Safe Passages
Our Bend to Suttle Lake Coalition partners and other wildlife connectivity experts from across the U.S. share insights on the prospects for new wildlife crossings in Oregon
By Jeremy Austin, Wild Lands and Water Program Director and Lace Thornberg, Communications Director
What do elk, black bears, mountain lions, wolverines, salamanders, crabs, monkeys, alligators, otters, tortoises, elephants, voles, cockatoos, squirrels, wallabies, and jaguars have in common?
Somewhere in the world, each of these species benefits from a wildlife crossing.
First developed in Europe in the 1950s, overpasses and underpasses for wildlife have gained traction worldwide as a technique to mend the habitat fragmentation caused by roads, or “linear transportation corridors,” as the scientists and transportation planners would term it.
In North America, crossings are typically built to help our large hooved mammals, like elk, mule deer and bighorn sheep, migrate more safely through areas bisected by highways, but these wildlife crossings also serve our mountain lions, coyotes and bobcats and an array of smaller animals, as trail camera footage of raccoons, foxes, porcupine, badger and more, clearly shows.
Catching Up on Crossings
Inspired by the effectiveness of wildlife crossings in Europe and Canada, many Western states have followed suit and developed their own crossings, built to serve the needs of the most-impacted species, whether pronghorn in Wyoming, mule deer in Oregon, or mountain lions in Southern California.
As Erin Sito, United States Public Policy Director at Wildlands Network, noted, “Within the last decade, we have seen an explosion of interest in wildlife crossings. Flagship crossings projects like those in Banff National Park have allowed the public and our government agencies to see what road design innovation is possible, and more importantly, how effective wildlife crossings really are.”
How states tally dedicated wildlife crossing structures can vary and so numbers often fluctuate depending on who is reporting. Regardless of how you tally the numbers, several states are in the front of the pack.
California leads the way with more than 150 wildlife crossings. Utah has 119, Colorado 69, and Montana 41. Washington has 30. Nevada has 23 crossings just for large animals, and Wyoming has 20.
And then there’s Oregon. With just five crossings, Oregon trails behind our Western state counterparts in developing and implementing dedicated wildlife crossing structures.
Oregon’s current wildlife crossing shortage has real-world consequences for Oregon’s residents and visitors. According to State Farm’s 2021 annual collision data analysis, drivers in Oregon are more likely to hit wildlife on our public roadways than in other West Coast states.
Problem: A Dangerous Stretch of Highway
As Highway 20 travels across the densely forested Cascade Mountains and into the open high desert, it bisects several important wildlife movement corridors for mule deer, elk, and other wildlife.
Putting wildlife crossing structures in place can yield annual savings between $235,000 to $443,000 per structure.
Photo: Sue Yocum
With rich habitat on either side, it is not surprising that the section of highway between Suttle Lake and Bend sees the highest density of deer and elk wildlife-vehicle collisions in the state, with 350 to 600 mule deer and elk killed yearly by vehicle strikes.
These strikes are scary, potentially lethal, and expensive. When you add up the combination of vehicle damage, medical expenses, and lost hunting value, each deer collision imposes an average cost of nearly $17,000. That figure swells to well over $55,000 for an elk collision.
The cumulative cost for those two species alone on Oregon’s roads totaled $91.7 million in 2022.
Solution: Working Together to Build Wildlife Crossings
To address this growing safety concern, Central Oregon LandWatch helped convene a group of state and federal agencies, nonprofits, landowners, and institutions to form the Bend to Suttle Lake Wildlife Passage Initiative.
The coalition’s aim — creating a series of wildlife crossings along a 35-mile stretch of Highway 20 — is a bold ambition, but there’s a clear path to follow and the technique is proven.
Wildlife underpasses or overpasses are proven to reduce collisions significantly. That efficacy in reducing collisions makes them a practical investment for state and federal agencies.
Recent crossings projects in Central Oregon on Highway 97 have experienced high success rates.
Crawford Road and Lava Butte undercrossings: Over 90 percent reduced deer-vehicle collisions within fenced areas in their first two years.
MP 154 and MP 180 crossings: During the 2022 fall mule deer migration, these wildlife crossings had a combined 88% success rate for wildlife passage.
As Marcel Huijser, a senior research ecologist with the Western Transportation Institute, noted, wildlife crossings are effective only when all the steps are followed correctly, starting with defining the problem, identifying the ideal potential future, understanding the needs of each target species, working at the appropriate spatial scale, and, ultimately, choosing the correct locations, spacing, and crossing type (overpass or underpass) for the target species.
“It does not come down to just doing one thing right ... you need to do a lot of things right,” said Huijser, who has specialized in road ecology since 1995.
Another key element, according to Huijser, is lining up the right stakeholders to support the effort. With a project timeline spanning over many years and a total price tag in the tens of millions, this is a particularly important aspect and it is an area in which the Bend to Suttle Lake Wildlife Passage Initiative really shines.
