|
For those of us who care passionately about wildlife, destroying an animal with one’s vehicle is a horrific, unforgettable experience. The glimpse of startled terror in the eye of a doomed deer haunts your dreams for years and years, while the sickening violence of the impact and the nightmarish duty to terminate the life of a flailing, mortally wounded animal is one of the grimmer aspects of our mechanized lives.
I can still entirely recall the instant I saw a sharp-shinned hawk appear before my windshield while barreling down I-65 in Tennessee many years ago; so intent was that perfected predator on the bird it was pursuing that it likely never noticed my SUV until it was too late. I was nearly arrested by a friendly trooper soon after, driving up and down the grassy median in a desperate attempt to locate the hawk and, I hoped without hope, take it to a wildlife rehabilitation center. I never found the body, and to this day make an annual gift to a raptor advocacy group as a kind of gnawing penance.
Such is the profusion of gas-gulping vehicles, of varicose freeways throttling and splicing our remaining open spaces, that normal wildlife behaviors everywhere have been severely impacted, disrupting migratory patterns and causing routine carnage across the country. A 2008 congressional study found that one in 20 reported motor vehicle collisions involved animals; every year these incidents cause as many as 26,000 injuries and 200 human deaths, at a cost of around $8.3 billion. And this grim tally is generally limited to those animals large enough to cause personal or mechanical harm: the toll on smaller mammals, reptiles and amphibians, to say nothing of insects such as the imperiled monarch butterfly, is infinitely greater, with some 340 million birds estimated to be killed on our roads each and every year.
Signage and lighting typically have only limited effectiveness in reducing collisions, but funneling the animals themselves through conduits over or under the raging highways has demonstrably reduced vehicle/animal accidents in parts of North America and Europe. Wildlife corridors are carefully planned to channel migrating or foraging animals through designated crossings using the local terrain to maximize the path’s ease of use for animals. Fencing on either side of the corridor steers deer and bears toward the crossing, moving them parallel to the highway before opening onto a bridge, tunnel or riparian area flowing under an elevated road.
Artificial corridors such as bridges and tunnels are made to resemble natural habitat as much as possible to draw animals through them, but these infrastructural projects are pricey and, given the state of roads and bridges throughout the US, less likely to win approval by transportation agencies than simpler, less expensive methods. To see what form this might take in our area I recently accompanied a group of DGIF biologists down the clangorous rush of I-81.
In southern Rockbridge and northern Botetourt Counties, the Blue Ridge and Allegheny ranges draw close together, offering a sometimes-fatal attraction to resident wildlife dependent upon the intact forests of these mountain slopes. We pulled off the southbound lane just before a mighty bridge spanning Buffalo Creek, which feeds into Colliers Creek, the Maury River and then the mighty James. Piling out we traipsed downhill in the blazing sun to the rushing water below, remarking on the invasive Sericea lespedeza proliferating on the hillside and straining to hear birdsong over the highway’s imperious rumble.
Buffalo Creek runs through a wooded area below the bridge’s span, and its merry chuckling and blazes of light amid the lush streamside vegetation provided a stark contrast to the forbidding concrete pillars and thunderous traffic of the bridge looming some 100 feet overhead.
Including myself there were seven of us all together: two DGIF biologists and a seasonal intern, a VDOT guide, a wildlife corridor expert flown in from Montana State’s Western Transportation Institute named Tony Clevenger, and Tony’s former advisor Mike Pelton, a professor emeritus of wildlife science at the University of Tennessee and a nationally renowned expert on bears. In fact it was the high toll on bears due to the dearth of potential crossings on I-81 in this area that first attracted Mike’s attention, and through the help of RACC VCC he has diligently worked to record their attempted passages across the howling highway here with camera traps, aerial footage and geographical data.
