As someone who drives a "deer magnet", I approve.

[Scuba]

[Crepuscular]

1. Silly idea.

Clearly designed by an engineer that has no knowledge or understanding in regards to the movements and habits of wild animals.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. ORLY?

If you build it, they will cross.

[Crepuscular]

3. Only

in very specific situations involving migratory species.

The premise voiced by the OP was that such wildlife crossings would eliminate car/wildlife events within a generation. The overwhelming majority of vehicle wildlife accidents that cause damage in this country involve deer, not elk, as are pictured above.

Deer have very limited home ranges, typically a few square miles, in which they spend their entire lives within. They are not generally migratory in the US, with the exception of herds located in the extreme northern parts of the country, which migrate seasonally to winter deer yards.

Unless you were going to build those types of crossings every few miles and fence the roads and highways between the crossings with 8' deer proof fences, there would be virtually no impact on decreasing the frequency of car/deer accidents on a macro scale. The resources involved in doing so would greatly outweigh the amount that accidents currently cost.

Sorry, the idea is a pipe dream.

[Scuba]

5. Can you provide any source to back up your claim that "there would be virtually no impact"?

[yellowcanine]

8. You have it backwards. The proponents of this very expensive solution need to show that it would

work. That is how things are supposed to work, anyway.

[dionysus]

9. it might help in some places, not in others. i live 10 minutes from the center of a pretty big city

there are two large cemeteries on either side of the road a few hundred yards down the street. the cemeteries are surrounded by large woods and teeming with deer. no way to put crossings there.

in other places I suppose it would help.

[Crepuscular]

11. Sure

Let's use my state as an example.

Michigan has about 1.7 million white tailed deer according to our DNR. According to the Michigan State Police, we average around 53,000 car/deer accidents a year.

According to your original post, if the 200 proposed crossings were divided equally among the states, then Michigan's cut would be 4 crossings. A study in Virginia (Donaldson, 2005) showed that approx. 300 deer annually used the wildlife crossing that was being monitored in that study. So with the four that Michigan gets, you just reduced the number of accidents by 1,200 annually. Actually, that's not true either, as many deer successfully cross roads without a wildlife crossing and without being hit by a vehicle, so the actual reduction from the 53,000 accidents that occur, would be almost nil, if four crossings were built here.

Your OP also forgot to mention that such crossings are only effective when combined with fencing, to force animals to utilize the crossings.

There are about 164,000 miles of highway in the US, not to mention hundreds of thousands of miles of secondary roads that are not immune to car/deer accidents. Factor in the cost of fencing the highway, both sides, at approx. $1.50 a foot (cost of 8 foot deer proof fence installed) and you are looking at around $2.6 Billion in infrastructure cost, not including a similar cost for secondary roads. Putting aside the total impractical nature of fencing all of the roads, such costs would quickly become cost prohibitive.

As I said, it's a silly pipe dream.

[Scuba]

12. You missed the part about building 200 crossings EVERY YEAR.

[Crepuscular]

13. No, I didn't miss it

it's irrelevant.

So you are going to build 4 of these a year in my state. Michigan has approx. 123,000 miles of roads.

As previously mentioned, approx. 300 deer a year out of a population of 1.7 million will use each crossing. In 100 years, you will have provided crossing capacity for 120,000 deer, less then 10% of the total population. Not to mention the fact that after having spent $4 billion dollars (plus the cost of fencing) you still only have enough crossings to provide one for each 300 miles of road. How long out into the future do you want to project this exercise in futility?

[Scuba]

15. 300 huh? 'Cause Virginia and Michigan have the same number of deer? And miles of roads?

And other conditions? C'mon, you pulled that out of your ass.

