Roads all over the state of Oregon cut into the habitat of wildlife. When animals, large and small, make the dangerous journey across the road thousands will lose their lives in collisions with vehicles. The risk to humans can also be fatal. Approximately 5,000 deer, elk. bears, antelope and other large animals are killed on Oregon roads by vehicles every year. But there are efforts underway to address the problem.

Joining the Exchange to discuss the problem and project solutions is Tim Greseth, Executive Director of the Oregon Wildlife Foundation.

ABOUT

Tim Greseth has been the Executive Director of the Oregon Wildlife Foundation for 17 years. He has background in youth development including management of a youth conservation corps and outdoor programming. He holds a Masters degree in Public Administration from Portland State University and a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Montana

Nevada lawmakers had hoped to come up with a permanent funding source this session to build wildlife bypasses — structures that help animals safely cross busy highways and cut down on the estimated 5,000 animal-vehicle collisions that happen in the state each year.

But the effort suffered a major setback after AB486, a bill looking to double the existing $1 fee the state charges on new tires and send the funding toward the projects, was gutted. It faced opposition from the trucking industry — a heavy consumer of tires — and political challenges because it would require a two-thirds majority approval to increase a tax.

“So many of our bills become a marathon. It [requires] more than one session to get things through,” said Assm. Natha Anderson (D-Reno), who championed the bill on behalf of the Assembly Committee on Natural Resources, which she chairs. “We’ve got to see this as one attempt at the marathon run.”

Wildlife crossings, particularly when constructed in seasonal migration corridors, significantly reduce animal fatalities and save millions of dollars by reducing the number of animal-vehicle collisions.

The proposed tax would have brought in $2 million to $3 million each year for the state wildlife crossing account established in 2023 through AB112, which awarded the account a one-time $5 million appropriation but no permanent funding mechanism.

This session, lawmakers are considering AB87, which would provide another one-time allocation of $5 million to the account. But the lack of a regular funding source concerns advocates.

“Our wildlife, including mule deer, elk and antelope and other species that travel across highways, cannot depend on the fluctuation of funding every other year that our state has to fund projects like this,” Russell Kuhlman, executive director of the Nevada Wildlife Federation, said while testifying in favor of AB486.

AB486 passed out of the Assembly and is now before the Senate, but not before a series of amendments shifted the bill’s focus from wildlife to transportation — a process one lawmaker described as a “gut and replace.”

The Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT) recently compiled an inventory of high-collision areas in partnership with the Nevada Department of Wildlife (NDOW). The amended version of the bill requires that when NDOT reports on highway projects, it includes the progress of any projects identified in that inventory.

The bill also increases the cost of a project that requires the department to prepare a written analysis of the costs and benefits from $25 million to $50 million, while additionally requiring the department to include a discussion of the value of wildlife crossings for that project.

The language adding the tire tax and redirecting funding for wildlife crossings has been removed.

“The hope is in two years to bring something back,” Anderson said.

A mule deer crosses Old Harrison Pass Road in the Ruby Mountain range south of Elko on Feb. 7, 2018. (Jeff Scheid/The Nevada Independent)

‘Highways are known to create barriers’

Of the thousands of vehicle-wildlife accidents in the state each year, more than half involve large wildlife such as mule deer, elk, bighorn sheep and black bears.

Added up, those accidents become costly. Infrastructure damage, injuries, emergency response, traffic control and other costs come out to about $12.9 million per year — a sum of more than $155 million in the years studied, according to NDOT.

Since 2010, NDOT has spent more than $43 million on projects to reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions.

That includes wildlife crossings, which can include everything from overpasses spanning Interstate 80 for big game mammals to cross, to small tunnels similar to stormwater drains for tortoises to travel beneath highways. Fencing along the highways directs wildlife toward the crossings.

As of summer 2024, the department has installed 24 large animal over and underpasses, modified more than a dozen other structures to improve large animal movement and installed 42 tortoise crossings. It also put up more than 500 miles of wildlife fencing.

