Mule Deer Fanatic

How many mountain lions would you have to kill near this same stretch of highway in order to save 95 mule deer per year? Answer: three. How many predators could you kill for $15 million? Answer: A lot!

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BEND, Ore. – Every spring, mule deer migrate from the High Desert to the Cascade foothills in search of summer forage. And every fall, the deer sweep down from the foothills back to the desert to escape winter snows.

And during each migration, the deer run smack into a sometimes-deadly barrier: U.S. Highway 97.

To provide deer with an alternative to bounding across four lanes of traffic, the Oregon Department of Transportation is incorporating two wildlife underpasses into its highway expansion south of Bend, where an estimated 95 deer are hit by vehicles each year.

But it’s not easy to get a skittish deer through a tunnel.

So wildlife experts are using lessons learned from previous crossings to figure out how to get the animals to use the $1.4 million underpasses. They’ve factored in features such as tall fences, vegetation and salt licks, natural building materials and hiding cover to entice the animals.

“The science of transportation ecology is rather new, so we’re learning a lot,” said Sandra Jacobson, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Forest Service who specializes in the field. “But it’s turned out that using some good biological principles and some good engineering ingenuity, we can come up with structures that do work.”

The four-mile stretch of road south of Lava Butte will look significantly different upon completion, which is scheduled for fall 2011, said Peter Murphy, Oregon Department of Transportation spokesman. The two northbound and two southbound lanes will be separated by a natural, forested median that’s about 100 feet wide.

And the $15 million project is slated to include two wildlife crossings, which make up about a tenth of the project’s cost, he said.