[Crepuscular]

17. Um, no

Because Whitetail behavior is not determined by geographic boundaries. Again, deer have very limited home ranges of a couple of square miles and they rarely travel outside of that limited area. That's true whether the deer is living in Michigan, Long Island or Virginia. So while the total number of deer in a given area may fluctuate somewhat, depending on the location of the wildlife bridge, it's not going to vary enough to have much impact on it's utilization due to the fact that deer are not nomadic or for the most part migratory. Deer are not going to travel miles out of their way to utilize a wildlife bridge, that just simply is not the way they are programmed biologically.

Believing that such crossings would have any kind of substantive impact on reducing deer/car accidents in this country is simply ridiculous.

[oneofthe99]

19. And forget about it during the rut

Now if they want to plant a few acres of apple orchards on both sides of the bridge .... lol....

[MADem]

37. Then put over or under crossings where the deer or the antelope play.

https://www.dot.state.wy.us/home/news_info/achievements/maincontent/news_790.html


http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/wildlife-corridors-definition-lesson-quiz.html#lesson



http://magazine.good.is/articles/good-design-daily-an-overpass-for-colorado-wildlife

[Crepuscular]

38. Nothing wrong

with putting crossings in in western states but they will not accomplish the objective stated in the OP. Mule deer populations are declining and most of those areas do not have the concentrations of humans and vehicles that are found East of the Rockies. In order to substantially reduce the number of car/deer accidents in this country, let alone put an end to them as claimed in the OP, a viable solution would need to address white tailed deer populations and those types of wildlife corridors would be almost totally ineffective in reducing car/deer accidents involving white tailed deer.

[MADem]

39. Put them where the accidents are happening. The highway people know.

On Rte 95 in Maine, they have "Deer Xing 2 mi" signs up...in those areas they'd do some good, I should think.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

52. Would be cheaper to move the signs. Make the deer cross elsewhere.

Make the deer cross at the light.

[MADem]

54. Well, to be serious, they put the signs where accidents occur.

The accidents occur there because that's where the deer cross.

There are ways to slope and adjust the landscape to "feed" wildlife across one of those corridors, either over or under.

[2naSalit]

29. We have several of those

out here in the Rockies, MT, ID and WY and they have made a big difference with elk, deer and antelope. There are some up by Banff and Glacier... even the Lynx like to use them as do the bears.

I'm sure it requires some study as to where they would be best placed but when they are in a well placed spot, they work quite nicely.

However one might feel about behavior of certain ungulates, this might be of interest:

Red Fawn: Cold War Lives On In Minds Of Deer

http://www.rferl.org/content/deer-europe-borders-iron-curtain/25250047.html

[ileus]

46. Of course they'd have to build 10ft fences leading the deer to the crossings.

I'd assume they know this would have to be done....right?



These will also make great funnels for hunters to take advantage of.

[eppur_se_muova]

16. Careful design can make all the difference.

The more closely a wildlife corridor resembles a natural feature, the more likely wildlife will use it. Underpasses are more sheltered than overpasses, and presumably resemble natural gullies and ravines enough that even human-shy animals will enter them. What is really missing from the illustration in the OP is some brush or trees to offer cover and make wildlife feel safer.

Strategic placement is also important. In designing underpasses for Florida panthers, researchers used records of both car-panther collisions and radio-collar tracking to optimize a network of underpasses for maximum effectiveness with a minimum number of underpasses. (How do you think they figure out where to place the "deer crossing" signs ? They keep track of where collisions occur significantly frequently.)

You may be unaware that the design of wildlife corridors is something that people have actually devoted quite a lot of effort to; try reading some of the references in the wiki, which provides several examples of such "pipe dreams".

[Crepuscular]

20. You are confusing two

very different outcomes.

Wildlife corridors may be beneficial in reducing vehicle caused mortality in very limited circumstances, such as the small area in Florida where there is a demonstrated nexus between existing panther populations and specific highways. That may also be true in the case of the semi-tame elk poplations that frequent the vicinity around Banff, as pictured above. The goal in each case is to reduce mortality in small, specific wildlife populations.

