The hidden tunnels helping wildlife safely cross Massachusetts highways

6 14 on your friday morning, deer collisions on local roads continue to climb in our state. Boston 25 has reported extensively on the numbers and our traffic expert, Catherine prod is back down. Catherine, you found about a unique approach the state is considering taking here. In fact, they're already taking. Yeah, I've discovered that math dot has some measures already in place to keep wildlife safe and more importantly, to keep them out of our path and out of traffic. The brake lights, 57 minutes, the delays, our roads can get pretty wild. I never thought I'd be here as a biologist, but I love what I do. Wildlife biologist David Paulson joined mass dot in 2022 as an environmental analyst. The goal, how do you minimize any impact roads may have on wildlife, but also doing some good work along the way. That work often happens during planned road improvement projects, pretty low cost investment. If you're already replacing a culvert or bridge, making it a little bit bigger, adding a wildlife bent, Paulson took us for a walk on the wild side along route two and conquered the site of major improvements in 2015. And while you might have noticed the revamped roadway, you may not have picked up on this fence entrenched in the ground so animals can't go underneath it. Instead, they follow it to a safe crossing this new culvert kind of dark in the middle, but you can still see through it. And so the goal of any wildlife crossing structures to make it feel as natural as possible. Now, mascot tells me this culvert that you're looking at is actually on the smaller size when it comes to a deer crossing. But because of that, they were able to put more of these along route two and conquer. And that was something they did based on feedback they were getting from the community. So now the question is, are animals actually using this thing? So we'll just kind of walk through. This is the track bed that detects activity by animals moving through. Mastod checked the culverts track beds for about five years along with game cameras on the wall. They revealed plenty of foot traffic. We've seen 43 different species ranging from things as small as a frog all the way up to a deer, bobcat, beaver, muskrat, coyote. As for what we found on this day, deer track, turtle track, bobcat track. Paulson even found tiny tracks from mice and snakes. Then I spotted something. Is this anything over here or is this just like random? No, that's that's a deer. So these are the two who's right there. A deer passing under the road and not into traffic. Having a collision with a deer can cause injury but also be expensive. Every deer passage under this road reduces that risk and cost a culvert or bridge may last 75 100 years. So here's our opportunity to make a lasting difference on the on the landscape. And there's always more work to do. Paulson says right now he's working on modernizing a bridge dam in Wareham. Each project is a new opportunity to find out where the wild things are and improve travel for them and back over to