Animal underpasses

I am mildly obsessed with animal underpasses. What, you might ask, is an animal underpass? Well, let me tell you!

Banff National Park is unique because it has 45 kms of uninterrupted fence, protecting the wildlife from the highway and vice versa. Fencing has shown to decrease the amount of animal-car collisions by 80%. However, animals probably don’t want to be stuck on one side of the highway forevermore, so the park made animal paths for them to traverse the highway safely. These paths come in two forms – overpasses or underpasses. There are only two overpasses in the entire park (see below), however there are 22 underpasses in a variety of forms and locations. The variety allows different animals to cross the highway in settings that are comfortable to them. For example, small underpasses for small animals would not be comfortable for elk to use. The park monitors the usage of the animal passes, and from 1996 – 2003 there were 37,507 through-passes by animals at just 10 of the passes! Here is an overpass:
The main animals using the passes are elk, followed by deer, wolves, sheep and coyotes. Cougars, black bears and grizzly bears also use the passes, although less so than the smaller creatures. Check out this graph:
Also this one (all taken from the Banff National Park site). This one shows whether grizzlies, black bears, wolves or cougars prefer overpasses or underpasses:
Smaller mammals use culverts to cross the highway. Here is a squirrel (top) and a weasel (bottom) using a culvert.

Good job, little guys!
The last time Garrett and I drove through the park I started looking for the animal underpasses. I was immediately surprised by how many I could see! The distinguishing feature for finding the animal underpasses is to watch the fence come down directly next to the road on both sides of the highway. I tried to take pictures of this while we were in the car, but it was really quite difficult and there was always a barrier in the way when we were near enough to photograph it. Anyway, I found some pictures on the net to show you what I’m talking about.
I’m not quite sure why animal underpasses excite me so much – maybe because it’s just so cool that the animals actually use them. They are like animal highways. Garrett was super lucky the last time we went through the park and he saw elk IN THE ANIMAL UNDERPASS. This is because the highway was split and he could see them under the other lanes to our left. I was quite jealous (and upset) that he got to see the elk and I did not. Anyway, I now spend the entire drive through Banff looking for animal underpasses and trying to photograph them. Hopefully once Garrett has his new X-trail I’ll be able to get better pictures (will be higher off the ground than in the car).

Here are my attempted pictures. See the fence on the right of the highway coming right up to the road?Here is a shot of the area between the twinned highway. You can see the fencing continues and that there is an underpass beneath the road.Here is the underpass from the side-on:The rest of the shots are the better ones I got of the fencing leading up to animal underpasses.See, I told you there weren't very good! At least you'll leave my blog today knowing a little more about animal under- and over-passes.