The premise of the OP was that wildlife corridors such as the one pictured could eliminate vehicle/wildlife incidents within a generation. That is a totally different outcome. About a dozen Florida panthers were killed in the couple of years leading up to the wildlife corridors being put in place, something like 600,000 deer are killed by cars every year in this country. You are talking about a huge difference in magnitude in addressing two almost completely different situations.

Is it a pipe dream to think that a wildlife crossing targeting a limited population on an extremely local basis may have some positive impact? No it's not. .

But it's certainly pipe dream to think that such crossings would provide a similar impact on a macro scale across the entire country unless constructed on a scale much more massive (and cost prohibitive) than the one proposed by the OP.

It's like saying that because one soup kitchen, in one city, reduced hunger in 1% of the homeless, that it provides a universal solution to end poverty within a generation.

[eppur_se_muova]

21. Well, we can't solve the problem entirely, so we shouldn't try to solve it at all.

Understood.

[Crepuscular]

24. Non-sequiter

The "solution" proposed by the OP doesn't solve the problem at all, let alone entirely.

Which is not to say that there are not viable solutions available to reduce the levels of car/wildlife accidents, only that wildlife corridors are not one of them.

Keeping deer populations at reasonable levels, widening visual spaces adjacent to roads and educating people about the crepuscular nature of deer and the fact that there are high risk periods, both daily and during several weeks out of the year when drivers should be on high alert when watching for deer.

Oh and convince people to quit texting while driving and keep their eyes on the road.

All of which would provide a much more viable and much less costly solution then the monstrosities proposed by the OP.

[Xithras]

44. Spend much time walking the woods? Animals have and follow trails.

In fact, for untold millennia humans hunted animals by finding and trapping along those wildlife trails. While animals can cross at any point along a roadway, large animals tend to move along relatively predictable pathways.

The ecoducts built in Europe aren't randomly constructed. They are built where they are because wildlife researchers have either identified points where natural animal paths cross human roadways, or where vehicle/animal accidents have become so frequent that the pathway has made itself abundantly evident.

These only seem silly because it's an unusual concept in the United States. They've been building these in Europe since the 1950's, and they have done a remarkable job in reducing wildlife collisions.

[Crepuscular]

56. I would venture

that I spend a lot more time in the woods than you do. Last time I looked there are not significant populations of free ranging white tailed deer in Europe. You do understand that different species have different characteristics, in terms of migration and herding, correct? The primary animal involved in car/wildlife accidents in this country is the white tailed deer, a species I happen to know a lot about. Whitetail deer are non-nomadic and non-migratory, they have a very rigid social system that limits their range to small localized areas. They certainly follow game trails but those trails are within their established home ranges. Unless you were going to build these types of corridors every few miles, they would only be utilized by the deer in the immediate vicinity of where they were built.

As mentioned before, a game corridor that was built in Virginia and monitored, indicated that 300 deer used it in the course of 1 year. Eliminating 300 annual deer crossings is not going to have any kind of a tangible impact when states experience tens of thousands of car/deer accidents annually. Sorry, the math just does not work.

[genwah]

4. Hey, the deer know where to go, but this lady has hit three of them...

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/CI8UPHMzZm8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

[Ms. Toad]

28. I was remembering that video...

[ScreamingMeemie]

50. That was a hoax.

[snooper2]

6. 200 animal crossings would just start to address just Jefferson County, MO

LOL

I guess the 8 Billion is mostly in damage to vehicles--

We could just give everyone a bumper like this for a LOT cheaper

[yellowcanine]

7. Anyone who believes this has never been around many deer.

And they prefer cover so they certainly are not going to regularly use the crossing pictured above.

[LeftyMom]

10. Reminds me of the Davis Toad Tunnel.

http://daviswiki.org/Toad_Tunnel

[Eleanors38]

14. Don't know about deer, who are drawn to highway

shoulders because of frequent cutting (hence fresh grass & forb shoots) and water in ditches. But highway wildlife crossings seem to be working for the endangered Florida panther, who roams widely. Their declining numbers have been reversed.