Employing roadkill analyses provided by VDOT and insurance companies, Pelton provided us with a chilling depiction of the unbelievable risks that are posed to the wildlife in this area that are simply trying to move to and from established habitats. Traffic on I-81 has tripled over the past 25 years and is expected to double again by 2030. That’s between 35,000 and 55,000 vehicles per day, every day, or 35-40 vehicles per minute, with 30 percent of them tractor-trailer rigs—not much room to maneuver, as so many animals have brutally discovered.
This lovely area, rolling and wooded, clasped in the mighty arms of adjacent mountain chains, was recently designated the Buffalo Creek-Purgatory Mountain Special Project Area by the Virginia Outdoors Foundation. The Virginia Natural Heritage Program has deemed it as having “High to Outstanding Ecological Integrity,” and 178,000 acres have been scientifically appraised as being ideal wildlife habitat.
“When evaluating Special Project Area nominations, VOF’s board of trustees considers several factors,” says spokesman Jason McGarvey. “Does the area have statewide natural, scenic, historic, agricultural or recreational benefits? Has it been identified in the Virginia Outdoors Plan, a locality’s comprehensive plan, or other resource planning documents? Do the local landowners, conservation groups, and government officials support the nomination? Can VOF play a meaningful role in its protection, and do we want to give special consideration to projects located there? In the case of the Buffalo Creek-Purgatory Mountain SPA, the answer to all of these questions was a resounding yes. This area includes one of the few intact wildlife corridors connecting the Alleghany and Blue Ridge Mountains. If this connection were to be broken by overdevelopment, it could further isolate and jeopardize a number of rare and imperiled species.”
The idea of wildlife corridors is nothing new, as wooded rivers and creeks have for centuries been crucial means of wildlife dispersal from remnant woodlands scattered between farms and towns. These natural throughways are often referred to as “ribbons of life” by conservationists; Mike Pelton wryly refers to highways as “ribbons of risk.” The connection of core habitats, such as the exceptional forestlands that bracket Buffalo Creek, allows for genetic exchange, for new blood to recharge the old, without which isolated subpopulations of deer and bear, turkey and bobcat, become inbred and static, and blink out one by one from disease and poor reproductive success.
Once designated and established, the careful protection and maintenance of a wildlife corridor is crucial to its long-term success. It becomes a matter of habituated faith for the local animal to come to rely upon the safe passage a corridor provides, and for continued use critters must be guided by both a lasting feeling of security as well as sturdy roadside fencing. The latter certainly seems to work well: in Florida, construction of a barrier to guide animals into a culvert corridor resulted in 93.5 percent reduction in roadkill, while increasing the total number of species using the corridor from 28 to 42. In the East, fences should be around six or seven feet high to keep jumpers like deer from crossing outside the corridor, while one-way ramps on the highway side of corridor fencing can give frantic animals a chance to regain the safety of the woods rather than plunging alongside and into traffic.
Tony Clevenger has broad experience in this particular field, having been involved in highway mitigation projects in Alberta, British Columbia, Quebec, Montana, Washington, Idaho and California. He points to the large, contiguous wildlife habitat juxtaposed with heavy traffic volume that make Buffalo Creek/I-81 and Afton Mountain/I-64 ideal corridor sites, noting that these areas “are critically important from a motorist safety and wildlife conservation standpoint, without a doubt.” I asked him how Virginia ranked with other states and countries in confronting the mounting havoc of wildlife/vehicle collisions. “Behind Europe but ahead of Canada,” he said. “Second place isn’t too bad. Some states are at the same level as Europe; Washington, Florida, Colorado, and New England are very well organized and are planning at a multistate level, and they have tremendous coordination and buy-in from state and municipal governments.” Having everyone on the same page—reducing collisions, saving lives and money—seems to characterize the successful participants in this growing movement.
