Wildlife find path to safety under US roads
WASHINGTON — So how did the chicken cross the road? Or the raccoon, Virginia opossum, woodchuck, red fox, white-tailed deer or great blue heron?
To find out, researchers in Maryland put motion-detection cameras in culverts throughout the mid-Atlantic US state to learn more about how wildlife of all kinds use culverts, or storm drains, to avoid motor traffic.
Culverts are intended to channel water under a highway. But it turns out that animals of all kinds have figured out how to exploit such man-made structures to avoid becoming roadkill.
"I was really surprised by the number of species actually using these culverts," professor J. Edward Gates of the University of Maryland's Center for Environmental Science told AFP in a telephone interview.
"It was just about every mammal in Maryland, except for three species: bobcat, black bear and coyote."
Funding for the project came from the Maryland State Highway Administration, which like its counterparts across the United States is keen to find ways to lower the cost of roadkill for animals and humans alike.
Every year, vehicle-animal collisions kill more than 200 people as well as "millions" of animals, the federal Department of Transportation says.
Crashes involving deer alone add up to more than $4.6 billion in vehicle damage and health-care costs for injured persons, adds the Insurance Information Institute.
To assess how culverts can help, Gates' team put Moultrie Game Spy infrared cameras -- normally used by hunters to monitor game trails -- inside some 300 culverts in every county in the state.
Some of the culverts ran under Interstate 95, one of the most-traveled superhighways in North America. Others lay beneath sleepy country roads along the Chesapeake Bay and in the Appalachian mountains.
Then, over two years and eight seasons, until January this year, the researchers watched the critters come through.
Raccoons turned out to be the most frequent culvert users by far, turning up in 246 of the drain pipes on 24,800 occasions. (One of them, looking forlorn in chest-deep water, is something of a poster child for the project.
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Or the raccoon, Virginia opossum, woodchuck, red fox, white-tailed deer or great blue heron? To find out, researchers in Maryland put motion-detection cameras in culverts throughout the mid-Atlantic US state to learn more about how wildlife of all
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