“It’s fantastic to be part of this broad partnership that brings together the expertise, relationships, and regulatory authority essential to success,” said Cidney Bowman, Wildlife Passage Program Leader for Oregon Department of Transportation.
Mule deer tend to follow their migration routes closely, which means wildlife scientists and transportation planners don’t have to guess where to put the crossings to both enhance migration and reduce collisions. Photo: Greg Nickerson, Wyoming Migration Initiative
“The collars reveal to us where the animals are. We now have a lot of capacity to figure out where these animals move on the landscapes. The animals show us where they need to go.” - Dr. Matt Kauffman, Wyoming Migration Initiative
A Timely Opportunity
As we face the biodiversity crisis and climate crisis simultaneously, effective tools like wildlife crossings are tremendously important to mitigating negative impacts to native wildlife.
The even better news is that new state and federal funding sources have created a once-in-a-generation opportunity to implement wildlife crossings projects.
At the state level: In 2019, the Oregon legislature directed ODOT and ODFW to coordinate efforts to reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions. Since the bill’s passage, the state legislature has allocated $12 million to support wildlife crossing initiatives.
At the federal level: in 2021, the U.S. Congress authorized billions of dollars that could be used to construct wildlife crossings, including $350 million in competitive grants available through the Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program.
“Oregon has been ahead of the game on wildlife crossing legislation, having passed its own study and prioritization bill in 2019, and funding legislation in 2022 and again, in 2023,” noted Sito, of Wildlands Network.
Matt Skroch, Project Director, U.S. Conservation for The Pew Charitable Trusts, shared that sentiment, noting, “Oregon has palpable momentum in its efforts to improve driver safety while facilitating safe wildlife passage.”
Central Oregon LandWatch and our partners in this initiative are keen to tap into the available funding sources to address wildlife and motorist safety concerns between Bend and Suttle Lake and to see Oregon implement actual crossings at the scale and speed of our Western state counterparts.
“This work is only getting started, and we’re looking to the Oregon Department of Transportation, in particular, for leadership in moving projects forward,” said Skroch, adding, “We have the support, the funding, and the will — now we need our state agencies to respond to this unique opportunity and show that Oregon can be a leader in planning and constructing wildlife crossings throughout the state.”
Renee Callahan, executive director at ARC Solutions, an organization pioneering innovative collaboration within habitat connectivity, helped shed some light on strategies Oregon can use to successfully compete for federal dollars. In addition to the Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program, Callahan noted that “There are 15 other federal funding programs that can be used to pay for wildlife-related infrastructure or for other projects likely to co-benefit wildlife.”
Callahan’s advice: “Strategically targeting different funding pots for different projects at different stages of the transportation process — from planning, to preliminary engineering, to design, to construction — should help Oregon successfully compete for federal wildlife infrastructure funding.”
Function and beauty meet in wildlife crossings, like this one on the Trans-Canada Highway.
Purposeful, practical, poetic
For all their near-term practicality, wildlife crossings also serve a deeper ecological function.
“There’s often a focus on solving a problem … lots of animals killed on the road, and lots of damage to vehicles … and that’s important,” explained wildlife biologist Matt Kaufman, who directs the Wyoming Migration Initiative, adding, “The other benefit of properly placed crossing structures is that they allow animals to keep following their routes between winter range and summer range. It’s crucial to animals to be able to move at the right times. Crossings make the landscape more functional.”
Every purpose-built wildlife crossing plays an important symbolic role as well.
“Overpasses, by virtue of their visibility, are also billboards for habitat connectivity: They're highly conspicuous reminders that we share our ecosystems with nonhuman lives, to whom we're morally obligated to be good neighbors,” explained Ben Goldfarb, author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet.
“We can be unfathomably cruel to wild creatures, and heedless of their needs; but we're also capable of great compassion. Wildlife crossings are expressions of ecological empathy — our innate capacity for goodness manifest as infrastructure.” - Ben Goldfarb, author
When we collaborate to create wildlife crossings, we are agreeing that animals have a right to safety, just as we humans do. Wildlife crossings signal a shift in mindset — away from the old attitude of domination over nature which served no wildlife species well, toward one of coexistence with wildlife. As we consider wildlife crossings as bridges between eras, creating more crossings takes on an even greater urgency.
For Oregon, the path ahead is clear. Wildlife crossings are urgently needed, particularly in the rich habitat near Black Butte between Suttle Lake and Bend. Let’s act.
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Matt Skroch, Project Director, U.S. Conservation for The Pew Charitable Trusts
Renee Callahan, Executive Director of ARC Solutions
Erin Sito, United States Public Policy Director at Wildlands Network
Matt Kauffman, Research Wildlife Biologist at USGS and Lead Scientist at the Wyoming Migration Initiative
Ben Goldfarb, author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet
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Wildlife Crossings Along U.S. Roads Can Help Animals and Habitat Adapt to Climate Change | Pew Charitable Trust
State of States Report: A look at how far U.S. state habitat connectivity legislation has advanced and what is working | Wildlands Network
How Do Wildlife Safely Cross a Highway? Take a Look | New York Times