“Highways are known to create barriers,” Cody Schroeder, wildlife staff specialist for NDOW’s big game division, told The Nevada Independent. “When you put these crossings in, it can open up habitat on each side of the road that might not have been accessible before or were [too] risky to access before.”

In January, NDOT was notified it would be awarded $16.8 million in federal funding to protect one of the state’s smaller (and slower) species.

The funding would pay for NDOT to construct 61 tortoise under-crossings and install 68 miles of fencing (34 miles on each side) to protect tortoises along U.S. 93 in Clark and Lincoln counties, near Coyote Springs — an area considered essential for tortoise populations. Found only in the desert Southwest, the Mojave desert tortoise was listed as a threatened species in 1990 under the Endangered Species Act and remains on the list decades later.

The state was only able to leverage the federal funding for this long-standing department goal thanks to the Legislature’s 2023 appropriation to the wildlife crossing account.

“Our state investment is bringing in $16.8 million,” Nova Simpson, wildlife crossing program manager for NDOT, told lawmakers in April. “We hope to see that within the next year.”

A desert tortoise after being released by the Clark County Conservation Program inside the Boulder City Conservation Easement on Oct. 15, 2019. (Daniel Clark/The Nevada Independent)

A ‘win-win’ for saving wildlife and human lives

In the recently released inventory of high-priority crossing areas, 30 spots across the state were outlined as likely to benefit from wildlife crossings — roughly half of those are on U.S. 93 or Interstate 80.

In a 2023 interview with The Nevada Independent, Simpson said that construction of wildlife corridors can cost anywhere from $2 million to $20 million per project; when speaking with lawmakers this session, Simpson said that it would cost about $1 billion for NDOT to complete all 30 projects.

But she said, “we don’t have dedicated funding, and as you’re all aware, funding for the state is tight.”

After wildlife crossings were installed on U.S. 93 north of Wells, research from UNR showed that more than 35,000 mule deer used them during seasonal migrations. Prior to construction of the wildlife crossings, data collected by NDOT and NDOW showed an estimated 300 deer killed per year in vehicle collisions along a roughly 20-mile stretch of U.S. 93 between Wells and the unincorporated community of Contact. Collisions were highest during seasonal migrations.

The state’s current mule deer population is estimated at around 72,000 — up from 68,000 last year, the smallest deer population in nearly five decades. But numbers are still far below the 200,000 or so deer estimated to roam the state in the late 1980s.

The crossings on Interstate 80 and Highway 93 have helped reduce the number of ungulate deaths being recorded in that area, Schroeder said.

“Those were some of our higher collision areas,” he told The Nevada Independent. “Those have since been largely mitigated by some of the crossings we built out there.

“It’s a win-win when you can minimize wildlife collisions and you’re saving human lives.”

Desert bighorn sheep cross State Route 375 north of Rachel, Nevada on Oct. 17, 2019. (Jeff Scheid/The Nevada Independent)

‘There’s political realities in this building’

Passage of AB486 in its original form would have made Nevada one of the first states to establish a dedicated funding mechanism for wildlife crossings, Nic Callero, senior officer at Pew Charitable Trusts, told lawmakers.

But nationwide momentum for wildlife crossings is growing: From 2019 to 2024, 66 habitat connectivity bills were passed nationwide, and this year, 20 states have introduced bills related to wildlife corridors and crossings.

Utah recently appropriated $20 million to address wildlife-vehicle collisions, Callero told lawmakers at an April 28 Assembly Growth and Infrastructure Committee hearing, and in New Mexico, a $50 million bill to fund new wildlife crossing infrastructure was just signed. Montana just created a wildlife crossing account and is on the cusp of creating the nation’s first dedicated funding mechanism for such accounts.

Nevada’s previous wildlife crossing bills, in combination with passage of AB486, “would help solidify this momentum and codify the implementation of wildlife crossings as an agency priority,” Callero said.

But using the tire tax to fund the account would have an outsized effect on the state’s trucking industry, argued Nevada Trucking Association CEO Paul Enos. In an interview after the bill’s hearing in April, Enos told The Nevada Independent that one of his association members purchased more than 4,900 tires last year.

