Texas Builds a Wildlife Highway to Help Endangered Ocelots Survive

[WhiteTara]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/texas-builds-wildlife-highway-help-endangered-ocelots-survive-185303067.html?nhp=1


Texas Builds a Wildlife Highway to Help Endangered Ocelots Survive

TakePart.com
•May 27, 2016

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Texas Builds a Wildlife Highway to Help Endangered Ocelots Survive
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Back in the fall of 2014, I took a whack at the Texas Department of Transportation for treating the nation’s only viable population of endangered ocelots—beautiful spotted cats about twice the size of a house cat—as fodder for roadkill. The department had flagrantly disregarded recommendations from wildlife experts on the critical need for safe road crossings, instead installing an impassable concrete barrier down the center of a busy highway bordering a national wildlife refuge.

TxDot, as it’s known, responded with a note suggesting that they were hurt, deeply hurt, by my suggestion that they were anything less than acutely sensitive to the needs of wildlife. But it would cost $1 million apiece for crossings in the area of that concrete barrier. Not that anyone was counting. They had only asked whether it was worth spending that kind of money on a species nearing extinction in this country so they could “learn and understand the historical dynamics of wildlife survival.” This was at a time when the relevant dynamic was that highway accidents were causing 40 percent of all ocelot deaths.

But occasionally good things happen, even in the unlikeliest places. So I am delighted to report that TxDot is now doing something to protect ocelots in their last remaining patch of habitat. (It may have helped that you and readers of other articles about the plight of the ocelots let your feelings be known, so thank you for that.) The state last month began installation of a dozen wildlife underpasses in and around the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, a 98,000-acre coastal habitat near Brownsville, at the mouth of the Rio Grande.

Four of them, spaced at half-mile intervals, will help ocelots get around (or under) that concrete divider on Highway 100, which runs south of Laguna Atascosa and carries heavy vacation traffic to South Padre Island. Another eight are already being put into place on FM106, which may sound like a radio station but is actually a farm-to-market road that borders and runs through Laguna Atascosa. The work there will cost just $1 million, because the tunnels are part of an overall upgrading of the road; the retrofit on Highway 100 will cost $5 million.

Color me shocked that this happened in Texas!

[arely staircase]

1. I didn't know we had ocelots

much less that they had some pull in the Texas Legislature.

[Brother Buzz]

2. Pfft, Davis, California built a toad tunnel under the freeway to help them survive

Seriously!

[StarTrombone]

3. In Arizona's Tonto National Forest we have designated elk crossing areas

But most of the elk either don't read or they just ignore them

Dumb animals indeed

[alittlelark]

4. I know of a woman that is highly upset about that...

...quite upset...