The Optimist Daily · 20 hours ago

Colorado’s Largest Wildlife Overpass Cut I-25 Collisions by 91 Percent | the Optimist Daily

For decades, a stretch of Interstate 25 in Colorado functioned, in the words of one wildlife biologist, as "an effective wall that they had to play Frogger and try to get across" - severing ancient migration corridors and claiming roughly one deer a day during peak seasons. Nine months after North America's largest wildlife overpass opened near the Greenland exit, collisions on that stretch have dropped by 91 percent, and pronghorn have been filmed crossing to the west side of I-25 for the first time in generations. The structure's designers thought beyond the elk and pronghorn it was built for, piling wood along the overpass surface so that smaller mammals would have covered routes safe from hawks and coyotes, and a federally threatened jumping mouse now uses the crossing too. What made it possible was, as CDOT's Chuck Attardo put it, "everybody marching in the same direction" - federal agencies, state departments, counties, land trusts, and ranchers holding a shared vision across six years of work. Executive director Laura Sanford may have said it most plainly: "It's not just for you; it is for everyone."