reduce highway deaths of the endangered panthers that roam the Everglades, has now allocated $125,000 to see if a solution can be found to save thousands of turtles from being flattened by cars on U.S. Highway 27 at Lake Jackson near Tallahassee.

The crossing structures range from small culverts beneath a roadway for reptiles to overpasses 100 feet wide or more, planted with trees and other vegetation to match the pieces of the forest they connect. In some cases, creating connections is just a matter of raising and extending bridges that are already crossing streams and rivers to include adjacent pathways.

Despite what appears to be a sudden flurry of activity, “it took a lot of time for it to reach a fever pitch,” says Trisha White, director of the Habitat and Highways Program for Washington, D.C.-based Defenders of Wildlife. “I’ve been working on this issue for five years and I can see a tremendous difference.”

The new field of 'road ecology'
White and others say that difference is owed partly to the emerging discipline of “road ecology” and a growing body of data that shows the crossing structures work, and partly to more federal money aimed at reducing the environmental impacts of road projects.

Dr. Anthony P. Clevenger of Montana State University’s Western Transportation Institute is one of the wildlife-crossing field’s leading researchers. For years, he has studied the use of wildlife crossings and fencing in Canada’s Banff National Park, a 2,500-square-mile wilderness bisected by the Trans-Canada Highway, which boasts “the only large-scale complex of wildlife mitigation passage structures in the world.” Park officials say their “exceptionally diverse” crossing structures and the “world’s longest, year-round monitoring program” put them in a league of their own.

Clevenger’s research has found Banff’s efforts to be “highly effective in reducing wildlife-vehicle collisions,” according to the park’s Web site. “The mitigation measures have resulted in more than an 80 percent reduction in all wildlife road-kills, and more than 95 percent reduction in road-kills for ungulate (hooved) species.”

And while few things tug at human heartstrings like Rocky Raccoon-turned-pancake or Bambi’s battered body in the ditch, “road-kills of large predators and certain reptiles and amphibians can be highly significant” in ecological terms, writes Dr. Richard T.T. Forman of Harvard, a pioneer in the burgeoning field of “road ecology.” Among species like Minnesota wolves, Florida panthers and Spanish lynx, already low in numbers and slow to reproduce, just a few fatal encounters with vehicles can be disastrous for their populations, says Forman.

Larger problem: A disconnect
But highway construction creates larger problems of degraded habitat and “the barrier effect that reduces landscape connectivity,” Forman says. When roads and freeways chop a species’ territory up, they create a host of problems for the animals, who need freedom of movement to find food and mates, escape predators and make seasonal migrations.

The jury is still out on how well wildlife crossings address the overall issue of habitat connectivity and if they are truly cost-effective, although there is positive data. “In spite of these valuable kernels of information, gaping holes in our knowledge of functional wildlife crossing systems remain,” the Banff Web site acknowledges.

Despite the validation that his often-quoted research offers, Clevenger told MSNBC.com that a larger factor in the current rush to incorporate wildlife crossings in highway projects is the bottom line.

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