How do humans protect wild animals from entering public infrastructure like highways or train railways?
In: 23
By herding animals over, under and around those infrastructures via fences, burms (e.g., hills), land bridges, and tunnels. This topic has a lot to do with migration patterns of wildlife and strategically placing underground tunnels or land bridges to match migration or seasonal feeding patterns of animals like elk where they cross. Fences and land fences I called burms above are placed to push and ‘herd’ the animals to those safe crossings.
This is at least a start from someone who has been around wildlife all his life. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable will come along.
Depends. Norway has deer bridges along the highways, Japan has turtle tunnels under the railway tracks and most airport has ultrasonic devices to keep birds away from the airports.
Growing up in the Midwest, they didn’t. At least for railways.
Walking the tracks was always a fun way to find bones. Lots and lots of bones. And more dead animals than I liked to count.
They often do not do anything at all to prevent wildlife from crossing. This is why there are so many signs on many roads in lots of places warning about deer and moose, and occasionally other animals like ducks or turtles, perhaps. Many cars collide with wildlife, a lot. Bigger animals like moose and deer can destroy a car. Groundhogs and raccoons (or a feral cat) end up as roadkill, dead animals on the side of the road. Signs aren’t there for warning the animals, they are there to warn us humans that there might be, likely could be, animals, so pay attention.
The first level of defense is the construction of fences, which is often more done to keep people off the road/railroad than wild animals (more common to use fences in higher population regions).
In some areas, where the density of wildlife is high and the risk of collision is really high, there will be special animal overpasses or underpasses (tunnels of a sort) where the fencing funnels animals toward the crossing structure. It is a bit costly so only done where either necessary or in areas dedicated to wildlife preservation.
Improvements are being made, but once between SLC, UT and Boise, ID, I counted as many as 20 dead deer per mile on the highway, for a hundred miles.
Working closely with that area, on busy highways, fences were used along the roadside opening only to a tunnel under the road, called a wildlife corridor where the wildlife can safely cross to the other side, also in australia for possums and koalas etc, they had poles erected with wire mesh tubing crossing above the road to another pole directly across from it, helping them cross safely, hope this helps
Latest Answers