{"id":875977,"date":"2026-10-09T05:40:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-09T05:40:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/875977\/"},"modified":"2026-10-09T05:40:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T05:40:11","slug":"worlds-largest-wildlife-crossing-is-on-track-to-open-this-winter-unless-el-nino-intervenes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/875977\/","title":{"rendered":"World’s largest wildlife crossing is on track to open this winter \u2014 unless El Ni\u00f1o intervenes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The world\u2019s largest wildlife crossing over the 101 Freeway in Agoura Hills is barreling toward a Dec. 2 completion date<\/a>. Perhaps the only thing that could stop it is a fierce winter storm.<\/p>\n

Already, a concrete bridge stretches across 10 lanes of whizzing traffic. Atop that, there\u2019s a lush landscape sewn with 6,000 native plants. Recently, crews completed another overpass over adjacent Agoura Road. A big remaining to-do is to fill in the gap between the freeway and the road \u2014 and the freeway to the land to the north \u2014 with millions of cubic feet of soil to create a seamless pathway for animals. <\/p>\n

The idea behind the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing<\/a> is to provide a lifeline for mountain lions in the Santa Monica Mountains, locked in by traffic and suffering from the effects of inbreeding. <\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

A team with the National Park Service recently found and marked three mountain lion kittens in the Simi Hills.<\/p>\n

( Hannah Mellman \/ National Park Service)<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re just hoping El Ni\u00f1o<\/a>\u2018s on our side,\u201d said Beth Pratt, president of the Wildlife Crossing Fund and public face of the project. \u201cI keep saying, \u2018Mother Nature, we\u2019re trying to help you. Let\u2019s not throw any more complications our way.\u2019\u201d A super-sized version of the climate pattern is looming, and there\u2019s a good chance Southern California could be doused. <\/p>\n

Some rain is not a big deal but flooding would shut down work for safety reasons. At a final construction update held near the crossing Thursday, Robert Rock, lead landscape architect and principal designer for the crossing, explained that the soil in the area is rich in clay and silt. When wet, it gets dangerously slick and slippery.<\/p>\n

Heavy precipitation can also derail the soil compaction process, where crews lay down the soil in layers and go over each with a construction vehicle known as a roller. In the distance, workers were busy doing just that as the fierce late morning sun beat down.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re trying to compact a mud puddle, it wouldn\u2019t really compact, right?\u201d he said at a trailhead off of Agoura Road. \u201cBecause if you push that down, the mud just [splats] in either direction.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing in Agoura Hills, shown Oct. 7, 2026, is scheduled to open Dec. 2. <\/p>\n

(Kayla Bartkowski \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

In fact, something like that happened amid historic rains in the winter of 2022-23. Construction workers were busy preparing to pour the concrete for the bottom layer of the north wall. But water collected in the trench that was dug for it as they were working to compact the soil.<\/p>\n

That pushed back the original completion date<\/a> of late 2025. Right-wing pundits and politicos in recent months have attacked the project<\/a> over the delays and a high price tag that\u2019s currently $114 million. A March post<\/a> in an outlet published by a conservative think tank called it a \u201cbridge to nowhere\u201d and \u201cjobs program for environmentalists.\u201d U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy compared it<\/a> with the state\u2019s long-delayed, budget-busting high-speed train.<\/p>\n

Around the time the outrage reached a fever pitch, however, the completion date was announced.<\/p>\n

Pratt said \u201cthe hate\u201d has worn on her. She\u2019s been called a \u201cfraud,\u201d \u201cretard\u201d and worse, and she\u2019s even afraid to post about the crossing on social media. \u201cOf course we\u2019re still going to celebrate\u201d at the finish line, she said. <\/p>\n

At stake is the survival of the Santa Monica Mountains\u2019 isolated, beleaguered mountain lion population, which is listed as threatened. Seth Riley, wildlife branch chief for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, said 41% of documented matings were between close relatives since 2002, the start of an ongoing study of mountain lions in and around the Santa Monicas.<\/p>\n

Just a few months ago, the National Park Service caught a young collared male at the western end of the mountain range who had a kinked tail \u2014 a sign of inbreeding. It\u2019s not the first such documented deformity but shows the problems persist, Riley said. If the situation gets to the point where their reproduction is affected, modeling has shown there\u2019s \u201cessentially a 100% chance of extinction\u201d within 50 years, he added.<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

A team with the National Park Service recently found and marked three mountain lion kittens in the Simi Hills.<\/p>\n

(Hannah Mellman \/ National Park Service)<\/p>\n

But he doesn\u2019t think it\u2019s too late. The soon-to-open crossing will let the big cats seek mates in the Simi Hills and beyond \u2014 and allow fresh blood to travel into their neck of the woods, he said. Genetic diversity is expected to go up, though not overnight.<\/p>\n

In the last three weeks, a trail camera stationed close to the south end of the crossing has captured coyotes, deer, a female lion with two big cubs \u2014 even as construction churns on next door, said Jeff Sikich, a wildlife biologist at the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.<\/p>\n

Recently, in the Simi Hills north of the crossing, his team marked three kittens, the first litter for the 3 \u00bd-year-old lion known as P-113.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese kittens might be \u2014 once they grow up and leave mom at roughly around 1\u00bd \u2014 one of the first lions to actually use the wildlife crossing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The world\u2019s largest wildlife crossing over the 101 Freeway in Agoura Hills is barreling toward a Dec. 2…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":875978,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[77884,368585,22212,368583,58629,130384,368584,78170,2354,5188,61251,79,368586,69534,201,19818,4477],"class_list":["post-875977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-beth-pratt","tag-completion-date","tag-crew","tag-crossing-thursday","tag-el-nino","tag-freeway","tag-large-wildlife-crossing","tag-layer","tag-mountain-lion","tag-north","tag-santa-monica-mountains","tag-science","tag-seth-riley","tag-soil","tag-wildlife","tag-winter","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=875977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875977\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/875978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=875977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=875977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=875977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}