Bringing back historic wildlife migration corridors to the mountains
ASHEVILLE – Why did the black bear cross the road?
There’s a good reason for the age-old joke’s punchline, whether referring to a chicken or a large mammal.
“To get to the other side” appears to be just what bear, deer and now even some elk, are doing as they cross Interstate 40 in the Pigeon River Gorge, a 20-mile area about midway between Asheville and Newport, Tennessee, and U.S. 19 between Maggie Valley and Cherokee.
Bears are crossing the road in rising numbers. That increased traffic, combined with the ever-growing flow of people, cars and tractor-trailers over the four-lane highway, is leading to more wildlife-vehicle collisions, animal deaths and human injuries. Among other costs: cleanup, car repairs, hospital bills, insurance claims and even lost tourism.
The problem isn’t going away, said Jeffrey Hunter, senior program manager with the National Parks Conservation Association. Hunter worked with the Federal Highway Administration to convene a two-day meeting of international minds in October in Maggie Valley to address the serious issue of wildlife connectivity in the gorge.
“We’re trying to improve wildlife’s ability to safely get across the road, which will in effect, improve public safety in this busy corridor,” said Hunter, who is based in Asheville and works on issues to protect and promote the National Park Service and parks like the Smokies and Blue Ridge Parkway.
Building bridges for bears
The idea of creating wildlife corridors – specially designed highway overpasses, underpasses, culverts and fencing – has been discussed for years. They allow more “permeability” on the landscape by providing animals with safe crossing of the road in what was once their habitat.
In February 2017, a group of interested parties first met in Asheville, including the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission, Tennessee Wildlife Resource Agency, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, N.C. Wildlife Federation, Wildlands Network, NPCA, Defenders of Wildlife, Wilderness Society and Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.
In October 2018, more than 60 stakeholders and experts representing federal, state and nongovernmental agencies met at a peer exchange workshop in Maggie Valley, Hunter said. The group included the departments of transportation from North Carolina and Tennessee, wildlife biologists and road engineers from Colorado, Montana and Alberta, Canada.
“What we saw this time was the DOTs saying they’re willing to engage with the collaborative on this project,” Hunter said. It would be the first step in what is sure to be the biggest thing to hit the gorge since I-40 was constructed 50 years ago.
A roughly 20-mile stretch of I-40 between Exit 20/Maggie Valley to Exit 443/Foothills Parkway Exit in Tennessee is being considered for such corridors, which are more common in the American West, in Canada and in Europe, homes to larger populations of roving mammals like bear, deer, elk and moose.
The project’s necessity is based on four pillars, Hunter said: Human safety, biological conservation, economics and cultural importance. The other “1,000-pound gorilla,” he said, is climate change. “Where will animals move as the climate warms? Studies show they will be heading north.”
Why are any of these animals risking their lives in the game of chicken with a high-speed roadway? Because it’s no game. It’s what a bear’s got to do.
“Bears are just foraging, looking for food. There might be better food sources on one side of the road, or there might be one large male on one side claiming his territory, and so they’re moving out,” said Justin McVey, mountain region wildlife biologist with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission.
“To a bear, a road isn’t a barrier. It’s unfortunately part of their landscape. It’s not like the bear thinks, ‘Hey, this is something I’m having a hard time crossing.’”
Hawk’s-eye view of the world
From a four-seat Cessna 182 more than 6,000 feet in the air, the Western North Carolina world came clearly into focus: trees, forest, mountains and more trees.
Hap Endler is a volunteer pilot with SouthWings, a nonprofit that brings conservation groups, the media and others working on environmental issues into the air to get a broader view of the landscape.
In early December, Endler flew Hunter and a Citizen Times reporter and photojournalist on a “photographic mission” over Asheville, Pisgah and Nantahala national forests, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Blue Ridge Parkway and Pigeon River Gorge.
The area seems merely sprinkled with human habitation — houses, a power plant, factories, buildings — and forest swaths dominate the view.
What’s clear is the amount of publicly conserved land providing natural habitat for wildlife, and for people. Circling a snowy Max Patch, a point on the Appalachian Trail in Haywood County, it’s easy to see why it takes hikers months to hike the trail just from Georgia through the Smokies to North Carolina.
And it’s easy to see how this rich landscape serves as a haven for black bear, white-tailed deer, elk and countless other smaller creatures from snails to squirrels to saw whet owls.
The plane hovers above a break in the trees. It’s the Cataloochee Valley on the eastern edge of the Smokies, sprinkled with — rice? A telephoto lens reveals the specks to be a couple of dozen elk, some grazing, some just sitting, enjoying the sun in the open field where two experimental herds were reintroduced to the park in 2001 and 2002.
