Not only the bear Juan Carrito: how wild animals die on our roads
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The one of Juan Carrito Was it a death foretold? And how much more can be done to protect wild animals in Italy from the concrete risk of road accidents? After last Monday’s episode, with the bear symbol of National Park of Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise hit by a car on state road 17, near Castel di Sangro, the debate is open. The numbers are indeed important: according to an indicative estimate, every year around one and a half million wild animals are killed on our roads. A silent massacre. And accidents can also have consequences for humans, of course.
L’Abruzzowhere the attendance habitat of theMarsican brown bear it is very fragmented, it is undoubtedly an emblematic case: here the presence of roads and infrastructures that cross potential colonization corridors of the species is significant.
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Among these, the state road 17, the Sulmona-Roccaraso, is considered neuralgic. “Here, before Carrito, five bears had already been run over in the last ten years. Three had died. Chilling, if you consider that the subspecies is made up of just sixty individuals”, he denounces Marco Antonellinaturalist and expert on large carnivores of the WWF. “None of these animals – notes the director of the Park, Luciano Sammarone – had the confident behavior of Carrito demonstrating that the bear did not die because it was Carrito, but because, like – all the other bears – it was free to move around the territory”. And therefore, as the Park himself denounced in a post on social media, that road “besides being a physical barrier for wildlife has become, over the years, a kind of death road for bears”.
But the latest tragedy only amplifies the perception of a high risk that insiders have widely diagnosed in recent years, to the point that within the project LIFE Safe-Crossing and in collaboration with “Save the Bear” and the WWF itself, initiatives aimed at improving safety conditions and educating drivers to slow down have multiplied in recent years, despite the fact that the state road is formally outside the boundaries of the Park. For example, a 1100-metre metal fence had already been installed to invite wildlife to use the existing overpasses and underpasses. But Carrito, according to the reconstructions, would have jumped onto the roadway just ten meters from the underpass, repeating an action already done dozens of times. Because the behavior of wild animals is, by definition, not predictable.
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“More investments to stop the silent massacre”
“Although awareness is growing that so-called ecological connectivity is an important issue, Italy remains far behind the countries of Northern Europe and Canada. – Antonelli continues – The reason is obvious? Many of the road and railway infrastructures are old and in the planning stage, the risks associated with the interruption of the natural habitat of the animals have not been contemplated”. Last September, in Liguria, five wolves were killed by a passing train. “It is possible to remedy this by mitigating the risk – continues the WWF manager – but it requires important investments that the associations and parks alone cannot afford. It is therefore necessary that the Regions, Metropolitan Cities and the Ministry of the Environment understand the importance of structured interventions, even if it seems that the opportunity of the Pnrr has not been seized at all”.
The Safe-Crossing project and the help of technology
Yet something is moving. Anas itself, the FS Italiane Group company that deals with road infrastructure, explains, in a note, how “in the design and construction of new works it considers elements for the protection of wildlife, such as underpasses or ecoducts, such as the one already built on the Sassari-Olbia for the passage of the protected species present, with particular reference to the little bustard”. And Anas collaborates, with the Maiella National Park and the Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise National Park, in the international project LIFE Safe-Crossing, one of the most structured that the man is proposing precisely to stem the problem of the so-called “roadkill”the risk of collisions between wild animals and vehicles.
A project that follows a similar path, the project Life Streets (which envisaged the installation of an innovative system for the prevention of road accidents with fauna in 17 sites in central Italy) and which aims to reduce the impact of roads on some priority species from a conservation point of view in four European countries: theMarsican brown bear (Ursus arctos marsicanus) and the wolf (Canis lupus) in Italy, the Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus) in Spain, andBrown bear (Ursus arctos) in Greece and Romania.
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Among the most innovative ideas, the installation of an innovative system of prevention of traffic accidents with wildlife (AVC PS) in the new project areas. It works like this: a series of infrared sensors and a thermal camera record the presence of an animal approaching the road and send the information to an electronic control unit, which activates a signal to warn motorists, inviting them to reduce speed. A Doppler radar sensor, located on the road sign post, measures whether the vehicle is slowing down. If this happens, the system stops at this point. Otherwise the radar sends a signal to the control box, which activates the acoustic deterrent system, with the function of keeping the animal away to prevent it from crossing. The Life Safe-Crossing project also aims to increase the attention of drivers in the project areas on the risk of road accidents with the target species. But the road signs proposed in Abruzzo do not seem to have had the desired effect.
The help of citizen science and Italy’s delay
In recent years, a group of researchers has also dealt with roadkill in Italy, analyzing – thanks to the contribution of the so-called citizen science – a total of 529 “certified” road accidents, which involved 33 different species, including 13 mammalian, 10 bird, 6 reptile and 2 amphibian species. The results of the study, concentrated in particular on the roads of Campania and merged into an article published in the scientific journal Ecological Processshow how the peaks of accidents are concentrated in the winter and spring months, identify the more vulnerable species (fox, hedgehog and badger in primis) and suggest a map of the potential risk, with particular regard to infrastructure close to vegetable gardens and orchards, which “could help plan the placement of mitigation measures”.
“What we have highlighted – explain the authors of the research, Francesco Valerio, Marco Basile And Rosario Balestrieri – is that the placement of mitigation measures, such as crossing structures, should take into account species life cycles and ecological requirements. For evaluations of this kind, however, the collection of data on large areas is necessary, and citizen science, experimented through the creation of a specific form filled in by citizens, can be fundamental”. citizen science also appealed the Natural History Museum of Ferrarawhich has started a collection of cases of road traffic accidents of animals along the roads of the Po River Deltawith a focus on the provinces of Ferrara, Rovigo and Ravenna: already over 1500 observations registered on the innaturalist.org portal.
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Wolves and bears, but also many birds die on Italian high-speed roads. “They are the ones that make the least news, because motorists often don’t even notice it, but I assure you that many blackbirds, thrushes and even birds of prey are run over on our roads. – he says Marco Antonelli of the Wwf – Together with risk mitigation works, with overpasses and underpasses, we hope exemplary punishments for motorists who do not respect the limits and more speed cameras and speed bumps: the high transit speed prevents us from coping with the unexpected, a wild animal that comes out on the roadway”.
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And among the most affected species there is certainly the badger: “That’s right. – confirms the naturalist, popularizer and photographer Marco Colombo – they come to England about 50,000 invested each year, in Italy we don’t have such precise estimates, but they are certainly very many. In the Recovery Center Piacenza Wildlife Rescue Center I documented, as part of one of my latest projects, the stories of some of them: they taught me that even with broken legs you can run again. But the massacre on the roads is not admissible, not even with the most common species”.
The road is therefore still long, although there are virtuous realities, even metropolitan ones, to draw inspiration from: for example Stockholmwith its ecological corridors, mitigates the negative effects of anthropization on ecosystems, guaranteeing freedom of movement for wild animals even in the city.
And among the most avant-garde countries there is undoubtedly the Portugalwhere the Life Uevora conservation project resulted in the construction of tunnels for amphibians, underpasses with walkways for the crossing of mammals, ultrasonic deterrents and widespread road signs to raise awareness among motorists. The Italian naturalist Francesco Valerio also took part in the project, to which he dedicated a research doctorate: “We have developed universal guidelines on risk mitigation works, here – more than in Italy – the so-called road ecology has its overriding importance”.
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