The bobcat lay just over the dotted-yellow centerline. I pulled onto the narrow road’s shoulder and walked a few wary steps to her side. The unmarred tawny coat glistened in the Sierra sun; the tufted ears quivered with the energy that was draining from her body. The first bobcat I had ever seen was dead.

She must have wandered south from the Caribou Wilderness, where she lived without roads, without vehicles and with limited human contact. Only this rural two-lane highway dissected her freedom to roam the backcountry that stretches 100 miles between paved roads in northeastern California. It was her undoing.

Roads are killing America’s wildlife. They’re not just slaughtering raccoons, deer and the occasional bobcat. Millions of endangered species are splattered every year across highways that cut through national parks and other pristine areas set aside to protect natural resources.

• In Florida, 65 percent of the endangered panther population has been killed on highways since 1981.

• In Texas, collisions with cars and trucks have helped reduce the population of the endangered ocelot to around eighty animals.

• In North Carolina, the endangered Carolina heelsplitter, an ancient mussel species, has dwindled to fewer than 100 animals since construction of an outerbelt freeway around Charlotte.

• In Montana, 275 western painted turtles died last year along a sixty-mile stretch of U.S. Highway 93.

Humans are affected, too. More than 200 motorists are killed annually and thousands more are injured in animal-vehicle collisions. The insurance industry estimates the annual cost of these accidents at $200 million. Each smashup with a deer costs the motorist around $2,000.

Anyone who has survived clobbering an animal with a car can forever hear the thwack that slays, feel the thump-thump that ends life. But far more is at stake for wildlife than direct mortality, particularly for forest mammals. Roads are eliminating the forests, meadows and wetlands where animals live. From double tracks in the woods to multilane interstates, roads are creating boundaries for the many species that cannot or will not cross them. They fragment habitat, forcing wildlife into smaller and smaller spaces and isolating them from one another.

Many species simply stay clear of roads, moving instead into less desirable habitat to avoid human contact. My dead bobcat may have lived side by side in the wilderness with wolverines, but no one has seen the reclusive furbearer in the region for years.

Scientists are only beginning to understand the enormity of these combined effects. Roads are not just another environmental issue. By compromising the basic integrity of our wildlife and wildland ecosystems, they may be the conservation issue of the twenty-first century, says William Ruediger, a U.S. Forest Service ecologist specializing in forest carnivores.

“Something profound and disturbing is happening that goes beyond the unspeakable carnage occurring on our highways. If we don’t figure this stuff out, we’ll have a real problem sustaining wildlife in America,” he says.

FOREST SERVICE ROAD MANAGEMENT

The Forest Service has a particular responsibility to come up with solutions. With 386,000 miles of roads crisscrossing its 192 million acres, the agency maintains the largest network of roads in the world—enough to travel to the moon and halfway back. Nearly 2 million vehicles a year travel national forest roads, which now slice through some of America’s most unspoiled habitat.

In January, the Forest Service adopted a new road policy that changes the emphasis from developing transportation systems to managing the existing system in an environmentally responsible way. Dramatic shifts in public use of national forests have pushed the agency to look more closely at the effects of roads on wildlife, watersheds and ecosystems. Less controversial than a related policy for managing roadless areas, the new Forest Service road policy, also adopted in January, requires each national forest to document all of its roads using on-the-ground inventories and to do away with unneeded roads.

These laudable goals were driven, in part, by funding. The Forest Service receives only about 20 percent of the annual appropriations it needs to maintain its road system, says Heidi Valetkevitch, an agency spokeswoman. On top of that $6 billion shortfall, officials have discovered around 60,000 miles of “ghost” roads, temporary roads that were never planned, built or maintained to agency safety and environmental standards.

Many system and non-system roads will soon be gone. During the next decade, the Forest Service plans to decommission even more than the 2,700 miles it has removed annually over the last ten years. It does not plan to build new roads to replace them. The Forest Service has already slashed the amount of new construction from 2,320 miles in 1988 to 215 miles in 1998. It’s unlikely that many more roads will be built in the future, says Ruediger.

The challenge is how the roads already constructed will be used. Ironically, some of the land use changes environmentalists have championed for decades may produce the very changes most threatening to wildlife. As the Forest Service shifts from logging and mining to public recreation, roads are becoming more and more significant. They get hikers, bikers and kayakers to the backwoods and remote streamsides. Ruediger believes the next controversy will not be road quantity but road quality.

The Forest Service is under pressure to increase its road standards. The 15,000 logging vehicles that used forest roads in 1950 have not increased, but they are now joined by 1.7 million nonlogging vehicles—more than ten times the number in 1950. Agency officials are considering accepting Federal Highway Administration funds to improve and pave about 77,000 miles of roadway. That would open the woods to more traffic moving at much faster speeds.

Ruediger recently became the first Forest Service ecology program leader for highways and roads. He spends much of his time meeting with forest and district-level engineers to discuss the environmental effects of road improvements. This is a rare opportunity to correct past mistakes and improve conditions for wildlife and watersheds, as well as vehicles, he says. Along with adopting construction techniques that reduce erosion and sedimentation, the Forest Service can build culverts to accommodate fish, reptiles and mammals. The key is locating these structures along natural wildlife corridors, Ruediger says.

Although environmentalists are generally optimistic about the new Forest Service road policy, not everyone agrees with Ruediger that few new roads will be built. They cite loopholes in the policy they fear can be exploited. Grassroots groups are already reporting logging projects that require new road building. On the Targhee National Forest in Idaho, for example, four proposed projects would locate roads in a roadless area, says Kim Davitt, a spokeswoman for American Wildlands in Bozeman, Montana.

