#Canada built 44 bridges and tunnels across a single stretch of highway so that animals could cross without dying, and collisions with wildlife there have fallen by more than 80%, with #grizzly mothers now teaching their cubs to use the crossings like a route the family has always known
When a highway became a deadly barrier to evolution itself, engineers built an invisible detour that wild animals instinctively learned to use.
By Brendan Brown
Published September 6, 2026
"The #TransCanadaHighway runs straight through #BanffNationalPark — 82 kilometers of four-lane road through the Canadian Rockies, carrying a vehicle every few seconds through some of the richest wildlife country on the continent.
"For decades, the arithmetic of that arrangement was written in carcasses. The highway killed elk, deer, bears and wolves at a relentless rate, and did something quieter and worse besides: it cut the park’s animal populations in two, a river of traffic no prudent animal would cross, splitting gene pools on either side of the pavement.
"Canada’s answer, built out over three decades, was to give the animals their own infrastructure — and it has become the most-studied, most-copied piece of #wildlife engineering on Earth.
Six bridges, thirty-eight tunnels
"Along that one stretch of highway, Parks Canada built 44 crossing structures — six overpasses and 38 underpasses — beginning with the first two overpasses in 1996 at about $1.5 million each.
"The overpasses are the famous ones: to a driver they look like ordinary concrete bridges, until you glimpse the top and see forest running unbroken across them — trees, shrubs and grass planted fifty meters wide, a strip of the Rockies carried over four lanes of traffic. The underpasses do the volume work below: culverts and tunnels sized for everything from cougars to moose."
#SolarPunkSunday #WildlifeCrossings #WildlifeCorridors #WildlifeHabitat #PreserveNature #WildlifeDiversity #Biodiversity #GreenBridges #Reconnection #HabitatConnectivity #WildlifeConservation #GeneticDiversity
