21 Nov Wild Bridges

If you’ve driven many of Montana’s 13,000 highway miles, you’ve experienced the pit-of-the-stomach dread that one of those mule deer grazing the shoulder will lunge into your lane or that an unseen elk or moose will sprint across the road, forcing you into a dangerous swerve, tire-smoking brake, or elbow-bracing collision.

Every year, Montana drivers kill some 6,000 deer, pronghorn, elk, bear, and other wildlife, and those are just the ones that can be counted because they die within sight of the road. The reported wrecks cause $200 million in damage to hoods, fenders, and windshields, and another untold toll goes to medical bills for injured motorists. Some years, more than a half-dozen motorists are killed in collisions with Montana wildlife.

According to Montana State University research, the average cost of a single deer collision is $19,000. When factoring insurance claims, emergency response, and roadway damage, the cost of an elk encounter can exceed $73,000.

An elk herd crosses Highway 89 north of Gardiner.

Collisions with cars don’t end well for wildlife, either. Some localized game populations are so reduced by highway fatalities that state game managers close or curtail seasons. The number of federally protected grizzly bears killed by cars in some years exceeds the number that are removed due to livestock predation.

These negative interactions between wildlife and vehicles are only increasing as Montana continues to grow in population, with more cars on the highways, more miles of highway under construction, and less room for wildlife to roam across unaltered landscapes.

The solution to reducing collisions and conserving wildlife, says Deb Wambach, is to keep wildlife off our roads by offering them an alternative: crossing over, below, or around our busiest highways.

Wambach is Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks’ (MT FWP) Wildlife Coordination Bureau chief and a leader in the growing effort to fund, design, and build “wildlife accommodations.” The movement gained momentum last year when the Montana State Legislature approved the Big Game and Wildlife Highway Crossings and Accommodations Account, a repository for state funds that can be used as seed or matching money for overpasses, underpasses, and roadside fence modifications that reduce vehicle-wildlife collisions.

Other legislation allocates a portion of Montana’s marijuana tax revenue, estimated at $500,000 annually, specifically for wildlife crossings. It’s the first continuous funding source for wildlife accommodations in the nation.

The bipartisan legislation also created a new specialty vehicle license plate that could generate another $160,000 annually. Money raised from the plates will go to building and maintaining wildlife crossings. Montana motorists should start seeing these plates in 2026, after a panel of artists and biologists approves designs submitted through conservation organizations.

The legislation received overwhelming bipartisan support, largely because wildlife collisions don’t differentiate between party affiliation, state region, or highway type.

An elk herd crosses Highway 89 north of Gardiner.

“These collisions hurt animal populations, including animals that are endangered and that we would like to see delisted,” Rep. Katie Zolnikov (R-Billings) told a House committee as she introduced House Bill 855. “It hurts opportunities for Montanans who like to hunt. It creates public safety problems, and it raises the cost for Montanans through repairs on their vehicles and through higher insurance premiums.”

The remedy is neither simple nor cheap. Once sites for wildlife accommodations are finalized, design and engineering can take years and cost millions, and then the actual work of building these structures — often during Montana’s busiest driving season — adds many more millions to the bottom line.

“There’s a lot that goes into these,” says Wambach, who moved to MT FWP after a 26-year career as a Montana Department of Transportation wildlife biologist. “It starts with partnerships, from state and federal agencies to NGOs [non-governmental organizations] and landowners to identify and prioritize project sites. But when things are correct, and the engineers say it can be designed and built, and feasibility studies say it’s a net benefit, then there’s the matter of funding. Even after funding is secured, you’re looking at two to five years to build a major project.”

With Emigrant Peak in the distance, U.S. Highway 89 traces the Yellowstone River between the Absaroka and Gallatin ranges. The section of the highway between Livingston and the north entrance of Yellowstone National Park has become particularly notorious for frequent wildlife collisions.

