Imagine if aliens from Alpha Centauri landed in New Hampshire with a glowing beam that made your car explode and your clothing ignite.
Now imagine that they put this beam between you and every grocery store in the state.
It wouldn’t stop you from getting food, but running naked through the snow every time you needed groceries would be really hard. Over time you’d get weaker and sicker, and who knows how it would end.
That is the situation facing wildlife as human development spreads.
There’s often no absolute reason that a rabbit or frog or wild bee can’t cross a parking lot or big lawn with lights shining on it or an empty highway to get food or shelter or a mate, but it’s hard. Over time they get weaker and sicker and — well, we know how it ends. They disappear.
Which brings us to wildlife corridors.
“Wildlife moves. It moves between areas for breeding, or food, throughout its life history — so keeping these areas connected is what’s important,” said Sandra Houghton, a biologist with New Hampshire Fish and Game’s nongame and endangered species section.
Houghton is lead author on a new report summarizing the state’s effort at keeping wildlife corridors open or creating new ones to connect what are called “habitat strongholds,” where certain species are doing well.
Corridors can be on land, where they can be helped by improving road crossings or preserving property, or in water, helped by removing unused dams and improving culverts. Come to think of it, there likely are air corridors, too, which target landing areas used by migrating birds and butterflies.
The problem with protecting corridors is that it isn’t very exciting compared to preserving a handsome forest or scenic hilltop or bird-filled wetlands.
It also faces extra obstacles because it’s more likely to get in the way of people’s development plans or desire to move around. You’d probably be happier supporting your town buying some land to preserve it from development than you would to having officials drop the speed limit on your daily commute by 15 mph to help protect beasts that cross the road or even closing one of your favorite roads for a week or two during amphibian migration times.
These problems are one of the reasons that the Legislature passed a law in 2016 telling the Fish and Game Department to identify existing and needed wildlife corridors, which led to the recent report.
The report doesn’t say we need this kind of corridor over here and that kind over there, and here’s how we’ll make them. Rather, it gathers together information needed to make such decisions, as well as pointing to programs that are already working on them.
You can read it online at wildlife.state.nh.us/nongame/documents/nh-wildlife-corr-rpt.pdf.
Those programs include Connect the Coast, started last year by the Nature Conservancy and Fish and Game to identify corridor projects in the Seacoast area; the Staying Connective regional initiative, which covers much of the northeast and includes Canada; and a Route 2 Wildlife Crossing Project that I’ve written about before, which uses game cameras and other techniques to quantify animals’ road-crossing behavior; and the Salamander Brigades, a volunteer band of amphibian protectors.
Houghton said that as she worked on the project, she found more efforts to help wildlife corridors than she knew about, which surprised her because she works in the field.
“It was really helpful and encouraging to see how many different groups are doing things that are part of what we need to be doing to protect wildlife diversity in New Hampshire,” she said.
Yes, that’s right — this is an environmental story that has an optimistic angle, instead of being only a tale of woe. Hooray!
The report also includes a number of details about the process for choosing and protecting corridors. These are not exactly scintillating to read, such as detailing sources of grant money or state laws that can affect such programs, but they’re important.
This is not a problem with an easy solution. The reports notes, for example, that butterflies and moths may not be able to fly across long roads because of “vehicular wind” while Jersey barriers and granite curbs can trap small organisms trying to cross roads.
Darned if anyone knows what can be done about either of those.
But this is a start — a holistic look at the issue of keeping wildlife around. Until the aliens land, at least.