All this lush forest, but what stands out is the asphalt cut of I-40, splitting the otherwise nearly contiguous landscape of the Smokies to the south and west and the national forests to the north and east, as it follows the shining Pigeon River. If a bear’s got to move in search of food, if a deer follows the river, they’re eventually going to butt up against the I-40 border wall, which rarely ends well.
But there are people on the landscape — lots of them. The Great Smokies reached record-high visitation with some 11.3 million visitors last year. The parkway logged 16.1 million, and the forests combined draw 5-6 million people a year.
Record year for WNC bears?
Bears are having their year in Western North Carolina. Forget spotting them on a hike in the woods; many people have seen bears at their front doors or trying to hibernate under their decks, or have bumped into the bruins in their driveways. It’s not a Goldilocks mirage. The bears are back, in a big way.
Black bears thrive in the region, numbering about 8,000-10,000 across the mountains, with another 15,000 from the Piedmont to the Coast, said Mike Carraway, wildlife biologist with the state wildlife commission.
Preliminary reports show the wildlife commission received 830 calls for "nuisance bears," such as those spotted in backyards, in District 9, which covers the 12 westernmost counties, Carraway said. That's up 63 percent from 2017.
Liz Hillard, a scientific researcher with the nonprofit Wildlands Network, which works to restore wild places, said there is no hard data on how many bears are being killed each year in the Pigeon River section of I-40, but that is a focus of current research.
She said the data collected is fragmented, coming from Highway Patrol, the state wildlife agency, state DOTs and from drivers taking photos and video.
Hilliard said researchers know of 170 locations of mortality from 2002 to present between Maggie Valley to Exit 443 at the Foothills Parkway, documented by state troopers.
“We think there’s a lot more. I think it’s a very small portion that’s being reported,” Hillard said. “We want to start understand the spatial and temporal patterns of where these mortalities are happening. It will take two to three years of focused research in the region to get true scientific information outside of the anecdotal to hang our hats on.”
Dozens of bears die on I-40
But wildlife numbers compiled by the N.C. Department of Transportation across the state so far are sobering, said Wanda Austin, project development engineer for the NCDOT Division of Highways who presented at the October workshop.
Between 2011-13 over the state’s 79,000 miles of road, there were more than 61,000 wildlife vehicle collisions resulting in 20 human fatalities, more than 3,400 injuries and $149 million in property damages, she said.
Since May 2018, there have been 25 bear fatalities in the Pigeon River Gorge area and 10 additional fatalities across the Tennessee border.
In 2017 the wildlife commission recorded 33 bear fatalities on I-40 in WNC and 21 in Buncombe County. In 2016 there were 49 bears killed in WNC, 25 in Buncombe.
Austin said funding and data collection to flesh out the full magnitude of the problem is essential in furthering the project.
“It is necessary and it is vital to the safety of the animals and the human population. Any fatality or any injury on the highways is not acceptable,” she said.
What is known is that the bear population and its interface with humans is increasing. Last year was a poor one for natural food sources for bears, namely soft mast like berries, said McVey, so bears were on the move in search of food, crossing highways, leading to an increase in bear-motor vehicle accidents.
The lack of food and the increased movement of bears also led to a record for bear harvest in District 9, the 12 counties including Buncombe west to the state line, McVey said. There were 851 bears killed by hunters near the end of 2018, he said. The previous highest harvest was 752 bears, in 2015. Western bear hunting season ended Jan. 1.
Bears were scarce in WNC 40 years ago
But bear abundance and the concern of crashing into one wasn’t always the case in the mountains.
Renowned wildlife biologist Mike Pelton started the first research project in the Great Smoky Mountains in 1968, the year I-40 was built alongside the park. Pelton, professor emeritus of the University of Tennessee, taught wildlife science and studied bears in the park, and around the world, for 40 years.
“The National Park Service was concerned they weren’t seeing that many bears. There was no database, no one knew how many there were and how to keep track of their food habits, their movement,” said Pelton, now retired.
Overhunting by the early 1970s led to a tiny bear population of 300-400 bears sheltering in the Smokies, Pelton said.
“The states of Tennessee and North Carolina were also concerned. Tennessee shut down its bear hunting season and North Carolina created bear sanctuaries within Pisgah and Nantahala national forests to protect female bears and allow them to have successful reproduction,” Pelton said.
“It worked and got the population surviving and increasing. Today an estimated 1,500-1,800 bears live in the park. In fact, there are so many now, the cultural carrying capacity has been reached, resulting in nuisance bears and roadkill. Where humans are moving into bear habitat and bears moving into human habitat, the interaction can be pretty negative.”