[countryjake]

18. My county is currently trying to determine popular crossing spots...

as Elk accidents up here are the ever-present danger when driving our North Cascades Hwy. We have a herd that comes down to our pasture every year (and strips the garden very efficiently, but it's worth it, to me) and their "crossing" is quite obvious, to anyone who sees the trail they've made thru our woods directly onto the road. A few weeks ago, there was a Drone whizzing circles over our heads, as they attempted a survey to pinpoint the various herds' locations (I waved at the camera) for a study.

Considering the horrific wrecks due to elk/vehicle impact that we have here every year, I can see the value of something like those structures. Now that traffic on our little two-lane highway has more than quadrupled due to the mudslide down in Oso, this season may be even worse, with the herds already down from their winter grounds.

Skagit elk collisions, carcass counts don’t add up
Group wants better data to pinpoint Highway 20 crash hotspots

http://www.goskagit.com/all_access/skagit-elk-collisions-carcass-counts-don-t-add-up/article_79012dfc-d51a-50ab-ad1a-14066ffd250d.html


Drones plot upriver elk herd’s size
Researchers on the ground use eyes in the sky to track animals

http://www.goskagit.com/all_access/drones-plot-upriver-elk-herd-s-size/article_0c39f3ff-d498-5476-888c-642ef2b248fd.html


Nobody wants to run into a queue of these:

[IDemo]

22. One of these worked well in our area

http://arc-solutions.org/article/idaho-21-wildlife-underpass-apparently-works/

From 1979 to 2001, cars killed 159 deer in the area of the wildlife underpass — about seven per year.

The number killed in that area this migration season: zero.

[oneofthe99]

25. Those are mule deer

Whitetails do not have a migration or travel in big herds.
They pretty much stay put in small areas .

[Donald Ian Rankin]

23. Now there's a stupid assertion.

200 animal crossings a year wouldn't even make a dent in roadkill in the USA.

[doc03]

26. It would also help if the wildlife agencies would quit managing the deer population

to produce a market for more guns and to make more money on hunting licenses.

[Scuba]

27. I don't know about Ohio, but here in Wisconsin deer hunting is THE key to keeping herd size ....

... under control. We have roughly 600,000 animals harvested during the hunt and another 30,000 or so killed by vehicles each year. Still, during harsh winters, lots of deer starve.

This isn't "managing the deer population to produce a market for more guns" but using the hunt to reduce an unsustainable population.

[madinmaryland]

30. And to add to your point as to why there are so many deer is that

most if not all of their natural predators have been wiped out. Man and his vehicles are about the only predators that deer have.

[Crepuscular]

31. Maybe in Maryland

But there are lots of natural predators that prey on deer in many states. Black bear, Coyote and bobcat kill significant numbers of fawns in many states and wolves also kill a fair number of deer in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and many western states, also.

The primary reason that there are so many deer (primarily white tail) is that they are amazingly adaptable to changes in habitat and they also have a very high reproductive capacity. Mule deer, in the other hand, are much less adaptive and their populations have been plummeting in many western states in the last decade or so.

[madinmaryland]

34. That may be true in the west, but as you go further east of the Mississippi, much of those

natural predators become far more rare.

[Crepuscular]

36. Um,

Coyotes are not rare in about 90% of the US, they have them in Central Park in the middle of NYC.

Come visit Michigan, Wisconsin, Maine or Minnesota and you will find a plethora of natural predators, not exactly out "west".

[pipoman]

48. Coyotes aren't major deer predators

they tend to like smaller game.

[Crepuscular]

55. No, that is not the case

It used to be thought that coyotes had only a minimal impact on deer but a number of modern, published scientific papers have changed the thinking in that regard. A study done by John Kilgo, a biologist for the US forest service, radio collared 60 fawns and found that 44 of them were killed by predation during their first 3 months of life. Coyotes accounted for 36 of those 44 deaths, bobcats 7 and 1 of unknown origin. That study was conducted in Georgia. Other studies have shown that it's not at all uncommon for coyotes to cause 50% plus mortality in fawns. A study in Michigan's UP showed that Coyotes were also the primary natural predator causing adult deer mortality, beating out black bear, bobcat and wolves for that honor.

