Crossings - How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet

by Ben Goldfarb

When a road passes through a forest and is frequented by vehicles, the road becomes a wall for the animals living in the forest. Animals have not been taught how to cross roads and require 1 - 2 minutes to cross a road. Highways typically do not afford that much time to the animals. To them, the highway becomes a wall of traffic, a wall that cannot be crossed.

For mountain lions near Los Angeles, this could mean starvation since they are left on the side with less game and although they might have better prospects on the other side, it may require them to put their life at peril.

This book takes a look at what roads do to ecosystems across the world. Roadkills are a very common occurrence on highways. Animals trying to cross the highway get hit by vehicles often and get killed. The smaller the animals the larger the numbers that perish on the highway. At least with the larger animals, there is danger to the human in the vehicle as well. If a car were to run into an Elk, it’s a 50-50 toss-up on who would survive.

This has resulted in the calls for building animal passages either as tunnels or as overpasses more seriously. With the smaller animals, the demand for such investments often falls on deaf ears.

The book covers the US and Australian context since the author travels mainly to these two countries. He mentions conservation efforts in other places as well.

Across the world, millions of animals perish as roadkill thanks to our insatiable need for roads. In the US the forest service builds roads in conservation areas as well, to make it possible for tourists to visit these locations and for hauling timber in most cases.

In the US alone over 300 million birds are killed by cars. An additional 1 million vertebrates are killed per day in the US as roadkill and globally close to 5.5 million are killed each day. Such wanton loss of life that is entirely avoidable.

The author spends time with those who rescue these animals and try to rehab them. Tasmania is considered the roadkill capital of the world. Often when rescuers find dead marsupials, they check to see if the infant is still alive so it might be saved. The stories are gut-wrenching.

The solution is to build corridors and tunnels which can be used by animals to cross the road and access the resources on the other side. The trouble is that there is very little willingness amongst lawmakers to fund such “wasteful” projects. It takes a concerted effort over a long period to convince lawmakers to commit to such projects.

This book lays out several case studies of parks that have undertaken the development of crossings and what impact that has had on the wildlife in the region. In North America, Canada built the first crossing in Baniff and the benefits of it were studied over some time before America decided to build one.

Source: Indian Holiday

The image above is one on the Delhi-Mumbai expressway which facilitates the movement of animals.

At the Pench National Park in Madhya Pradesh, the entire highway is elevated to facilitate the free movement of tigers.

Countries across the world are working on making these walls disappear and facilitating animal movement. Still as the numbers above show, a lot more needs to be done.