These wildlife crossings are often more complicated than carrying a highway over a major river. Frequently, wildlife accommodations first require that highway frontage is in some sort of conservation status. The crossing itself must be “softened” to appeal to wildlife that might be averse to crossing over an asphalt bridge or through an underground corrugated culvert, and funnel fencing is often necessary to direct wildlife to the crossing. Location is everything. A wildlife accommodation placed a mile away from a traditional migration route is as useless as a highway offramp to a cul-de-sac.

A decade ago, these wildlife accommodations would have been considered superfluous adornments to the main business of moving vehicles across Montana’s landscape. But the relatively new science of tracking wildlife movement — informed by GPS-enabled collars on elk, deer, pronghorn, and wild sheep — has provided biologists with valuable information about daily and seasonal wildlife migration corridors. In many cases, those migrations take herds across busy roads, and roadkilled wildlife hotspots in Montana correspond tightly to ancient migration routes.

One of those hotspots is U.S. Highway 89 through Paradise Valley. The road that carries millions of visitors to Yellowstone National Park severs historic routes that connect elk, grizzly bears, and mule deer to habitat in the Gallatin Range to the west of the valley and the Absaroka Range to the east. The valley also happens to be the homeland of Daniel Anderson, a third-generation Montanan who gathered members of wildlife-oriented NGOs to help understand and reduce wildlife collisions. Anderson, who has amplified his work to the wider region through his role with the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, says the grim accounting of wildlife collision costs tells only part of the story.

A mule deer lays dead after being struck by a vehicle. Scavengers such as grizzly bears are also put at risk, as they’re attracted by the scent of carrion along highways.

“Roads are one of the most pervasive forms of infrastructure humans have ever built, and we all depend on them to get to our jobs, to our kids’ schools, and to visit our families and friends,” he says. “Unfortunately, they also fragment every landscape they cross. When we choose to build wildlife crossings, we’re making a statement about what kind of Montana we want to pass down to our children and grandchildren. Landscapes that allow wildlife to move are landscapes that remain functional, resilient, and whole. Crossings say that safety and connectivity matter, that we’re not content to watch our wild migrations vanish piece by piece.”

Sources note that wildlife accommodations, while expensive, are among the few transportation infrastructures that pay for themselves, through reduced collisions. “Studies from Canada to Colorado to Utah show that well-designed overpasses and underpasses can reduce collisions by 80 to 97 percent, saving both lives and money,” says Anderson.

Because these structures often have lifespans as long as 50 to 75 years, the design and placement are critical, says the National Wildlife Federation’s Simon Buzzard, the organization’s regional wildlife connectivity manager.

“In Wyoming, two overpasses and five underpasses at Trappers Point [a migration route between the Wind River Range and the Yellowstone Plateau] on U.S. Highway 191 near Pinedale are estimated by engineers to last for 75 years but to pay for themselves in 17 years,” says Buzzard. “The Wyoming Department of Transportation made that estimate based on the cost of real property damage but also the cost of wildlife” by assessing things like the average value of a mule deer to the public, explains Buzzard.

Like other highway infrastructure, states pay only a portion of the cost of designing and building wildlife accommodations. Most of the cost is covered by the federal government and paid through the Surface Transportation Reauthorization, a multi-year spending authority approved by Congress.

In 2021, as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Congress authorized $350 million for projects with the twin goals of “reducing wildlife vehicle collisions while improving habitat connectivity for terrestrial and aquatic species,” according to the law. That funding, allocated through a competitive prioritization process, is due to expire in 2026, and conservation groups have been lobbying Congress to permanently authorize additional funding.

A car speeds past a deer struck by a vehicle on Highway 89.

“We’ve known for decades that wildlife crossings work and save animal and human lives,” says Ed Arnett, CEO of The Wildlife Society, whose members include most professional biologists. “The Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program should now be permanently authorized with at least $500 million in the next transportation bill. This investment is a win-win for people and wildlife and perhaps one of the easiest decisions Congress could make for conservation.”

