Highways, Genes and So. Cal. Mountain Lions

UC Davis mountain lion geneticsThe mountain lions of southern California are hemmed in on all sides. In one place a 10-lane highway divides mountain lion habitat. All that development is particularly difficult on a species with such a large home range.

All those highways and housing developments are putting a crimp in the mountain lions of the region’s gene pool, says a recent paper in PLoS ONE by University of California, Davis scientists. The mountain lions of the Santa Ana Mountains are no longer on speaking terms with the mountain lions of the Santa Monica Mountains. Within those population segments, genetic diversity is low.

I just covered this issue back in January (where the solution was a wildlife crossing) and wasn’t sure it was worth writing about again, but a the UC Davis press release and a Los Angeles Times article pointed out that we’ve seen this phenomenon of mountain lions hemmed in by a growing human population before — in the Florida panther. Other Puma populations may not be as distinctive as the Florida panther, but we are almost certainly sure to see this again. If there is a solution, it is a story worth following.

Read the PLoS ONE paper here.
Read the UC Davis press release here.
Read the Los Angeles Times story here.

Photo/map: This map identifies puma captures in the Santa Ana Mountains and eastern Peninsular ranges of southern California. The inset photo is of a mountain lion keeping watch while her juvenile cubs feed. Courtesy: UC Davis/The Nature Conservancy

Dollars and Sense at NETWC

deb markowitz VTANR“What we did to protect animals actually protected roads,” said Vermont Agency of Natural Resources secretary Deb Markowitz at a general session at the Northeastern Transportation and Wildlife Conference this week (Sept. 21 – 24) in Burlington, Vermont. In places where culverts had been resized to allow wildlife to walk along the banks during low flow periods, the culverts have held during floods like the one caused by Tropical Storm Irene in Vermont.

A documentary on the Highway Wilding project that built wildlife passages along the TransCanada Highway in Banff National Park said that the cost of hitting a moose with a vehicle averages $30,000. Hitting a deer averages over $1,000. It doesn’t take many wildlife collisions to cost-justify a wildlife crossing, the documentary said, and some highway locations are the scene of hundreds of collisions.

Photo: Camera fail. None of my photos of Markowitz speaking even made it onto my camera’s memory card. Here’s her official portrait off the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources website.

Snakes in a Drain at NETWC

turtle crossingBlack racer snakes are rare in Vermont, so when highway construction was going to introduce drains with holes big enough for the snakes to fall into, the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife asked for a fix. Drain covers with smaller holes were not possible. So the Vermont Agency of Transportation fashioned snake-sized ladders and attached them to the drains. It turns out that black racers are excellent climbers, so it is expected that the snakes will rescue themselves if they fall into the drain.  A poster on the unusual solution was presented at the Northeastern Transportation and Wildlife Conference, being held this week (Sept. 21 – 24) in Burlington, Vermont.

In other news from the conference: Now that fish and wildlife departments and transportation agencies are getting along so well together, what is the next step? Bringing urban and land-use planning into the fold. This will be trickier, because while transportation and wildlife function on the state level, planning happens at the local level. In Vermont, several speakers noted, just two percent of all development was subject to state review. (And Vermont has a strong state-level development law.)

Seeing Is Believing At NETWC

Richard TT FormanThe Northeastern Transportation and Wildlife Conference is taking place in Burlington, Vermont this week (Sept. 21 – 24). The technology of the hour is the game camera. It’s cheap, it’s non-invasive, and it’s cheap. One presenter confessed that there were probably better tools for his project — radio collaring, for example — but that it was better to have some data for his project now than waiting around for funding for better technology.

The next step is to become more adept at using game cameras. In that same presentation, there was a problem with smaller animals not being picked up by the cameras. At least one of the conversations after the session was about how to better place and aim the cameras to pick up all the species included in the study (which can be difficult if it includes both weasels and moose).

Another aspect touched on by a poster from the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife, is processing all those photos. This poster suggested using software that lets analysts pick descriptions from a pull-down menus to standardize the interpretations for better data crunching.

Photo: You never know who you will meet at a conference. Harvard researcher Richard T.T. Forman, known as the “father of road ecology,” was one of the NETWC attendees. Here, he adds his thoughts on a documentary that he appeared in as an expert.

Construction Netting Harms Swallows

Nets installed to keep cliff swallows away from a bridge construction zone in Petaluma, California wound up killing dozens of the birds last year, the Press Democrat reports. The construction firm had to pay a $3,525 fine for killing the birds, but now a local conservation organization has won a victory that will force CalTrans and its contractors on the Petaluma bridge project to use hard plastic sheeting instead of netting to keep the birds away during construction.

