Male: Here we are on highway 93, almost to Hoover dam and the Arizona-Nevada border. On this side we have the Colorado river, it cuts a blue ribbon through the Bahadas and provides life supporting water for everyone downstream. On this side, we have highway 93, a major artery leading to the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas. Caught between a immovable object and an unstoppable force are herds of majestic big horn sheep. Today, we’re capturing 30 of those sheep, affixing radio collars and then releasing them back into the wild. Bruce Eilerts explains.
Bruce: Well this is a joint effort with Arizona game and fish and Arizona department of transportation and this is a project that’s been in motion for a long time. We’re working on a series bypass here in US 93, it’s a bridge to bypass the actual Hoover dam for many reasons, mostly for national security and the highway just wasn’t big enough.
Male: When the bridge spanning the Colorado river is finally open and the roadway is increased from its current two lanes to four, wildlife will run head long into some serious trouble. We’re here to try to mitigate some environmental impacts that could potentially occur from the road construction as well as the increase traffic. And the most effective wildlife, the desert big horn sheep that call these lands their home.
Bruce: And what we’re doing is we’re finding ways to move big horn sheep from one side of the road to the other. Basically highways are a serious physical barrier to movement of wildlife all over the world. And we’re finding here through radio telemetry studies that big horn sheep don’t like to cross the road and those that do are often killed by vehicles. So today we’re here to work with game and fish to capture sheep, collar them and from then on out, we’ll use that data to bolster our research and make decisions in terms of wildlife management.
Male: By affixing the radio collars and tracking sheep locations both before and after the expansion, we’ll have a better idea of the impacts that the big horn maybe facing. And those collars, they have some very special features. Jeff Gagnon explains.
Jeff: This is satellite collar and we can get a location on sheep every two hours during the day and it’s sent back to us on a computer so we can look at on the computer to see where they’ve been. It’s got a receiver, a GPS receiver at it which takes the satellite locations and then satellite and other satellite can pick those locations back up and find out where that, that collar is at. This also has a VHF transmitters, so when the collar falls off or we can go in and find that animal or find the collar and pick it up, use it later, this is the automatic release mechanism so in 22 months this collar will fall off on the ground automatically, we can go in and pick it up and they don’t have to wear the collar for their whole lives.
Male: As the big horn travel back and forth across the highway looking for food or shelter, they play a very real and very dangerous, sometimes fatal game of dodge ball, one that both the animal and the vehicle will lose.
Jeff: From a transportation point of view, we have the obvious safety issue. An animal and a vehicle meeting at 80 miles an hour is not a good thing. We have property damage, loss of life, injury, there’s the insurance part of that, so there’s a lot of benefit to doing this now and saving money in the future.
Male: Since a bighorn sheep isn’t gonna wait patiently by the side of the road for a pedestrian light to change, just how does one get a large herd of animals across a four lane highway? The traditional method has been with an underpass.
Jeff: For sheep, they like, they have line of sight, they don’t like to know what they’re going into and come out of so there’s a wall there where it’s offset, where they can't see through it, they generally be more reluctant to go through it, worried about predators, they don’t know what’s gonna be in there. So the smaller the structure, the harder time they have convincing themselves to go through, so the more wide open, like the one we have behind us, there’s a sheep under it right now. And they don’t mind, where wide open, they can see, they can walk up on ledges, so the bigger the better in that case of that visual distance that they can see.
Male: Bighorn sheep by nature don’t like to go under things, they prefer high ridge life, where they can see the activity happening beneath them. So culvert and roadway engineers had to really start thinking outside the box, if we can't get the sheep under the road, how about over the road?
Bruce: The best case scenario with this animal, bighorn sheep, are the wildlife overpasses and those are literally bridges for animals that we build over the highway. And we’re gonna terrform the top of these structures, soil and rocks, try to make that as attractive as possible to the animals and as they follow the ridge line, they’ll hit these overpasses, and in theory cross right over.
Jeff: There’s three overpasses going in along on this stretch of 93 and we’ve got different sizes. One of them, the biggest one is gonna be a hundred feet wide and then the other two are gonna be around 50 feet wide and the idea there is sheep like to be up high, so when they’re crossing the highway, we suspect that they prefer to be up high, they walk on to that ledge and be able to, not worry about going to an area where predators maybe. And so we wanna have them as natural looking as possible so they’ll be able to go up to them and feel comfortable going across there and we wanna have different sizes to test, so we can figure out is there a difference, will they choose the larger one over the smaller one and we used a fencing to funnel them to it in the first place and then they’ll, then they’ll use it from that point on. And we’re gonna be monitoring them those for probably up to four years to see how long it takes them to get used those on a regular basis.
Male: Helicopter captures are expensive, very expensive, the cost for the thirty radio collars 130,000 dollars, factor in the cost of employee time for the capture and the tracking and you’re looking at one very large tab. Enter the Arizona bighorn sheep society, anytime we’re working with sheep, they’re alongside and help de fray the cost.
Gary: Now I think the financial support is around a hundred thousand dollars, you know, it’s a lot of highway mortalities over here and some of them think it’s very important, we can cut down on those, keep the sheeps off the highways. And supposedly this is what this is gonna do, we’re excited about that.
Bruce: Everybody wins here, whether you’re transportation minded, conservation minded or even just a motorist on the highway, you can rest assure that your chances of hitting wildlife in an area such as this, where this type of work is being done are greatly reduced.
Male: Bighorn sheep have had thousands of years to learn how to adapt to this dry arid country, they don’t have thousand of years to learn how to dodge speeding cars. Hopefully, through activities like this, we’ve provided an escape for the bighorn so that they can continue to roam this lands.
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