He said wildlife crossings were not a consideration for engineers building highways in the 1960s, but the practice is becoming more common across the country. Legislation was introduced in December by Sen. Tom Udall, D-New Mexico, and Rep. Don Beyer, D-Virginia. The Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act of 2018 would establish a “National Wildlife Corridors System.”
If signed into law, the bill would give the Department of the Interior the ability to work with agencies, states, tribes and landowners to develop and designate wildlife corridors around the country.
Pelton said bears found a “land bridge” formed over the double tunnel on I-40 in the Gorge that allows them to safely cross the highway.
“There needs to be a lot more of that kind of situation. The simplest solution is building fencing to funnel animals to culverts flowing underneath I-40 where it crosses streams,” Pelton said.
“Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of wiggle room to do things cheaply in the gorge. Geologically, I-40 shouldn’t have been built there to begin with because of the danger of landslides.”
Elk making their mark
It’s one thing to hit a 90-pound deer going 65 mph, Pelton said, another to hit a 300-pound bear. But when you talk about slamming into 1,000-pound elk, that can be like crashing into another car.
And as elk become a greater fixture on the WNC landscape, an increase in car collisions is inevitable.
When I-40 was built, there were no elk to consider. The massive ungulates had been extirpated from the Southern Appalachians at least 200 years ago through overhunting and habitat loss, said Kim Delozier, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation’s conservation program manager for the Eastern U.S.
Delozier was a wildlife biologist in the Smokies for 32 years before leaving in 2010, and he oversaw the elk reintroduction program. The Smokies, partnering with the Missoula, Montana-based RMEF, introduced 25 animals into the Eastern ecosystem in 2001 and another 27 animals in 2002, all in the Cataloochee Valley.
It was a success story – to some. The elk herd now numbers about 150, but the natural wanderers have long left the park, and many have taken up residence in Cataloochee and Cherokee, causing traffic jams and accidents as they freely cross U.S. 19.
Hillard, with Wildlands Network, has already launched into a years-long study of elk movements. Working with NPCA, the Smokies and N.C. Wildlife Federation, she has electronic collars on six elk and gets detailed location information on them every 20 minutes to collect data on when, where and how far they're going.
The biggest issue with elk is now along U.S. 19. On that route near Andrews, a 2-year-old, 550-pound bull elk Hillard had collared was hit and killed by a car Sept. 25.
“The elk’s death is unfortunate, but it’s important to know where fatal collisions like this occur so that we can better prevent them in the future,” Hillard said.
And more collisions are certainly coming.
These highways, in addition to U.S. 441 and 74 and the Blue Ridge Parkway, also cross the sovereign contiguous land known as the Qualla Boundary.
“I would love to see this I-40 project expand to include other corridors for the protection of tribal resources,” said Caleb R. Hickman, supervisory fish and wildlife biologist with the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians.
Tribal wildlife biologists would like a chance to study wildlife along these highways and are looking to place 10 collars on elk in the next two years to understand elk behaviors in response to highways and residential areas, he said.
His office counted some 60 elk this fall on tribal lands, more than 40 are known to walk across U.S. 19, and another 12 cross the Blue Ridge Parkway.
“We also wish to manage land with partners to attract these large animals away from dangerous highways and residential areas into the more remote wild places during their long-distance movements,” Hickman said. “My only concern is that the corridors are built with respect for the tribe's land and people in mind.”
Twelve Mile Project adds impetus for wildlife crossings
One of the biggest drivers to get a wildlife connectivity project underway is the Twelve Mile Project, which will take place on the Appalachian Ranger District of the Pisgah National Forest, very close to I-40 in the Pigeon River Gorge.
The Twelve Mile Project is a 26,000-acre study area that all lies within Haywood County, said Richard Thornburgh, Appalachian District Ranger with the U.S. Forest Service.
“When the U.S. Forest Service announced the project in the summer of 2016, a timber sale with a goal to expand elk habitat that surrounds the interstate in the gorge, that put up a red flag,” Hunter said.
“We want to be proactive about it. We don’t have a big problem with elk now, but with an expanding herd on both sides of the roadway, and a desire to expand elk habitat in that corridor, a real concern is that at some point it could become a public safety issue,” he said.
The project has several objectives, Thornburgh said, including a timber sale, creating a more diverse and resilient forest landscape and functioning ecosystem, providing for water quality and aquatic organism passage, road maintenance, trail management and improving and creating early successional habitat for a wide range of species, in particular, elk.
A draft environmental assessment should be released in January for public comment, Thornburgh said.