He added, “We do believe this bill has a noble purpose in terms of preventing these wildlife vehicular collisions.”

In addition to initial opposition from the state trucking association (which flipped to support after it was amended), Enos said there were concerns in the Legislature over the tax component of the bill. Any bill that adds taxes, fees or other assessments requires a two-thirds vote by both the Senate and the Assembly, and those bills usually face tough odds — especially with Gov. Joe Lombardo pledging not to raise taxes.

The amendment, he said, focuses on what can be done to move the ball forward for wildlife crossings short of a tax.

“There’s political realities in this building with two-thirds votes,” Enos told The Nevada Independent.

The Wildlife Society and a coalition of nongovernmental organizations are calling for federal investment in programs to improve wildlife crossings—reducing vehicle damage and saving the lives of both humans and wildlife species.

“Imagine if you wake up in the morning, and someone’s put a highway between you and your kitchen,” said TWS member Patricia Cramer, an independent transportation ecology researcher and founder of the Wildlife Connectivity Institute. In this scenario, you have to cross two lanes of traffic to get breakfast and then cross another four lanes to get your kids to school before making the journey back home at night. “That’s what we’ve done to wildlife.”

The Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program, a part of the Surface Transportation Reauthorization Bill that comes every five years, was the result of a decade-long collaborative effort between a broad coalition of stakeholder groups, including TWS, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership and many other collaborators. The legislation set aside $350 million in funds, which came from federal fuel excise taxes, to be disbursed to states via a grant application process.

The Trappers Point wildlife overpass was built to provide safe passage for migrating pronghorn, which have used the area as a migration corridor for thousands of years. Credit: Leon Schatz and Gregory Nickerson / Wyoming Migration Initiative

As Congress crafts the next Highway Bill, the coalition is asking for at least $500 million for the Wildlife Crossings Program, as the demand for funds has more than tripled. All of the $350 million allotted for the pilot program could have been disbursed during the first round of funding. The demand for funds in the 2022-2023 application cycle was five times higher than available funding.

There are over four million miles of roads across the United States that slice through the home ranges of countless animals. Whether it’s a pronghorn (Antilocarpa americana) along a migration route or a spotted salamander (Ambystoma maculatum) heading to a breeding pond, the urge to cross a busy roadway is strong. “The imperative is so important that they’re willing to risk their lives,” Cramer said. And many animals do lose their lives—every day, an estimated 1 million native vertebrates are killed on roadways.

Species like the Sonoran Desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii) can benefit from smaller, less expensive wildlife crossings like underpasses or culverts. Credit: Brad Sutton / National Parks Service

Beyond danger to wildlife, there’s a high financial and human cost, too. The 345,000 annual wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVCs) cause 200 deaths and 26,000 injuries, costing Americans around $11 billion, according to a report sponsored by the Nevada Department of Transportation. But that’s just reported crashes. Studies of roadkill from Utah to Virginia have shown that the number of roadkill vastly outnumbers the number of reported crashes. “Lack of reporting is a major problem,” Cramer said. If collisions go unreported, it’s more challenging for biologists and planners to identify collision hot spots and good candidates for intervention. It can even be a challenge for state transportation departments to elevate WVCs to an actionable level on the priority list if collisions are underreported.

Saving wildlife, saving people

Wildlife overpasses, underpasses, fencing and refurbished culverts are all infrastructure that can help reduce WVCs and save both wildlife and human lives. Installing crossing structures and fencing can reduce crashes by up to 97%, said TWS member Renee Calahan of Animal Road Crossings (ARC) Solutions, a nonprofit think tank that works with state, federal and Tribal partners as well as nongovernmental organizations.

“There’s proven effectiveness in reducing human and wildlife mortality, but also in allowing wildlife to move across highways in order to meet daily, seasonal and lifetime needs,” Calahan said.

