Photo caption: Under the watchful eye of Teakettle Mountain, Dr. Marcel Huijser (yellow vest) discusses mitigation options with GTMA ED Peter Metcalf, and two Forest Service biologists, Kris Tempel and Jess Swanson.
Any road ecologist will tell you that it’s tough to understand much about a potential wildlife crossing mitigation site without having seen it in person.
Sure, you can scour the topography and vegetation in GIS software to get a sense of where the target animals might want to move across the landscape. Yeah, can also peruse the Heart of the Rockies’ new Keep It Connected Data Viewer and find your way to the mouth of Bad Rock Canyon, where you’ll find two lonely polygons indicating this is a key location for grizzly bear movement along the western front of the Swan and Whitefish ranges.
You can even check the Montana Wildlife and Transportation Partnership Planning Tool and see that the stretch of road through Bad Rock Canyon scores about the same as the Sixmile Wildlife Crossing Project west of Missoula, where the Montana Department of Transportation is conducting a feasibility study to replace the 60-year-old, hydraulically undersized Sixmile Creek culvert with two large open-span bridges.
But really, you gotta get out on the ground and look around to really know what needs to be done. So on October 24, we met with Dr. Marcel Huijser—a well-respected road ecologist whose expertise includes the ecological impacts of transportation infrastructure, vehicle collisions with large mammals, and how to mitigate these impacts—at the Bad Rock Canyon to get his expert opinion.
The only real option, he said, for the target species that use this habitat—large ungulates and black and bears—is an overpass. Specific species require different crossing structures. Grizzly bear sows with cubs, for instance, won’t use the dark confines of an underpass, and mountain goats and pronghorn won’t use overpasses.
The other problem at Bad Rock Canyon, which is very adjacent to the Flathead River, is a high water table, which precludes digging deep in this flat area to make room for an underpass.
Exclusionary fencing is also required to keep animals off, and funnel them over or under, the highway. If the fencing stretched between the Teakettle and Hungry Horse bridges, it would provide animals the option of crossing the highway along the river or on the overpass.
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