Tue 14 Nov 2006
SHANNON MONEO
Special to The Globe and Mail
VICTORIA — As the season changes from fall to winter, so too do the risks encountered by drivers on British Columbia highways, who must add the movement of wildlife to their list of concerns.
Large animals such as moose, deer and elk are mating and moving erratically. Their mineral cravings draw them to salt on winter roads. And darkness prevails, obscuring wildlife.
The Insurance Corp. of British Columbia says out of $2.27-billion in claims in 2004, drivers who hit wildlife cost the public insurer $23-million.
In that year, 10 people were killed in accidents with animals, more than 375 were injured and B.C. road maintenance companies spent more than $600,000 to clean up road kill.
“There’s a huge amount of carnage that happens on our roads,” said ICBC loss-prevention manager David Dickson. “We’re paying out far too much in wildlife claims.”
Mr. Dickson handles the region of north-central B.C., a vast area representing 70 per cent of the province. Some months, the Williams Lake-based manager travels 8,000 kilometres in his pickup truck and he sees dead animals along those roads daily.
He has seen the driver of a huge tractor-trailer smash into a deer, destroying the animal, without stopping. On a recent trip from Williams Lake to Prince Rupert, several dead deer littered the ditches, he said.
Mr. Dickson has even seen a dead Kermode bear near Kitwanga in northwestern B.C. The Kermode, or spirit bear, is a rare white subspecies of the black bear. There are only about 400 on the Central and North Coast.
Last year, during the September-to-November rutting season, in the Burns Lake area alone 28 moose were hit in one month, said Carey Derksen, a manager with Lakes District Maintenance.
Drivers and passengers are also at risk.
In addition to the deaths that occur because of the impact of an accident, people have been suffocated by an animal that has smashed into the vehicle’s interior and others are killed when a panicking 350-kilogram animal survives the impact but ends up wildly thrashing about inside a vehicle.
Mr. Derksen, who drives a big four-wheel-drive truck, said he is also seeing more elk herds in the north-central area, which adds another layer of risk.
“There’s a chance of multiple animals being hit,” he said.
B.C.’s Ministry of Transportation collects road-kill data from road maintenance companies such as Lakes District Maintenance.
Last year, 6,055 wild animals were killed by vehicles. In 2004, there were 5,611 and in 2003, 6,008 animals were killed.
Moose deaths were the highest in northern B.C., accounting for 229 of the 311 killed provincially in 2005.
Deer, the species that always tops the list of animals killed on B.C. roads, were hit most often in the Southern Interior, with 2,808 dying out of a total of 4,766 across the province in 2005.
Of the total 129 raccoons killed in the province in 2005, 117 of them died in the South Coast and Vancouver Island area, and 1,409 deer were also killed in that area.
In fact, about 75 per cent of road-kill incidents involve deer due to their prevalence across urban and rural B.C.
Other road-kill victims are cougar, beaver, caribou, coyote, eagle, fox, lynx, otter, skunk and wolf.
The B.C. Conservation Foundation estimates the actual number of wild animals killed by vehicles could be 75 per cent higher than ministry numbers indicate.
There are several reasons why not all animals become statistics. Some manage to drag their injured bodies into the bush, dying out of sight. Others are devoured by scavengers. Some are picked up by passersby.
To reduce road-kill incidents, the insurance bureau is trying several strategies, including having trucks that travel in the Prince George area outfitted with global positioning systems.
Drivers pressed a button each time they saw a living or dead moose or deer and a location and time were recorded. That data will be used to update 20-year-old estimations about exactly where animals are living in the province.
“We’ll be able to come up with hot spots,” Mr. Dickson predicted. Signs will then be posted, or if necessary, fences installed.
But fencing, most often seen in national parks, is expensive and disruptive. It costs up to $100,000 to fence a two-kilometre stretch of road and it interferes with animals’ migratory routes.
November 11th, 2008 at 2:15 am
During a recent trip to Banff I became aware of a story about the death of the alpha female wolf from the Bow Valley pack on the TCH highway (Famed wolf dies on Highway). I would like to comment on this issue, because I believe that Parks Canada have misrepresented the facts regarding the effectiveness of wildlife fencing for protecting wolves, bears and other carnivores such as coyotes from being killed on the highway. I am aware of this because I was employed as a statistician and biologist by Parks in 2005 and 2006, to examine the roadkill rates and effectiveness of the 5 sections of fencing by using 25 years of roadkill data that were collected between 1981 to 2006 by the Alberta government and Parks Canada. This is one of the best sets of data collected about effectiveness of wildlife fencing in North America, and possibly in the world. Although I no longer work for Parks, I am currently in the process of publishing a peer-reviewed paper on this topic.
There is no disputing the fact that highway fencing is very effective for reducing roadkill mortality of ungulates like deer and elk. These species cannot easily bypass the fence, and so there has been a reduction of deaths of these species of over 80%, as stated by Parks representatives. This is misleading statement in light of the recent wolf mortality because the statement of “80% reduction” statistic as used in the newspaper article simply does not apply in the case of wolves, or other carnivores, it is a number that represents only ungulates which are completely different in their reaction to the fence than carnivores.
In the case of carnivores the story is not so clear-cut, and the Parks Canada roadkill numbers actually show the opposite to be true. Bears, for example, have shown a doubling of the number of deaths in parallel with a doubling of traffic volumes that occurred between 1981 and 2006. There was no effect of the fence to reduce the bear mortality rates at all, with no reduction in bear mortality observed after fencing in any of the 5 sections of fence. This is because the bears can and do climb or go under the fence at will, as documented by on-duty Park wardens and during bear monitoring. While the wildlife crossings have recorded increased use by bears over time, intrusions by bears into the fenced roadway have also increased, demonstrating that the fence has not worked to keep these animals off the roadway. As well, many radio-collared bears are known to have crossed the highway without leaving any trace of tracks or pictures at the intensively monitored wildlife overpasses and underpasses, showing that even individual radio-marked bears do not always use the wildlife crossings to cross the highway.
In the case of wolves, again Parks Canada’s own data do not show fencing leads to any consistently observed reduction of wolf mortality either. In fact, along 3 of the 5 sections of fence in the Banff and Canmore area wolf mortality rose over time, likely due to concurrent increases in traffic volumes and the gaps under the fence caused by it not being buried along the bottom edge, or not properly maintained. Again, the fence was not shown to always be effective at reducing wolf mortality, as it was also not effective for bears. Coyotes show a similar trend to that of wolves, with greater mortality as traffic increases, and along the unburied fences where the canids can pass under the fence with little effort. The recent death of the alpha female wolf of the Bow Valley pack and her adult son only serves to highlight this fact in an indisputable manner - dead wolf carcasses on the side of the highway.
In 2006 I was released by Parks from my contract to examine effectiveness of the fence to protect wildlife, shortly after showing these results to my supervisor on the Trans-Canada Highway wildlife study. I do not currently earn any income from continuing this research for a further 2 years beyond my contract cancellation, and so do not have any monetary interest in spreading this knowledge to the public, or in keeping these facts hidden. Clearly the data records show the fence is not working effectively to protect carnivores like bears and wolves from roadkill mortality as was originally hoped. Although fencing works great for ungulates, there is definitely a story to be told of how the fences are failing to work for carnivores that the public deserves to hear.
Sincerely,
Wayne Hallstrom