Missoula News

"I discovered that the farthest point in the lower 48 states was less than 22 miles from the nearest road"

Not sure what Bendick meant by this comment. The northern-most tip of Maine has a road within 22 miles? Or any point in the lower 48 is within 22 miles of a road?

I'd guess that a lot of roads have less than 25 vehicles per day. I can see that busy roads would pose a crossing problem, but not rural roads and city streets.

Wish the movie would be shown outside the northwest.

Traffic density, speed, and cluelessness is on the cusp of eliminating some races of animals. A high speed two lane hiway, or barrier median freeway, is no less than a free fire zone for critters. If you think the no man's land off the 38th Parallel dividing the Koreas is a death zone for humans, we have hundreds of thousands of miles of the same kind of situation for critters, and unlike humans, the critters don't have a clue as to their fate. All they know is that they are supposed to go thataway, and do. Often to their death. The dark stain of blood and the green stain of stomach contents is all we see after the corpse collectors of the hiway dept. have done their job. That and some shards of glass, pieces of plastic, and the usual skid marks.

I knew a man who worked for the Oregon Hiway Dept. He drove a snowplow and picked up dead animals on the roadside for disposal. He kept a log, and every year he threw more deer in a dump truck than the Game Commission alloted for the management unit the hiway bisected. How many more got even a hundred yards off the road to die is not known.

I have seen cougars, mink, martens, bears, countless birds and reptiles, deer and elk, and this in the last year. A couple of months ago, I saw a wolf at noon along I-90 looking to cross near Saltese, MT.

The most useful freeway improvement this nation could embark upon would be the creation of over and under passes for wildlife, with directing fences, on major and minor hiways across the West. All the hoohaw about USFS roads, and road obliteration, is wasted effort if you look at habitat on a larger scale, and believe connectivity is important. The whole of the reasoning about NREPA is purported to be about that issue, and not just another Wilderness deal to secure undeveloped land. If you bisect it, carve it up, as it is now, with freeways and high speed two way roads, paved, all the connectivity gains are lost to auto and truck delivered mortality. It is a waste of time and effort.

If we were to gain placement of a number of secure wildlife crossings, and the results are measurable as to habitat use of significant populations on either side of the bisecting roadway, the issue of connectivity would gain some credence. And maybe, that connectivity would lessen the need to place great chunks of ground into classifications that essentially preclude most human use and visitation.

In the Machiavellian ways of all things political, I can see obstruction and obfuscation of the secure crossing issue as it would challenge some tenets of larger area land use restrictions.

In my backyard, I-5 from Portland to Weed, CA., has 5 major grades for trucks to pull. If they exit at Goshen, and take US 58 over Willamette Pass, and then on down to US 97 at Chemult, south on to Klamath Falls, Doris, CA, and one grade just before Weed and I-5, the trip is 15 miles longer but saves a bunch on fuel because of only having to pull Willamette Pass and the hill before Weed. The downside is, there once was a significant mule deer population that used the east side of the Cascades in summer, and the High Desert for winter ground. That meant crossing 97 and the UP mainline RR lines twice a year. The resulting mayhem of annually increasing truck traffic and the lure of the Bend area to California auto traffic has decimated that race of deer. Once what was thousands has become hundreds. And it all is about second homes, million dollar second homes, in winter habitat and high speed roads laden with an extraordinary truck load trying to save on expensive fuel. And no secure wildlife crossings. A great deal of the area of concern is on public lands, and where better to spend stimulus or government money than on Deschutes, Winema, and Fremont Natl Forest bordered US 97. Or that road in your state that has become an egregious killer of animals, large or small. Habitat for dead critters is sort of a funky way of looking at conservation. We first need to protect the ones now living and using the available habitat.

Max...Texas ain't the West. It's a part of the Southwest. Our critters have to migrate to lower elevation to winter out. We don't have whitetail deer with snowshoe feet. Or mule deer or elk. It is either migrate or hibernate. So we have long distance migrations. Pronghorn that go several hundred miles each way each year. And snakes, tortoises, and other crawlers. It is an issue out here where the land has a distinctly more vertical component than Texas, and a bunch of winter snow that does not melt until spring.

I would like to witness that rally instructor when he is faced with a bear, an elk or a moose, an angus or horse on the open range.
At freeway speeds, people die and so does the critter. Not improvement to the environment in that deal. Especially since all the meat is removed to a landfill or the long faced undertaker's, cheating the carrion eaters. No putting uncle Phil in the crotch of a cottonwood today. He might poison some carrion snacker.

And then in some free association mind fart, as often happens to me, I have to wonder about the raven road patrol, and the raven in literature, and the raven as a battlefield scrounger of note. Has the raven been following people for millennia just because they know our propensity for creating meat snacks sooner than later? The wolf became the basis for out dogs. Why have we not domesticated the raven as some sort of scout for meat? I have a distinct feeling that humans have only turned down carrion recently in the time of our being on the earth. And some still do, as witnessed by the Roadkill Cafe and the discriminate salvage of meat on the roadside. I used to stop and pick up the pheasants that once were numerous in these parts, and flew into your windshield from nowhere with regularity. The only bird collision that I know about that had a bad ending for the driver of the car was a kid at the mill I was working for. He came over a hump and whoopee on the road and in the draw all too late came the vision of turkey buzzards working over a deer carcass and his CJ jeep windshield wasn't tough enough to repel a buzzard full of deer grout. He was a MESS!! and so was the jeep. No injury to anything but glass and pride, all with an odiferous overtone. The buzzard died for his effort at escape. The ravens were picking at the buzzard that afternoon, none the worse for wear. Few of them become victims of mayhem. Truly a wise bird and a true survivor. They should, however, wear one of those safety orange vests while doing their road patrol and packing off of high speed created morsels of meat and bone. And a little yellow hard hat with blinking LED red lights on it. And a flagger. They need a flagger so they aren't having to bounce up and down like Dominican short stop all the time. Hiway workers need all the help they can get. Ravens are certainly qualified hiway workers.

Dave: We had an election. The majority endorsed the candidate and platform of government taking ownership, of government the true way to enlightenment and progress. It is increasingly obvious to me that we are a socialist country, and in socialist countries, the government does it all on our dime, and if the dimes run out, they legislate a larger take of our dimes, and make them a quarter. Simple answer: the government should do it, and the sooner the better. A stimulus I could support.

I like the British way of getting good design: have a contest. Put up a quarter million dollar prize for a critter crossing, and let the clever ones design it. I think about the Viet Nam Memorial wall, and that is just how that came about. Thousands of young engineers just graduated from college. And the brightest and the best can devise unknown and new designs and techniques. OH, by bad!!! Can you pay incentives in a socialist system? Or are they reserved as awards for spying on your neighbors?

Dave, I don't know how we, as a Nation, pay for anything. I guess just print money. I would just as soon print money to build something here as print money to buy stuff from China. I hope we keep our supply of Hummer parts. That way we can salvage damaged ChiCom vehicles and put them to use on the more and more certain battlefield of the future. I would hope that designing and constructing critter crossings would provide jobs that ObamaNation cannot sell overseas, as seems to be their forte' for now, in direct contradiction of the campaign rhetoric. I would rather see the whole of the Hummer construction machinery and parts destroyed and melted down to build a better fence on our border. Red neck that I am.

Wendell: "I'd guess that a lot of roads have less than 25 vehicles per day. I can see that busy roads would pose a crossing problem, but not rural roads and city streets."

Roads with ZERO traffic are still devastating for wildlife, because many species are unable to cross them, because they are afraid to be out in the open, where they are vulnerable to their predators. See for example http://home.pacbell.net/mjvande/roads1 .