Mulling my own agonized encounter with that sharpshin from long ago, I asked Clevenger how corridors might be designed to accommodate birds as well as terrestrials; the answer seems simple enough. “Planting roadside shrubs and trees that deflect bird flight high over the road rather than directly at grade level” is the easiest way to wean birds up and over traffic, and this too has been accomplished elsewhere: “In Florida they’ve put tall white poles on a bridge (simulating a fence or wall) which has been successful in decreasing mortality with a species of tern,” he said. VDOT already plants trees along our roadsides and medians—why not choose native species whose reach when grown will gently lift birds above the tumult below?
Placing corridors of life over or under our surging roadways is simply a no-brainer, a verified and effective method of reducing both human and wildlife fatalities and of saving millions of dollars in taxes and insurance premiums. Especially given the simplicity, ease and lack of expenditure of projects like Buffalo Creek, where a beautifully sited corridor is already in place and requires only a half mile of rudimentary fencing in both directions to become widely effective, it’s difficult to how imagine how informed opposition could be heard. Especially with Virginia’s healthy bear population, its exploding deer herds and the welcome reintroduction of elk to the Commonwealth, foresighted plans to allow natural wildlife migratory patterns to take place in contained, pre-designated areas are eminently sensible. We’d be stupid, frankly, not to do this.
The great writer and naturalist Barry Lopez published a small book a few years ago entitled Apologia, in which he describes his longstanding efforts to remove slain animals (porcupines, raccoons, pronghorns, badgers) from the rural roads of his native Oregon. This helps decrease the number of scavenging coyotes, bears and golden eagles that in performing their duties are often themselves destroyed, but Lopez performs these rituals for other reasons as well. “It is an act of respect,” he says, “a technique of awareness.”
Geologists and other scientists are debating a new term for where we are in the world today: the Anthropocene, an earthly eon permanently marked by humanity’s restless urge for global domination. Few items of life today are as necessary and ubiquitous as the automobile, but those open roads we love to traverse are gouged through the only homes of countless species of wildlife. If something as workable, inexpensive and proven as wildlife corridors can save lives, ours and theirs, and perhaps even ameliorate the guilt and shame of vehicular slaughter, there’s not one reason to delay in making our little corner of the Anthropocene a better place. As Lopez puts it, “We treat the attrition of lives on the road like we treat the attrition of lives in war: horrifying, unavoidable, justified. What is to be done with the desire for exculpation?”
Now we have our answer.
I can still entirely recall the instant I saw a sharp-shinned hawk appear before my windshield while barreling down I-65 in Tennessee many years ago; so intent was that perfected predator on the bird it was pursuing that it likely never noticed my SUV until it was too late. I was nearly arrested by a friendly trooper soon after, driving up and down the grassy median in a desperate attempt to locate the hawk and, I hoped without hope, take it to a wildlife rehabilitation center. I never found the body, and to this day make an annual gift to a raptor advocacy group as a kind of gnawing penance.
Such is the profusion of gas-gulping vehicles, of varicose freeways throttling and splicing our remaining open spaces, that normal wildlife behaviors everywhere have been severely impacted, disrupting migratory patterns and causing routine carnage across the country. A 2008 congressional study found that one in 20 reported motor vehicle collisions involved animals; every year these incidents cause as many as 26,000 injuries and 200 human deaths, at a cost of around $8.3 billion. And this grim tally is generally limited to those animals large enough to cause personal or mechanical harm: the toll on smaller mammals, reptiles and amphibians, to say nothing of insects such as the imperiled monarch butterfly, is infinitely greater, with some 340 million birds estimated to be killed on our roads each and every year.
Signage and lighting typically have only limited effectiveness in reducing collisions, but funneling the animals themselves through conduits over or under the raging highways has demonstrably reduced vehicle/animal accidents in parts of North America and Europe. Wildlife corridors are carefully planned to channel migrating or foraging animals through designated crossings using the local terrain to maximize the path’s ease of use for animals. Fencing on either side of the corridor steers deer and bears toward the crossing, moving them parallel to the highway before opening onto a bridge, tunnel or riparian area flowing under an elevated road.
