How Canada Is Handling Wildlife Crossings

As the recently passed infrastructure bill is expected to fund more wildlife crossings across the country, here’s a really interesting story on how Canada is handling its own problem areas where animals and highway vehicles are literally intersecting. Here’s more from Canadian Geographic on the improvements being made:

“People hit animals. And if they haven’t, they know somebody who has,” says Candace Batycki, B.C. and Yukon program director with the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, a wild lands protection and connection advocacy group.  They’ve been watching elk get slaughtered on that highway for decades.”

But that could soon change. After more than 10 years of consultation, research and planning, a team of conservation and road ecology experts, local stakeholders, the Ktunaxa Nation and key staff from B.C.’s provincial transportation and natural resources ministries have broken ground on the first phase of the most ambitious wildlife crossing system ever attempted in Canada outside a national park. The plan calls for adding nine crossing locations on 36 kilometres of Highway 3 from the Alberta border to Hosmer. The centre-piece will be a 50-metrewide wildlife overpass spanning the highway and rail line a short distance west of the border. If it all comes to fruition — still not a certainty without committed funding for the overpass — the estimated $20-million project, called “Reconnecting the Rockies,” has the potential to cut the number of collisions on this deadly stretch of highway by 80 to 90 per cent.

The wildlife crossing system would cut the carnage and alleviate the risks to motorists and the costs of vehicle damage. But there’s another reason this effort matters. Highway 3 bisects one of the most ecologically significant regions in southern Canada. The Elk Valley, and the East Kootenay region generally, is a core part of the Crown of the Continent ecosystem, one of just two areas where grizzlies and other wide-ranging species can move back and forth between Canada and the United States. That makes it a critical north-south chokepoint in the Yellowstone to Yukon region, a key wildlife corridor that runs 3,200 kilometres from north to south, spanning two Canadian territories, two provinces and five U.S. states.