| September 27, 2015
Earlier this month an obscure Los Angeles area regional public lands agency—the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority—announced the first stages of a five-year plan to build one of the largest wildlife corridors in the world. The goal is to create a natural looking bridge that will allow a small cougar population in the Santa Monica Mountain National Recreation Area the chance to escape north into much larger public lands, while at the same time allowing northern mountain lions the chance to move south and help out the badly inbred and lethally infighting Santa Monica cougars.
The proposed bridge will leap over Highway 101, an eight-lane, east-west freeway in LA’s northern suburbs that sees 175,000 car trips a day. The bridge will be built at Liberty Canyon in the suburb of Agoura and when completed will be 200 feet-long and 165 feet-wide. It will be landscaped to blend in with the brushy hills and sound walls along the edge of the bridge will “mitigate traffic noise and block light in order to make the crossing more conducive to wildlife,” says the project study report. The bridge will extend beyond the 101, reaching over an access road south of the highway, necessitating the construction of a tunnel. Estimated cost of the entire project: about $57 million.
Despite the report’s dull bureaucratic language—mountain lion sex is blandly described as “the exchange of genetic material”—at its heart the proposed Liberty Canyon wildlife corridor represents an astonishing effort to reverse decades of suburban sprawl and fragmentation of the region’s surviving open spaces.
The campaign’s iconic poster boy is the famous “Hollywood lion,” also known by its wildlife ID number, “P22.” In 2012, P22 crossed two major freeways and migrated roughly 40 miles from the Santa Monica Mountains along the coast to Los Angeles’s 4300-acre Griffith Park on the city’s eastside. There he took up residence, feeding on the park’s mule deer and soon became a national celebrity of sorts.
More: http://ecowatch.com/2015/09/27/worlds-largest-wildlife-corridor-california/
Exposing the Big Game 
I just gasped – breathtaking! Great news.
It’s probably going to be a lot safer for humans too.
This was discussed at the focus group we had after the shooting of a young lion in Santa Monica several years ago. They had been applying for the grant for years. Hope it happens now. The lion who was killed was just trying to find a new range and sadly ended up in the courtyard of an office building. Wildlife agencies took hours to get there in traffic, and police shot him. There was a huge public uproar. It was learned that a local vet with lots of experience tranquilizing large animals could have come to assist, but at that time, the agency was not allowed to accept that help. A law has since been passed allowing collaboration, I believe.
Reblogged this on Coalition for American Wildbirds.
Reblogged this on Howling For Justice and commented:
Finally a little good news for wildlife.
good – I have been alertinng Northern CA (A quite different world, heavily forested, with some new wolfy residents) environmental orgs and talking wildlife crossings up to some National Forest staff and others.
Studied road ecology, in fact, in order to become strongly convefrsant on the necessity of the issue.
Black bears, most smaller mammals, and importantly, aquatic animals, need undercrossinngs of natural materials in order not to be fragmented by highways. Overcrossings are favored by ungulates, griz, wolves, coyotes (who can use either), and have actual growing things like bushes on them, at least the one in Banff. They just did one this summer in Wyoming, but I didn’t get down there to look at it.
CA needs it in many places, from the endangered and threatened salamanders and certain frogs that have been cut off for too long, to the coming wolves, the hopefully rather safe other puma populations, the long-ignored pronghorn, who really should be allowed back home, the hopefully expanding Roosevelt elk, the Tule elk which are right now stuck either in Owens valley on the river side by the Inyo mts. and the tiny endangered group over in Pt Reyes,.
One day, we hope for the griz to be able to return (I have seen the things they eat living in quantity from the Cascades to the coast, which show just how great it would be to return to a full complement of species (btw I am not one of the rich urbanites always accused of introducing this stuff to others – I was born at the edge of the wild where wolves still roamed, and failed to be able to live in any city – that mess, whether Idaho’s ocerpopulated everything but designated wilderness. I regard any grazed or ranchland as way too populated, as i have since first childhood), and they so a void humans that they do not cross any real occupied roads.
Here’s Oregon’s wildlife collision hotspots map: ftp://ftp.odot.state.or.us/techserv/Geo-Environmental/Webs/Wildlife_Movement/Wildlife/wchs.htm
Here’s California’s – note the steady death along I-5 : http://www.wildlifecrossing.net/california/map/roadkill
Even Yellowstone NP has far too many wildlife collisions, and this because humans are too often eager to get somewhere else, even though they ARE somewhere