Artificial corridors such as bridges and tunnels are made to resemble natural habitat as much as possible to draw animals through them, but these infrastructural projects are pricey and, given the state of roads and bridges throughout the US, less likely to win approval by transportation agencies than simpler, less expensive methods. To see what form this might take in our area I recently accompanied a group of DGIF biologists down the clangorous rush of I-81.
In southern Rockbridge and northern Botetourt Counties, the Blue Ridge and Allegheny ranges draw close together, offering a sometimes-fatal attraction to resident wildlife dependent upon the intact forests of these mountain slopes. We pulled off the southbound lane just before a mighty bridge spanning Buffalo Creek, which feeds into Colliers Creek, the Maury River and then the mighty James. Piling out we traipsed downhill in the blazing sun to the rushing water below, remarking on the invasive Sericea lespedeza proliferating on the hillside and straining to hear birdsong over the highway’s imperious rumble.
Buffalo Creek runs through a wooded area below the bridge’s span, and its merry chuckling and blazes of light amid the lush streamside vegetation provided a stark contrast to the forbidding concrete pillars and thunderous traffic of the bridge looming some 100 feet overhead.
Including myself there were seven of us all together: two DGIF biologists and a seasonal intern, a VDOT guide, a wildlife corridor expert flown in from Montana State’s Western Transportation Institute named Tony Clevenger, and Tony’s former advisor Mike Pelton, a professor emeritus of wildlife science at the University of Tennessee and a nationally renowned expert on bears. In fact it was the high toll on bears due to the dearth of potential crossings on I-81 in this area that first attracted Mike’s attention, and through the help of RACC VCC he has diligently worked to record their attempted passages across the howling highway here with camera traps, aerial footage and geographical data.
Employing roadkill analyses provided by VDOT and insurance companies, Pelton provided us with a chilling depiction of the unbelievable risks that are posed to the wildlife in this area that are simply trying to move to and from established habitats. Traffic on I-81 has tripled over the past 25 years and is expected to double again by 2030. That’s between 35,000 and 55,000 vehicles per day, every day, or 35-40 vehicles per minute, with 30 percent of them tractor-trailer rigs—not much room to maneuver, as so many animals have brutally discovered.
This lovely area, rolling and wooded, clasped in the mighty arms of adjacent mountain chains, was recently designated the Buffalo Creek-Purgatory Mountain Special Project Area by the Virginia Outdoors Foundation. The Virginia Natural Heritage Program has deemed it as having “High to Outstanding Ecological Integrity,” and 178,000 acres have been scientifically appraised as being ideal wildlife habitat.
“When evaluating Special Project Area nominations, VOF’s board of trustees considers several factors,” says spokesman Jason McGarvey. “Does the area have statewide natural, scenic, historic, agricultural or recreational benefits? Has it been identified in the Virginia Outdoors Plan, a locality’s comprehensive plan, or other resource planning documents? Do the local landowners, conservation groups, and government officials support the nomination? Can VOF play a meaningful role in its protection, and do we want to give special consideration to projects located there? In the case of the Buffalo Creek-Purgatory Mountain SPA, the answer to all of these questions was a resounding yes. This area includes one of the few intact wildlife corridors connecting the Alleghany and Blue Ridge Mountains. If this connection were to be broken by overdevelopment, it could further isolate and jeopardize a number of rare and imperiled species.”
The idea of wildlife corridors is nothing new, as wooded rivers and creeks have for centuries been crucial means of wildlife dispersal from remnant woodlands scattered between farms and towns. These natural throughways are often referred to as “ribbons of life” by conservationists; Mike Pelton wryly refers to highways as “ribbons of risk.” The connection of core habitats, such as the exceptional forestlands that bracket Buffalo Creek, allows for genetic exchange, for new blood to recharge the old, without which isolated subpopulations of deer and bear, turkey and bobcat, become inbred and static, and blink out one by one from disease and poor reproductive success.
