By Susan Hagood
Many of you have felt relief while driving to discover that
the dark form lying motionless in the road ahead is...is...a
tire fragment! Too often, though, that dark form is a turtle,
raccoon, fox, or deer who attempted against all odds to cross
the road. Far too many don't make it—so many, in fact, that
some scientists believe collisions with vehicles are the
primary human source of wildlife mortality. Estimates derived
decades ago put the daily death toll at one million animals—a
figure that can only have grown given the increase in the
number of roads, cars, and driving speeds.
Highways impact wildlife in many ways. First, of course, is
the direct destruction of habitat that accompanies road
construction. But roads and the cars that travel them continue
to introduce toxic chemicals and heavy metals into roadside
environments. And roads encourage development, resulting in
more loss of habitat and giving humans access to remote lands
and the sensitive wildlife and plants in them. Roads fragment
habitats, too, forcing wildlife into smaller and smaller
pockets where populations may not be able to survive. Roads
mean cars and cars kill wildlife—the common and the rare, the
large and the small, the feathered and the furred and the
scaled.
If there's any good news in this, it's that the United
States is finally beginning to take a look at the problem. We
lag behind European countries, though, by decades. Europeans
began to build structures to help wildlife safely cross
roadways in the 1960s. Today, wildlife overpasses and
underpasses are routine parts of highway planning in many
countries. The placement of structures is correlated with
extensive mapping projects aimed at identifying protected
habitats and lands that can provide animals with movement
corridors. Existing structures are monitored to evaluate how
much they are used and who uses them. The Europeans consider
the needs of a wide range of wildlife—from insects to brown
bears—in their transportation decisions.
Hoping to learn from European experience, the Federal
Highway Administration and the American Association of State
Highway and Transportation Officials sponsored a tour of five
countries—Slovenia, Switzerland, Germany, France, and the
Netherlands. I was lucky enough to be invited and planned to
help bring the best European ideas back to the United
States.
We saw a massive viaduct in Slovenia that brown bears,
lynxes, and wolves pass under without obstruction; overpasses
in Switzerland that have ponds and wetlands for amphibians;
German amphibian tunnels; French "green bridges" that
accommodate local traffic and wildlife; and
badger tunnels in the Netherlands that are helping bring this
species back from the brink of extinction.
Now our real work begins. We must provide the
transportation community with the information it needs to plan
for wildlife structures in new road construction and road
improvement projects. We must change federal legislation to
ensure that wildlife is considered in transportation decisions.
And we must let the public know that roadkill does not have to
be a part of every trip we take, in the hope that concerned
citizens will demand that roads be made as passable to wildlife
as they are to people.
Susan Hagood is a Wildlife Issues
specialist for The HSUS.
