George Lee, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Macleod Gazette

Wood, metal, concrete and mesh have transformed a 10-kilometre stretch of the open road in southern Alberta into a protective passageway for the motoring public.

Strategically placed along a scenic foothills route to prevent the kind of wildlife encounter drivers would sooner avoid, all those posts, fences and cattleguards along Highway 3 are hard to ignore.

Less obvious, however, is what the system does to help critters of multiple types and sizes safely meet their own cross-terrain needs.

A bridge that’s part of the $11-million Rock Creek project traverses a wildlife underpass that barely pings a driver’s consciousness. But that gentle rise and fall covers a critical piece of infrastructure that’s far more sophisticated than most motorists realize.

The entire project, in fact, is a practical meeting of research, applied science and engineering that will, if all goes well, pay for itself in 15 years, the province forecasts.

“It’s not just a physics problem,” explains Clayton Lamb, a post doctoral researcher and biologist who earned his PhD in ecology at the University of Alberta.

Lamb and other researchers across Western Canada work for the Wildlife Science Centre. With main offices in Edmonton and at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus in Kelowna, the centre falls under an umbrella organization called Biodiversity Pathways.

He says that Rock Creek and systems like it are “not just about building the infrastructure and making sure the overpass will last. They’re about being embedded in an ecological system with animals that are changing in response to their landscape and in response to the very system itself.”

He continues: “There’s this kind of push and pull, or this game theory going on between all the parties playing the game.”

The Birth of Roadside Ecology

Humans, of course, have been carving up and paving the landscape since the 1950s as their love for the automobile rapidly ascended. But things weren’t always this sophisticated.

The birth of roadside ecology — the practice of managing the spaces where linear infrastructure intersects with the movement needs of wildlife — came out of that explosion of roads and cars, explains Stephen Legaree.

A professional biologist and the director of environmental regulation with Alberta Transportation and Economic Corridors, Legaree provides a primer on the recent history of wildlife exclusion.

“What you saw was systems in Banff and Yoho national parks continue to evolve as Parks Canada deployed them. And the ministry of transportation in B.C. developed their systems, too,” he explains.

“And when Alberta came onto the scene, essentially what we did was work with them to take their current designs, the latest learning, and apply that learning to our designs.”

Completed by the Alberta government late last year, the Rock Creek underpass and fencing project hooks west along Highway 3 from a sliver of Highway 22.

Crews on the Rock Creek stretch historically collected an average of 30 animal carcasses a year along the increasingly important southern corridor between Saskatchewan and B.C. Researchers estimate the actual number of deaths is three times higher, because many animals wander off and die elsewhere.

Those localized collisions with wolf-sized animals and up were costing society nearly $1 million annually. Once the system matures — as it gets tweaked, as animal acceptance grows and as its flora ages — the hope is that collisions will have dropped by 80 per cent.

A Bigger Picture

According to the provincial government’s Alberta Wildlife Watch program, animal-vehicle collisions accounted for roughly 60 per cent of all reported crashes on Alberta’s rural highways between 2015 and 2020.

Those impacts cost Albertans approximately $300,000 every day in direct and indirect costs, including property damage, health care and highway cleanup.

Provincial statistics peg the average number of human fatalities caused by wildlife collisions at six a year, on top of about 320 serious injuries.

To put that in perspective, the Alberta Motor Association notes that between 2000 and 2020, Alberta accounted for 22 per cent of all wildlife-vehicle collision fatalities in Canada — more than second-place Ontario at 17 per cent, a province with three times the population.

Building a system to reduce those fatal collisions requires a cross-jurisdictional web of collaborators.

Researchers like Lamb track what kinds of animals go where and why they do it, using GPS tracking collars and remote cameras to monitor migration.

Along with Biodiversity Pathways, another major player is the Miistakis Institute, a charitable organization based at Mount Royal University that helps turn academic research into land management solutions.

Miistakis — it’s the Blackfoot word for the Rocky Mountains, or “the backbone of the world” — works directly with private landowners, government agencies and academics to ensure scientifically robust information is put to practical work.

Also part of the picture is the international vision driven by the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. With offices in Bozeman, Mont., and Canmore, Y2Y is dedicated to connecting and protecting 3,400 kilometres of habitat along the spine of the Rockies.

Y2Y calls Rock Creek a critical pinch-point in an initiative called Reconnecting the Rockies, which strives to make sure genetic flow and animal migration aren’t choked off by asphalt.

Ground View

But doing that is never simple.

“There are constraints on the infrastructure side — like, you can’t build a concrete footing in a swamp, even though it would be good for where the wildlife are,” Lamb explains.

“And then there are constraints on the wildlife side. Places where builders would prefer to fence a section but we think it’s a really important movement area. So we’re kind of working those through together on the ground in real time.”

The resulting infrastructure is tailored to specific critters in specific ecosystems.

For Rock Creek, larger mammals are the primary safety concern — from wolves, cougars and bears up to elk and moose.

White-tail and mule deer are struck most often. But the design also accommodates smaller mammals like coyotes, red foxes and raccoons.

Projects like Rock Creek act as funnels to ensure animals find the safe crossing points, which are lined with natural flora and debris to provide cover for smaller prey.

Designers monitor the edges of fencelines to ensure they aren’t simply pushing impacts further down the road.