Deer use a wildlife overpass to cross U.S. 160 near Chimney Rock National Monument in southwest Colorado. Credit: Colorado DOT, Southern Ute Indian Tribe, and the Wildlife Connectivity Institute

Though this may seem like a lot of money, advocates say that the initial investment is well worth it. “Paying for crossing structures would cost taxpayers less than if you do nothing,” Calahan said. When migrating pronghorn were creating a public safety risk to travelers on U.S. 191 in Trappers Point, Wyoming, the state built two overpasses and five underpasses. The project, which was completed in 2012, cost a total of $12 million. The Wyoming Department of Transportation engineers estimated that the structures, which are predicted to last 75 years, will pay for themselves in just 17 years.

“The money we have from the pilot program—$350 million—is decimal dust,” Cramer said. “As biologists, we think it’s a lot of money,” she said. But in reality, it’s less than 0.1% of the Transportation Act budget. “It’s a small amount that we’re asking for to save human lives and wildlife lives,” she said.

Including wildlife in the planning process

While wildlife has been included in transportation acts for the last few decades, it has rarely been the stand-alone reason to fund transportation projects—until now.

“Historically, there hasn’t been money set aside for wildlife crossings, so you needed to be creative in how you were going to fund them,” said Sarah Barnum, chair of TWS’ Transportation Ecology Working Group. One way is through the replacement of the country’s tens of thousands of bridges and culverts that are more than 50 years old. “Upgrading old culverts and bridges is a key opportunity to add both wildlife crossings and climate resiliency,” she said.

In the eastern U.S., where waterways crisscross the landscape, culverts help water pass safely under roads—and when designed properly, can double as wildlife crossings. The West, which is characterized by larger herds of animals migrating in predictable patterns, less dense communities and fewer waterways, is a different story. Larger-scale projects, like wildlife overpasses, can be beneficial in western states like California or Colorado. The Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program (WCPP) provides critical funds to such projects, many of which faced existential financial barriers. “[The WCPP] gives you the freedom to construct projects that are focused on wildlife and to upsize a lot of existing projects, where the only reason for that upsizing is to benefit wildlife,” Cramer said.

The WCPP also includes funding for the creation of transportation plans and to determine where these structures can be most effective. Barnum is working on one such plan for the Massachusetts Department of Transportation to identify rare species, prime habitat and collision hot spots to find where wildlife crossing infrastructure would be the most valuable. The State Wildlife Transportation and Action Plan they’re working on instructs them to put wildlife crossings in places where they’re most needed. “At least a dozen studies looking at these top areas have been funded by the program,” Cramer said. Missouri, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Mexico and other states have created their own action plans, some with the help of the WCPP. “The WCPP institutionalizes processes that will guarantee wildlife are considered in transportation going forward,” she said.

A broad coalition

WCPP funds are available not just to states but to Tribes as well. The Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribes received $8.6 million during the first round of grant disbursements in 2022-2023 to construct wildlife overpasses over U.S. Highway 93 in Ninepipe National Wildlife Management Area in Montana. The overpasses will help reduce collisions between grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) and vehicles along the highway as well as improve habitat connectivity.

Barnum sees the WCPP as an issue of rural equity as well. Urban areas tend to be the focus of federal resources and policy initiatives, leaving out many rural communities. “People in rural areas are heard, seen and noticed through legislation like this,” she said. “Rural populations are smaller, but they have the highest chance of hitting an elk and dying,” she said. “Someone cared enough to send millions of dollars so that we would be safer.”

Casey Stemler, a TWS member who was the senior advisor to the director of western states for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is now a freelance wildlife and policy consultant with his firm Spectrum Outdoors. Stemler said that the WCPP has sparked states to match funding for wildlife crossing programs. New Mexico just set aside $50 million for wildlife crossings, the greatest amount of money any single state has allocated for this kind of infrastructure. He also said that other planned projects lack key funding to proceed. “Overwhelmingly, the demand way outstretched the funding,” he said. “This isn’t a political issue,” he continued, “it’s brought together a broad coalition of people across the board.”

Calahan agrees, saying that collisions could affect anybody. “It’s not a question of if, but when, one of your loved ones is going to be affected,” she said. “If you care about safety, there are proven solutions that can be implemented today.”