He said there will be several silvicultural prescriptions, including a commercial thinning harvest of 300 acres and the clearing of 136 acres for wildlife fields, to open some of the forest canopy to let in more sunlight and allow more native grasses, plants and trees to grow on the forest floor.
“One of the benefits of Twelve Mile is to elk, grouse, deer and many other species. There is some possibility it might take pressure off private land, and so it will add to some of the wildlife fields and more open fields that will favor them," Thornburgh said.
Elk have been a “nuisance animal” for years for farmers and private landowners in Haywood and Swain counties, who say the large mammals eat their crops and trample their gardens.
“If we can create more spaces for them on public lands, we can minimize conflicts on private lands,” Hunter said.
Wildlife crossings the standard for future?
Hugh Irwin, landscape conservation planner with the Wilderness Society, has been watching bear movements in the Pigeon River Gorge since the 1980s.
“With both bear and elk, instinct leads them to cross roads like I-40. Pressure to find new habitat for browsing and to find mates leads them to want to go to new areas,” Irwin said.
“If the roads weren’t there, both elk and bear would go freely across the landscape. More than 50 years after I-40 was built is a good time to re-evaluate our footprint on the landscape and see how we can improve that for wildlife.”
Wildlife connectivity is starting to become a natural part of highway design. Although the I-26 Connector project, which will include widening I-240 through West Asheville to six lanes, is one of the largest road projects to hit WNC, there will be no wildlife considerations.
Derrick Weaver, the N.C. DOT engineer overseeing planning for the project, said the urban nature of the project doesn’t warrant road crossings.
Another major road project, the widening of Sweeten Creek Road in South Asheville from two lanes to four, will have wildlife corridor planning, said Ahmad Al-Sharawneh, N.C. DOT project development engineer for the Western Region.
He said the agency is looking at the feasibility for a wildlife crossing at the Four Mile Branch, just north of the Carolina Day School athletic fields. The school’s property is on the west side of Sweeten Creek Road, the Biltmore Estate owns wooded property on the east side, and it is all near the Blue Ridge Parkway, a bear haven.
Al-Sharawneh said in a recent five-year span there were 590 crashes on Sweeten Creek, including nine that involved large animals, he said.
“We are looking at a bridge, maybe a culvert opening, for bear and deer, large enough for them to cross,” he said. “Animals come along the stream, and the crossing would be over the stream and go under the roadway.”
He said the DOT is working with the Wildlife Resources Commission and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to see if wildlife crossings would work in this area, and if the property owners will agree to having conservation easements on their land, which are agreements that restrict certain kinds of development.
Irwin said considering wildlife in any planning adjacent to their habitat is the right thing to do, especially in the face of climate change.
“With climate change, there’s going to be the need for species to move. Elk and bear, they’re not like some species where their habitat is going to move. But other species, like salamanders, as the climate warms, they will likely need to move to more suitable habitat,” Irwin said.
“We need to think about this as we come up on climate change - which of our native species will be able to adapt to a changing climate? We also need to think in terms of wildlife passages that allow for northward movement and movement up and around the mountains.”
What is the cost-benefit of wildlife corridors?
Marcel Huijser, senior research ecologist with the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University in Bozeman, has been studying wildlife and their interface with highways for more than 20 years. Originally from The Netherlands, Huijser has worked on these projects around the world.
Huijser said the costs of creating wildlife corridors on an existing road are not small. He said on average it can cost $100,000 per kilometer (0.62 mile) to build fencing on both sides of a road.
Wildlife overpasses across a major highway can cost $5 million to $10 million apiece and underpasses, “maybe half a million apiece.”
But he said society can’t afford not to build them.
A deer-vehicle collision can cost $6,600, half is vehicle repair and half in human injuries, hospital and insurance costs. With elk, which are much bigger and can cause more damage to vehicles and humans, the average collision cost is $17,000, he said.
“It saves cost to society if you implement effective mitigation measures that substantially reduce costs by 80-100 percent,” Huijser said, based on economic research models.
“It can be less expensive to society to implement mitigation measures. Even if people don’t care about human safety or biological conservation, it can still make sense to implement wildlife corridors even if you only care about the dollar.
He said the model was largely based on human safety, not including the worth of a viable population of bear or elk, recreation, and tourists and how much money they’re spending in local communities.
“If you think about adding biologic conservation measures, the value expands,” he said. “Then we should be doing this even quicker than we think.”
Western North Carolina bear vehicle mortalities
Year District 9 (WNC) Buncombe County
2012 30 12
2013 44 10
2014 25 18
2015 53 21
2016 49 25
2017 33 21