BEND, Ore. — More than a decade after Oregon transportation officials built wildlife undercrossings on Highway 97 south of Bend, the number of vehicle collisions with large animals like mule deer and elk has dropped by nearly 80 percent — but advocates say the danger remains, and new projects are in the works.
The Oregon Department of Transportation completed an $18.9 million wildlife crossings project on 3.7 miles of Highway 97 in 2012.
“Mule deer have to migrate to survive,” ODOT Wildlife Passage Coordinator Cidney Brown said. “They go from the High Cascades in the summer to the high desert in the winter, and they have to migrate or they die, and they have to cross highways to do that.”
One path was a multi-use undercrossing. The other was a dedicated wildlife undercrossing designed for mule deer.
“These undercrossings were built as a way to find a way for them to safely pass under the highway and protect drivers from striking animals,” Bowman said.
Bowman says vehicle collisions account for around 20% of known mule deer mortality in an already declining population here in Central Oregon.
“After construction of the wildlife crossings, we see close to an 80% reduction in the number of wildlife collisions for large species like deer and elk,” Bowman said.
While work is being done to help with animal traffic safety, the danger for animals and drivers is still very real this time of year.
“We’ve had tons of calls to our wildlife hotline about mule deer,” Think Wild Development and Communications Coordinator Molly Honea said. “One of our partners who does carcass removal has had over five calls in the last 24 hours about deer who’ve been hit by cars and need to be removed from our roadways.”
Honea says that at dawn and dusk, look out for wildlife near roads and avoid feeding wildlife.
“If you’re attracting wildlife towards human spaces, you’re attracting them towards roadways as well,” Honea said. “So we ask that people not feed the wildlife. You can also put window treatments on your windows to help break up the reflection so birds can see your windows more easily and decrease their instances of window strikes.”
A bill to increase funding for wildlife crossings did not make it through the Oregon Legislature this year. It will be reintroduced next year.
An effort to build four wildlife crossings over Highway 20 between Bend and Suttle Lake hit a significant funding milestone in April. Central Oregon LandWatch has now raised over $1 million for the project, thanks to a $688,000 grant from the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board. That means it has raised enough money to apply for federal matching funds for the next phase of the project, which is engineering and design of the crossings.