Once designated and established, the careful protection and maintenance of a wildlife corridor is crucial to its long-term success. It becomes a matter of habituated faith for the local animal to come to rely upon the safe passage a corridor provides, and for continued use critters must be guided by both a lasting feeling of security as well as sturdy roadside fencing. The latter certainly seems to work well: in Florida, construction of a barrier to guide animals into a culvert corridor resulted in 93.5 percent reduction in roadkill, while increasing the total number of species using the corridor from 28 to 42. In the East, fences should be around six or seven feet high to keep jumpers like deer from crossing outside the corridor, while one-way ramps on the highway side of corridor fencing can give frantic animals a chance to regain the safety of the woods rather than plunging alongside and into traffic.
Tony Clevenger has broad experience in this particular field, having been involved in highway mitigation projects in Alberta, British Columbia, Quebec, Montana, Washington, Idaho and California. He points to the large, contiguous wildlife habitat juxtaposed with heavy traffic volume that make Buffalo Creek/I-81 and Afton Mountain/I-64 ideal corridor sites, noting that these areas “are critically important from a motorist safety and wildlife conservation standpoint, without a doubt.” I asked him how Virginia ranked with other states and countries in confronting the mounting havoc of wildlife/vehicle collisions. “Behind Europe but ahead of Canada,” he said. “Second place isn’t too bad. Some states are at the same level as Europe; Washington, Florida, Colorado, and New England are very well organized and are planning at a multistate level, and they have tremendous coordination and buy-in from state and municipal governments.” Having everyone on the same page—reducing collisions, saving lives and money—seems to characterize the successful participants in this growing movement.
Mulling my own agonized encounter with that sharpshin from long ago, I asked Clevenger how corridors might be designed to accommodate birds as well as terrestrials; the answer seems simple enough. “Planting roadside shrubs and trees that deflect bird flight high over the road rather than directly at grade level” is the easiest way to wean birds up and over traffic, and this too has been accomplished elsewhere: “In Florida they’ve put tall white poles on a bridge (simulating a fence or wall) which has been successful in decreasing mortality with a species of tern,” he said. VDOT already plants trees along our roadsides and medians—why not choose native species whose reach when grown will gently lift birds above the tumult below?
Placing corridors of life over or under our surging roadways is simply a no-brainer, a verified and effective method of reducing both human and wildlife fatalities and of saving millions of dollars in taxes and insurance premiums. Especially given the simplicity, ease and lack of expenditure of projects like Buffalo Creek, where a beautifully sited corridor is already in place and requires only a half mile of rudimentary fencing in both directions to become widely effective, it’s difficult to how imagine how informed opposition could be heard. Especially with Virginia’s healthy bear population, its exploding deer herds and the welcome reintroduction of elk to the Commonwealth, foresighted plans to allow natural wildlife migratory patterns to take place in contained, pre-designated areas are eminently sensible. We’d be stupid, frankly, not to do this.
The great writer and naturalist Barry Lopez published a small book a few years ago entitled Apologia, in which he describes his longstanding efforts to remove slain animals (porcupines, raccoons, pronghorns, badgers) from the rural roads of his native Oregon. This helps decrease the number of scavenging coyotes, bears and golden eagles that in performing their duties are often themselves destroyed, but Lopez performs these rituals for other reasons as well. “It is an act of respect,” he says, “a technique of awareness.”
Geologists and other scientists are debating a new term for where we are in the world today: the Anthropocene, an earthly eon permanently marked by humanity’s restless urge for global domination. Few items of life today are as necessary and ubiquitous as the automobile, but those open roads we love to traverse are gouged through the only homes of countless species of wildlife. If something as workable, inexpensive and proven as wildlife corridors can save lives, ours and theirs, and perhaps even ameliorate the guilt and shame of vehicular slaughter, there’s not one reason to delay in making our little corner of the Anthropocene a better place. As Lopez puts it, “We treat the attrition of lives on the road like we treat the attrition of lives in war: horrifying, unavoidable, justified. What is to be done with the desire for exculpation?”
Now we have our answer.