A salamander in hand. File photo via CNS
Camryn Woods is a reporter with the Community News Service, part of the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program.
MONKTON — Every day as cars, buses and other motor vehicles drive over Monkton Road, a high-traffic street that connects the towns of Monkton and Vergennes, a culvert-like tunnel underneath the road prevents 80% of small-bodied organisms from being run over.
The tunnel — Monkton’s first and only wildlife crossing — is intended to help amphibians like spotted salamanders, wood frogs and spring peepers reach their breeding grounds. Many amphibians reside in wooded, upland habitats for the majority of their lives but migrate to wetlands during their breeding seasons to lay eggs.
Unfortunately, many roads in Vermont bisect the two ecosystems, forcing amphibians to embark on a journey across busy streets in order to reproduce.
Wildlife crossings like the one in Monkton are often expensive and require evidence of significant animal mortality to be considered by state and federal grants. So in the early 2000s, Monkton community members conducted on-the-ground research to justify the project.
Volunteers from the town of Monkton, the Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans) and the Lewis Creek Association, a non-profit that works with Vermonters to preserve natural landscapes, visited the street at night (when amphibians are most active) to note species and the number of mortalities. In just two nights, they found over a thousand dead amphibians.
“The Monkton area is very biodiverse,” said Kate Kelly, program manager at the Lewis Creek Association. “It has to do with being in the Champlain Valley, but also being on the edge of multiple habitat types and zones.”
Kelly added that two unusual species were found in the areas surrounding the designated crossing: the blue spotted salamander and the four-toed salamander. “Having those unusual species there was helpful for getting funding,” Kelly said.
The crossing, which ended up costing $342,397, was completed in 2018. It was mainly funded by a U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration grant, state wildlife grant and Lewis Creek Association fundraising, according to Kelly.
The Monkton wildlife crossing also served as the site of a unique 12-year-long research study published in May.
The research was conducted by University of Vermont scientists and assessed amphibian mortality before and after the tunnel’s construction — one of the firsts of its kind. The results were surprising, said Matthew Marcelino, ecologist and lead author for the study.
“We figured they’d be effective, but we didn’t realize how effective they would be,” Marcelino said. Along with the 80% overall reduced mortality statistic, they found that mortality of non-climbing amphibians decreased by 94% as a result of the crossing.
Marcelino hopes that the results of the study will encourage people to invest more in wildlife crossings. “It’s important to have evidence to get things funded so that stakeholders feel comfortable with the government disbursing funds to these types of projects,” Marcelino said. “And this really did that.”
Not to mention, amphibians play an important role in local food webs, act as good indicators of environmental health and support human health.
“They serve both as predators and prey. So they provide a lot of food for mammals, birds, reptiles, et cetera, but they’re also preying on things like mosquitoes and other pests — insects that we humans don’t like,” Marcelino said.
The University of Vermont study came out at the same time as a large wildlife crossing project on Route 2 and Interstate-89 in Western Waterbury was pulled back. The project, which had won $1.6 million in funding from the Federal Highway Administration in 2023, would have cost around $50 million in total, according to Joe Flynn, secretary of VTrans.
The 2023 grant provided momentum for the project, but the state would have needed to apply for a much bigger one to cover the cost. Unfortunately, only $75 million was available for the country, and Vermont didn’t receive part of the funding.
Though the project was retracted due to the lack of funding, Flynn said that the decision to cease looking for grant money was “not intended to diminish the importance of wildlife crossings” and that Vermonters understood the need for them.
Marcelino said that wildlife crossings can save residents money in the long term. “If people are hitting deer or moose or bear, or a turkey, that is a lot of money being spent to either fix the vehicle or have first responders respond,” Marcelino said.
“There is a nexus of wildlife crossings to highway safety, and if that nexus is the nexus that is promoted … then I think there is the possibility that these crossings will be continued in the future,” Flynn said.
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