While Montana’s charismatic wild mammals are the most obvious victims of collisions — 93 percent of all wildlife collisions in Montana are with white-tailed deer — they’re hardly the only beneficiaries of appropriate wildlife accommodations.

“The beauty in focusing transportation projects on wildlife accommodations is that you can have multi-species benefits pretty easily,” says Buzzard. “A culvert that’s designed to do the minimal hydraulic work it needs to do would be one size, but if you can upsize that culvert to pass native fish more easily, you have that additional benefit to both water and fish. If you upscale just a little bit more and have some soil substrate on either side, that simple culvert can accommodate small terrestrial critters.”

Buzzard notes that much of the wildlife accommodation work in the East and Midwest has been focused on replacing under-highway culverts, enabling the seasonal movement of amphibians and reptiles “that you wouldn’t 
notice if you’re driving around but which have huge unseen benefits.”

The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes implemented a series of more than 40 crossing structures over and under Highway 93, resulting in fewer collisions across a major travel corridor for both humans and wildlife. Other agencies, NGOs, and working groups are now following suit to integrate more crossing structures across Montana.

Montana’s most visible and successful wildlife accommodation to date is the series of overpasses, fences, and underpasses along U.S. Highway 93 on the Flathead Indian Reservation north of Missoula. Among the species conserved by the projects are endangered lynx and grizzly bears, but Wambach says that painted turtles (slowly) crossing the highway near Ninepipe National Wildlife Refuge on the reservation have also benefited.

“Those turtles are clearly not a big safety consideration for the driving public, but they’re absolutely an important consideration culturally for the tribes of the Flathead Reservation,” says Wambach. “Biologically, it’s a hyper-localized population of turtles, so even a few getting hit on the highway can have an impact on the population.”

While engineers, highway designers, and contractors focus on building durable projects, another group of wildlife advocates is looking at land use on both sides of the highways. Unprotected private land that might change in ownership or use over the lifetime of a wildlife crossing is such a liability that otherwise high-priority projects won’t get funded if roadside land use is subject to change.

“One of the criteria for consideration in all these wildlife accommodation projects is some kind of protective instrument of land-use management that’s compatible with the long-term sustainability of the [infrastructure] investment,” says Wambach, who notes that landscapes heavily used by wildlife also tend to be valuable for residential development or real estate investment. “Protective instruments might be a conservation easement or a lease or conservation-minded agricultural production. We’re cognizant of not looking to site a wildlife crossing project where there’s potential for a subdivision development, for instance, in the foreseeable future.”

Daniel Anderson is the coordinator for Yellowstone Safe Passages, a coalition that seeks to unite agencies, NGOs, and community leaders to reduce wildlife-vehicle conflict in Montana’s Paradise Valley.

But as Montana grows, with more residents buying and building homes in the state, the amount of conserved land is decreasing. Add the risk of catastrophic fires that could alter wildlife habitat and drought or flooding that could change migrations, and you see the challenge of ensuring the viability of a 75-year wildlife crossing.

But the alternative is even more stark.

“Imagine what Colorado’s Front Range looked like a century ago,” says Anderson. “Vast open prairies, healthy herds of elk and pronghorn moving across the landscape. Now, fly into Denver and look down: subdivisions, highways, parking lots, and fragmented patches of habitat. That’s the path Montana could be on if we don’t act with foresight. Wildlife crossings are one way of drawing a line in the sand, saying we refuse to let our landscapes become permanently broken.”

Andrew McKean writes about hunting, conservation, and wildlife management from his home in Glasgow, Montana. The former editor-in-chief of Outdoor Life magazine and the current hunting editor, McKean is the author of How To Hunt Everything. He also contributes to a number of national publications.

Rob G. Green is a Montana-based conservation photographer and National Geographic Explorer documenting conflict and connectivity across the American West. His work centers on culturally and politically sensitive stories — from grizzly and wolf management to wildfire with frontline crews — illuminating the fragile space between beauty and loss on an ever-changing landscape.