The aim was to protect motorists and wildlife along an especially grisly stretch of highway. Now, it was time to see whether the investment would pay off.

Aran Johnson, a wildlife biologist for the Southern Ute Indian Tribe in the southwestern part of the state, walked up a bank to a newly constructed overpass crossing Route 160.

He’d been trying not to worry about the project. After all, the existing research was in his favor. But the thought still crept in: What if all the effort, over 15 years, turned out to be a failure?

It was a cool summer morning in 2022, with mist rising from the ground. Johnson carried trail cameras. Mule deer and elk wouldn’t be showing up in any numbers until later in the year, when they had to cross the highway to reach their wintering grounds. Still, he wanted the cameras ready to capture the earliest evidence possible of any animals using the structure.

At the top of the overpass, he could barely believe what he saw: a line of hoof prints pressed deep into the fresh mud, stretching from one side to the other. An elk had already found its way across.

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“To me, it was kind of a sign,” Johnson said.

Since then, it’s been one successful year after another. Entire herds of mule deer and elk use the structures, as well as bears, mountain lions, bobcats, coyotes and foxes.

Wildlife crossings are growing in popularity across the country, and in recent years, Colorado has emerged as a leader. Since 2015, it has built 28 new large game crossing structures, according to the state Transportation Department.

The state is rich in wildlife, and many of its species travel from higher elevations in the summer to lower ones in the winter, oftentimes crossing highways at great peril. In 2022, the General Assembly passed a law creating a cash fund for the department to use for animal crossings. Colorado has also evaluated its highways to create a priority list for future projects.

Wildlife crossings, when combined with long stretches of fencing to funnel animals to the right location, have been found to reduce vehicle collisions with large animals by more than 80%.

They are expensive, but research has shown they can save money when installed on stretches of highway with at least an average of three collisions between motorists and deer per mile per year. For collisions with elk and moose, which are bigger and therefore cause more damage to vehicles and people, that threshold goes down to less than one collision per mile per year.

Locals had long known they had to pay close attention when driving along that stretch of Route 160, near the Chimney Rock National Monument.

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“I apologize for the gore, but it was littered with carcasses,” said Mark Lawler, a biologist with the Colorado Department of Transportation.

In the early 2000s, Johnson started collaring mule deer to better understand how they moved over the landscape around the reservation. He analyzed his data and superimposed them on state records of wildlife-vehicle collisions.

“It couldn’t be more perfect,” he said. “These things line up so precisely.”

The Colorado Department of Transportation, which covers the vast majority of the cost for wildlife crossings, agreed to put in an underpass on the reservation. But the Southern Ute also wanted to install an overpass, since certain species, particularly elk, seem to greatly prefer them. The tribe came up with $1.3 million from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to make that happen.

Additional funding for the $12 million project came from the state department of wildlife, nonprofit groups and even a private donor.

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Lawler, the Transportation Department biologist, said Colorado has tried to emulate successes in other states and also share its own lessons.

“It’s a friendly competition,” Lawler said. “We’re all learning from each other.” Information isn’t the only thing shared. In some cases, the herds that use wildlife crossings move across state lines.

An added bonus of wildlife crossings is the photos that come from trail cameras, which help to bring attention to the programs, Lawler said.

However, a potential hitch has surfaced: As the Trump administration cuts federal spending, a grant program that helps states and tribes pay for wildlife crossings in collision hot spots is now in doubt, including grants that had already been promised.

The Trump administration said the remaining grants were under review and that projects focused on relieving congestion and bolstering safety would be the priority.

Wildlife crossings transcend political divisions, said Patricia Cramer, an ecologist who consults with states on wildlife crossings, including the project on Route 160. They are popular among Republicans and Democrats. Of the two states she sees as national leaders, Wyoming is red and Colorado is blue.

For the Southern Ute, the crossings fit in with the cultural importance of being stewards of the land, said Andrew Gallegos, a member of the Tribal Council.

“This is one way to give back,” Gallegos said. “To help preserve life.”