There is ample evidence available that shows that coyotes kill hundreds of thousands of deer a year and are a major deer predator.

[Crepuscular]

33. Hunting is certainly the key

to keeping herd size under control. Wisconsin harvests about 340,000 deer annually. The deer that suffer from winter kill there are usually in the northern part of the state. The primary problem is that much of the north woods deer habitat has matured to the point where it offers almost no forage for deer, due to a depressed timber market and the fact that most of the pulp and paper mills in Wisconsin and the UP have closed because it's cheaper to import paper from China. No timber cutting means no browse for the deer herd.

[doc03]

41. In my opinion we have too many deer in Ohio. They manage the population to keep numbers up

for hunting. Only a limited amount of does are killed in order to keep the heard at a maximum. Meanwhile the deer cause millions of dollars of damage and deaths on the highway and millions of dollars in crop damage. I remember back in the 1950s when seeing a deer was like seeing a bear today, we had a buck and doe season then. You know why lots of deer starve during a harsh winter? There are more deer than the habitat can support. I had to spend over $5000 to replace my landscaping with deer resistant plants, it was impossible to keep them out of the old plants. I am happy there are more deer today but most people I know feel there are too many now.

[Scuba]

42. There are definately too many deer here in Wisconsin. Without the hunt we'd be overrun.

[doc03]

43. If more does were killed in hunting it would reduce the population but no they want

the numbers to sell the licenses and support the hunting related industries. It's all about the dollars.

[Scuba]

45. Not here. In many areas one has to shoot a doe before one is allowed to harvest a buck.

[Crepuscular]

58. Not any more

Unfortunately, Earn-a-Buck in Wisconsin was stopped several years ago, a political decision, not one based in biology.

[Crepuscular]

57. You do know

that more does are killed by hunters in Ohio every year than bucks, right?

Last year hunters in Ohio killed around 81,000 antlered bucks and about 138,000 antlerless deer, about 80% of which were does.

The Ohio DNR has made a concerted effort in the last decade to reduce deer numbers, by extending seasons and liberalizing antlerless permits and while they have had some success in dropping the population by around 10%, it's an uphill battle as deer have an amazing reproductive capacity.

[a kennedy]

32. Should this be posted here?? ....I have friends that regularly pick up road kill to feed

their family. That's what they live on along with food stamps.....road kill.

[Crepuscular]

35. Michigan

just passed a law that eased restrictions on allowing people to keep road kill. I think it's a somewhat flawed assumption, though, to think that people are only keeping road kill due to economic hardship. The fact is that a lot of people like to eat venison because it's a healthy, lean alternative to commercially raised beef and it does not have the growth hormones and anti-biotics that commercially raised cattle does. If I hit a deer and it's not too badly mangled, darn right I'm taking it home, backstraps on the barbecue the next evening.

[Redford]

40. I work auto claims and I get at LEAST 3 a week

Deer jump in front of cars on highways, city streets, dirt roads etc. they don't give a shit about a bridge. And you better have comprehensive coverage too, cuz this is not a collision claim

[xchrom]

47. du rec.

[pipoman]

49. silliness

The claim here is complete nonsense, impossible, unfounded, and verging on crazy talk.

OTOH, I am sure that there are very specific places that could greatly benefit from a crossing.

Of course keep in mind the source. ..A structural engineer...he's stepped a little outside of his field of expertise. ..

[Historic NY]

51. Heck we even put up signs with pictures and they still don't get it..

[liberal N proud]

53. We put up deer crossing sings just like pedestrian crossings

Why can't the deer just use those?



Probably for the same reason they wouldn't use the crossings in your image.