Newly Opened Road Takes Toll on Wildlife

By DEBORAH SCHOCH

Nov. 9, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Orange County’s newest highway is levying a grisly toll: deer and other animals hit by cars despite multimillion-dollar precautions.

At least five deer and seven coyotes have died on the Eastern Transportation Corridor since it opened three weeks ago, raising questions about whether animals will use tunnels intended to guide them under the six-lane toll road.

The deaths have prompted toll road builders to reexamine the tunnels and other measures meant to keep animals off the highway, which cuts through a rural area of canyons and hillsides.

Environmentalists have strongly criticized the $765-million toll road, in part because it bisects a 37,000-acre wildlife preserve created in a state-federal effort to protect rare plants and animals.

But officials with the Transportation Corridor Agencies, which build toll roads in the county, said they are taking swift steps to prevent future accidents with wildlife. And the deaths reported so far may be flukes, they said, pointing out that no one knows how the animals got on the road.

To protect wild creatures, builders equipped the road with five wildlife crossings, or underpasses designed for animals, with 7-foot fences flanking four crossings and 10-foot fences at the fifth.

But the mesh fence that lines both sides of the 17-mile road for most of its length is only 6 feet high, which several biologists agree is too low to stop deer from leaping onto the road. Fences should be 8 or 10 feet high to stop deer, they said.

“Most of our biologists would say an 8-foot fence. If you’re trying to keep cows out, a 6-foot fence is fine,” said Ken Mayer, statewide deer program coordinator and senior wildlife biologist for the California Department of Fish and Game.

Some wildlife experts also criticize what they term inadequate monitoring of the numbers and kinds of animals killed on the road, saying that such data could be key in improving the crossings and protecting wildlife and people alike.

In the wake of the deer killings, toll road officials have started using lighted signs to warn motorists to watch for wayward animals. They are trying to lure more wildlife under the highway by placing salt licks, apples and bales of alfalfa on the bare ground inside the underpasses.

Even as they try to improve their precautions, however, toll road officials are making a mistake, Mayer said. He urged them to remove the alfalfa, which wild deer cannot digest.

“It makes me shudder to think of alfalfa, because we have a long history of finding dead deer with their stomachs filled with alfalfa,” Mayer said.

A toll road spokeswoman said Friday evening that officials would consult with Mayer about the alfalfa issue.

The spokeswoman, Lisa Telles, warned against drawing swift conclusions about the deer deaths, saying they occurred during the first days of the road’s operation, with no deaths since Oct. 26.

“The question may be: Is this an anomaly?” Telles said. “It’s certainly very early to analyze if the program is failing. Any scientist, I think, would agree with that.”

But environmentalists who have long opposed the toll road said the deer deaths simply confirmed their worst fears.

“It’s like taking a butcher knife through this landscape, and it’s going to continue to cause animal deaths,” said Dan Silver, a toll road critic and coordinator of the Endangered Habitats League, a Los Angeles-based environmental group. He denounced the notion that road builders should be allowed to construct wildlife crossings to compensate for the highway’s environmental effects--a process called mitigation.

“The word ‘mitigation’ is just a euphemism to let people think they’re correcting the damage. But the damage isn’t corrected,” Silver said.

But others say wildlife crossings can be made to work, depending on their size and location.

Such crossings are supposed to allow animals to continue moving between wild lands that have been fragmented by highway construction. Many biologists believe that such movement--particularly of large mammals--is key to maintaining normal wildlife patterns. If coyotes and other large carnivores are driven away, the ranks of smaller predators can swell, distorting the natural food chain and endangering small creatures such as songbirds.

The toll road agency conducted studies in the early 1990s on the movement of southern mule deer in the area around the road route. A 1992 study for the agency concluded that the deer do not make seasonal movements that could be blocked by a highway, although other activity--such as fleeing a predator--could be deterred.

Four wildlife crossings are now operating on the Eastern toll road, including an underpass 30 feet high and 80 feet wide at Gypsum Canyon and one 40 feet high and 100 feet wide at Blind Canyon.

Paul Beier, who has extensively studied mountain lion movement in the toll road area, said the size of the crossings sounds appropriate.

“Presuming they put them at good locations, that’s reasonable,” said Beier, now an associate professor of wildlife ecology at Northern Arizona University. But he, too, thinks a 6-foot fence is too short to keep deer away from the road.

The 6-foot fence meets standards set by Caltrans, spokesmen there said. Those standards, however, are intended to keep people--not deer--away from the road. And some biologists noted that the Eastern toll road may be unique because it is a new highway running through steep cliffs in a wilderness area.

Deer might find a fence easier to clear if it cuts across a slope, Mayer said.

“Six-foot-high fencing is not adequate to keep deer off freeways,” added Scott Harris, a wildlife biologist with the habitat conservation division of the state Department of Fish and Game.

Telles of the toll road agency pointed out that federal wildlife regulators who reviewed highway plans in 1994 required 10-foot fencing only at one wildlife crossing, the so-called Windy Ridge underpass at Gypsum Canyon. Road builders complied, she said.

Fencing is one issue officials will review in coming weeks, especially if the deer deaths continue.

“We will continue to evaluate that and see if we need to add additional fencing, if that’s the answer,” Caltrans spokeswoman Rose Orem said.

How well the fences and corridors work is a key issue for federal and state officials involved in the adjacent wildlife preserve created in 1996 under the state Natural Community Conservation Plan, an effort to balance growth with the federal Endangered Species Act.

Bill Tippets, a state NCCP official, said he is paying close attention to the wildlife deaths, adding that fencing may be needed.

“The main aspect is: Are the animals using the wildlife crossings? And if they’re not, where are they getting on the road?” said Annie Hoecker, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Such riddles may be impossible to solve without more sophisticated road-kill monitoring showing where specific animals try to cross the road, several experts said. Fish and Wildlife officials, for instance, are urging formal monitoring of road kill on the proposed Foothill South toll road in South County.

But the same federal agency made no such requirements for the Eastern toll road. Instead, it simply called for a five-year study of wildlife movement near the crossings in the spring and fall, starting a year after the road opens.

Cameras will begin operating at the crossings next autumn, toll road officials said.

“Our responsibility is to ensure the wildlife crossings are working,” Telles said. “We just monitor the crossings, not the deaths.”

But that means important data are being overlooked, some say.

“The problem with that approach is that they’re monitoring only the successful crossings. They’re not monitoring the unsuccessful crossings,” said Kevin Crooks, research supervisor for the carnivore monitoring program in the surrounding preserve.

He said he has been repeatedly frustrated in his attempts to get road-kill data. “It has to be one of the most important pieces of information of what we’re doing to nature,” Crooks said.

Some biologists say deer may well learn to change their routes because of the highway. Said Dennis Strong, a field biologist working for the toll road builders: “The animals are going to have to acclimate to the road.”

Others wonder whether the early spate of deaths shows that deer had grown too accustomed to the new road before it opened.

“To these deer, it’s just one more structure that they’ve been roaming around on,” Crooks said. “And all of a sudden, there are cars on it.”