The fences themselves are highly specialized. To thwart climbing species in the foothills — bears and cougars —Alberta Transportation utilized steel posts and, at fence tops, angled return-arms at to prevent animals from hauling themselves over.

Mesh is buried at the bottom to stop bears from digging underneath, and in some systems finer mesh is incorporated to keep reptiles and amphibians off the pavement.

Wildlife exclusion systems also feature specific exit points, so-called “jump-outs,” so that animals that do breach barriers don’t ping-pong around till they get struck.

Why Did the Deer Cross the Road?

But why do animals need to get to the other side so badly in the first place? Can’t they just stay on one side of the fence?

“If you’re an animal that lives on the north side of the highway and the highway completely blocks your movement, you basically have half as many options as you did before,” Lamb says.

“These animals need to be able to use all the variety in the landscape, and there is a ton of it, especially in a mountainous area,” he says.

“If it’s hot you can go to a north-facing slope. You can go up in elevation. If it snows a lot, you can go down to a south-facing slope. If there’s a burn, you can move away. If the berry crop fails, you can go to another area.”

Tracy Lee, the director of conservation research at the Miistakis Institute, points out that survival and reproduction are powerful motivators.

Lee, who holds a master’s degree in resources and the environment from the University of Calgary, says: “That movement across that highway is quite critical for sustaining these large mammal populations.”

She points out that even for smaller creatures like amphibians, a highway splitting their upland habitat from their wetland breeding grounds can wipe out a local population during spring migration.

An elk makes use of the Rock Creek underpass during the wildlife exclusion system’s early days.

The Curious Critters Queue

Getting that right is the big payoff for researchers, builders and society.

Alberta Transportation requires a full calendar year of post-construction data before officially reporting on the collision reductions at Rock Creek, but early monitoring is promising.

In the system’s first 40 days, there were 45 different “wildlife events” captured by cameras at the underpass, Lee says.

“So that’s 45 different times that animals — and that could be a group or a family — used the underpass. That’s more than one a day.”

Safely navigating beneath the traffic were mule deer, white-tailed deer, red foxes, coyotes, raccoons, an elk, a cougar and a moose with twin calves.

A grizzly bear and two cubs approached the entrance to investigate but didn’t cross, which isn’t unusual early on. Researchers have learned it takes bears a bit longer to trust a new structure.

But animals generally change their ways quickly.

“If you build it where they are, where they already want to be, then acclimation and use happen fast,” Legaree notes. “A lot of the species over time will build that into their habits once they find a safe crossing opportunity, and they teach it generationally.”

Curious critters often show up before projects are even finished. “Wildlife are sometimes using them before construction is complete,” said Legaree.

The centrepiece overpass of the $17.5-million Peter Lougheed project east of Canmore saw animals put it to use before the topsoil was even down, Legaree says.

“And I know my colleagues in B.C. had all sorts of challenges with their bighorn sheep at the Radium overpass, because the sheep really wanted to be on it.”

A Rare Win-Win

Locals are noticing the difference from their side of the Rock Creek fences.

At a recent government media roundtable, Lisa Sygutek, publisher of the Crowsnest Pass Herald, praised the system.

“We see a massive change,” Sygutek told Devin Dreeshen, the responsible minister.

Noting a drop in observed roadkill on a route many of her readers travel daily, Sygutek said during a government-organized media roundtable: “We’re talking about it all over southern Alberta and how wonderful it’s been.”

While some folks have complained about the industrial aesthetic of the Rock Creek project, Lee of the Miistakis Institute says the overarching success of the project is undeniable.

“This is a win-win project for everybody. How often can you say that?” Lee says.

“You talk to any rural person and they themselves or someone they know has hit a large animal on the highway. It can be minor damage to your car and an inconvenience, but it can also be very deadly.”

If the light’s right, Rock Creek is literally a shining example of modern wildlife exclusion.

A Feedback Loop of Fences and Crossings

But anecdotes aren’t the same as data, scientists often point out.

And the Alberta system of collecting it — Alberta Wildlife Watch — is best in class, according to Lee.

“I have yet to see a program like this anywhere else in Canada or even in the States,” she says. “It is really state-of-the-art.”

Highway maintenance crews report the carcasses through a smartphone app. And the program calculates risks and hotspots throughout the province, to figure out where money spent will be most effective.

“It’s a really powerful program,” she added.

Lamb of the Wildlife Science Centre, meanwhile, notes that every new system is part of a feedback loop of iterative changes and repairs.

“There’s this sort of constant and repeating cycle in real time,” he says, and it’s informed by “high-quality data” from various agencies.

The numbers also inform what’s to come.

Legaree’s ministry has released new terms of reference for road and bridge construction projects that, in some case, will mean wildlife impact mitigation is designed in right away rather than retrofitted later.

A real-world example is the west Calgary ring road. The project’s environmental assessment identified the need, so a fencing system “mitigated the highway from day one,” Legaree says.

Lamb says that kind of public-dollar investment makes sense in multiple ways.

“It’s not as if we are trading off the environment for the economy like we are in most situations,” he says.

“It’s a case where we can allow goods to travel more efficiently, allow people to move from A to B better, and also keep wildlife safer and allow them to be more connected.

“In the end, it’s actually economically more viable to solve the collisions than to keep hitting animals.”

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