Read all the details in the Press Democrat, here.

Roadside construction nets, although these were used on the ground to control erosion, also killed wildlife in New York State. We wrote about it here.

Photo: American tree swallows nesting under the bridge over Cayucos Creek, Cayucos, CA. By marlin harms. Used under Creative Commons license.

Construction Netting Harms Swallows

Nets installed to keep cliff swallows away from a bridge construction zone in Petaluma, California wound up killing dozens of the birds last year, the Press Democrat reports. The construction firm had to pay a $3,525 fine for killing the birds, but now a local conservation organization has won a victory that will force CalTrans and its contractors on the Petaluma bridge project to use hard plastic sheeting instead of netting to keep the birds away during construction.

Read all the details in the Press Democrat, here.

Roadside construction nets, although these were used on the ground to control erosion, also killed wildlife in New York State. We wrote about it here.

Photo: American tree swallows nesting under the bridge over Cayucos Creek, Cayucos, CA. By marlin harms. Used under Creative Commons license.

Third Time’s the Charm for Wildlife Passages

A pronghorn is released in western ColoradoAt Trapper’s Point in Wyoming, migrating pronghorns and mule deer are funneled by two rivers to 13-mile stretch of Highway 191, where they attempt to cross. Each year they endanger their own lives crossing the highway, and human lives as well, High Country News’s Goat blog reports.

Last year the Wyoming Department of Transportation (WYDOT) opened eight wildlife crossings, including both under- and overpasses at the site. The deer and pronghorns were guided toward the passages with fencing.

The effort worked — the deer and pronghorn eventually used the passages, but not without a lot of searching, looking and just plain standing around, first. Worse still, during the spring migration, the pronghorn and deer repeated the process. The passages still made them nervous.

But the third time is the charm, according to the excellent Goat blog post and a press release from the Wildlife Conservation Society. When encountering the passages for the second time on their fall migration, the animals didn’t hesitate, but proceeded right through.

Read High Country News’s Goat blog, here.
Read the Wildlife Conservation Society press release, here.

Photo: A pronghorn being released after being collared in Colorado. Courtesy Colorado Division of Wildlife

Birds Obey Speed Limits

How Did the Animal Cross the Road? The Shocking AnswerCanadian researchers found that European birds flee before an approaching car at an interval that is consistent with the road’s speed limit, but not with the actual speed of the approaching car. So birds on a highway fled sooner than birds on local, residential roads. The researchers studied roads in three speed categories.

There are conservation implications for this finding, as an article in AAAS’s ScienceShot says.

Read the ScienceShot article here.
Read the abstract in Biology Letters, here. (Full article requires subscription or fee.)

Research Round-up

Earlier this summer, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation wildlife biologists banded 15 peregrine falcon chicks from five nests in western New York State. The birds are part of the growing peregrine population in the state.

Read the NYS DEC press release here.

The California Department of Fish and Game recently caught and captured 10 female deer as part of a study of habitat usage along I-280 in the San Francisco region. The information collected is part of an 18-month study that will allow scientists suggest ways to keep deer off the busy roadway.

Read the California DFG press release here.

The Michigan Department of Natural Resources, Ohio Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that a recent sampling did not find Asian carp in western Lake Erie. A week of electrofishing and gill-netting did not turn up Asian carp. The survey was conducted because last summer, DNA samples revealed the presence of the invasive carp.

Read a press release from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources here.

The Bend (Ore.) Bulletin reports that wildlife biologists will set out camera traps in the Cascade mountains hoping to catch a glimpse of wolverines, which are listed as threatened in the state.

Read the article in the Bend Bulletin here.

Photo: Wildlife Biologists process a sedated deer for the I-280 deer study courtesy of California Department of Fish and Game

New York State Stops Using Photodegradeable Netting

Dead garter snake in photodegradeable nettingWhether its road construction, utility work, or chemical remediation, many states call for the use of some sort of landscape fabric or biodegradeable netting to prevent erosion at construction sites until plants take root.

New York State has learned that plastic netting advertised as photodegradeable was used at sites in the state, and has killed and injured wildlife at those sites. The netting is an entanglement risk for wildlife for years, a story put out by the State Bureau of Habitat says.

Read the story, here. The link will bring you to a PDF. The netting story is the second story on page 2.

Photo courtesy of NYS DEC