It’s not enough for agency biologists to tackle road and wildlife issues. If the engineers aren’t paying attention, nothing has changed, she says. As the science of wildlife connectivity develops, Forest Service managers must address the issues at all scales of planning, from the regional level to the project level.

“We’re ever vigilant. The basics don’t bode well,” Davitt says.

Still, the new policy does provide better tools for reducing the damage of roads on wildlife, says Marnie Crigley, road policy coordinator with Wildlands Center for Preventing Roads. And it’s a great change for the better that the agency has even acknowledged that roads impact wildlife and streams.

STRUCTURAL SOLUTIONS

The Forest Service is launching its new road policy and environmental consciousness at a time when a variety of strategies are available to counteract roadkill, habitat loss and fragmentation. In Florida’s Big Cypress Swamp, underpasses costing millions of dollars allow black bears, alligators and the endangered Florida panther to cross safely under Interstate 75. In Southern California, scientists are tagging and tracking the desert tortoises using storm-drain culverts built to protect the threatened species. There are underpasses in Montana for mountain goats, tunnels for salamanders in Massachusetts and culverts for bears in North Carolina.

The oldest and most scrutinized highway structures for wildlife are at Banff National Park, where the collision between wildlife and roads became a nationwide crisis. Canada’s premier national park and a world heritage site, Banff is bisected by the Trans-Canada Highway. Canada’s major east-west route cuts through the Bow River Valley, home to elk, moose, wolves, cougars, grizzly bears and other species.

In the 1970s, Canadian officials began studying how to upgrade the two-lane highway that carries traffic whizzing through the park between Vancouver and Calgary. The impact of the road on wildlife was obvious to everyone, says Bruce F. Leeson, an environmental scientist with Parks Canada. The annual tally of large mammals killed by vehicles was around 200; no one doubted that the actual figure was at least twice that. The challenge was to build a road through Banff that would accommodate the traffic—and the economic needs of the country—while protecting the ecological integrity of a world heritage site. “It was wickedly controversial,” Leeson says. Biologists and engineers, park and highway officials worked together for decades to design twenty-four underpasses, two 164-foot-wide overpasses and a series of eight-foot fences erected along twenty-eight miles of highway through the park.

Locating the underpasses and overpasses near the animals’ natural travel corridors was crucial to their success. For wolves, bears and other carnivores, this meant placing the structures close to stream corridors or drainage areas. For elk, moose and other ungulates, it required the opposite—placing the structures far from predators and providing a clear view of the entrance.

So far, equal numbers of species are using the overpasses and the underpasses, but Leeson and other biologists think the overpasses will prove better over time. Once the vegetation planted on these broad bridges grows, the animals will no longer see the highway and they will be less bothered by noise, he says.

After twenty-five years and $85 million, Parks Canada officials began reporting dramatic benefits to elk: 96 percent fewer killed. They found similar benefits for wolves. Highway accidents were wiping out population increases the wolves were gaining through natural reproduction. After the installation of the latest overpasses, biologists recorded fewer roadkill and counted 800 wolf crossings on structures.

Their data was too good to be true for some. Skeptics accused park officials of “cooking the books,” says Leeson. Parks Canada hired an independent research team to monitor the effects of the wildlife protections. Leeson and others who designed the structures are just as interested in the results as their critics. They learned that the fences were too low to prevent black bears and cougars from climbing over them onto the highway. Along with redesigning the fences, biologists are exploring strategies to eliminate roadside dandelions, a delicacy for black bears.

“Our responsibility is to protect the integrity of a world heritage site and Canada’s premier national park. If we encounter a problem and can identify a solution, it’s our responsibility to bring it forward—and convince government it’s worth the investment,” Leeson says.

Some of the lessons learned at Banff will soon be tested in Montana on a stretch of U.S. 93 notorious for roadkills. Biologists, engineers, environmentalists and leaders on the Flathead Reservation have been working together to devise road improvements that are safe for motorists, protect wildlife and meet tribal cultural concerns. Their plan, adopted in December, includes large culverts at strategic locations known for high mortality, smaller culverts at reptile crossings, and a 200-foot-wide overpass for lynx, moose, elk, bobcats and bears.

The Montana structures do not reinvent the wheel today, says Dale Becker, Flathead tribal wildlife program manager who began proposing them a decade ago. But they represent a triumph in communicating wildlife and cultural issues to engineers and highway agencies, he says.

“Folks realize we have real concerns and we’re not going to go away. We have an opportunity to try some things and see what works best,” Becker says.

The highway structures developed for Banff and Montana may not be suitable for smaller Forest Service roads, but the same principles apply, says Ruediger. He is promoting wildlife crossings along natural corridors and stream crossings that accommodate small fish as well as salmon and large fish. As roads built in the 1960s begin to deteriorate, the Forest Service has an opportunity to take some out altogether and to apply newer science to those that are restored.

It’s a process of constant discovery, Ruediger says. Biologists still know little about how wildlife interacts with highways. Because the roads are practically everywhere, the problems are everywhere. Some are surmountable; some clearly are not.

“This is new stuff. We’re trying to sustain fish, wildlife, streams—all natural resources—as intact as possible by applying technology that is evolving almost daily. If we don’t figure it out, these places will look more like England than America,” he says.

The country is still wild on both sides of the rural road where my bobcat died. I’ll never know if it was the stress of human contact or internal injuries that killed her. I had already grasped her legs and begun to pull her off the roadway when a pickup truck stopped. The driver and I shared a moment of awe, strangers bound by this perfect and very dead wild animal. He asked if he could take her to mount for display. That wouldn’t feed the vultures, but I agreed out of respect for his impulse to honor this creature. He picked up the limp bobcat and carried her to his truck. We drove off in separate directions down the road.