A new wildlife bridge will span Route 101, providing safe passage for mountain lions and other wildlife that are hemmed in by the freeways that surround the Santa Monica Mountain.
It was just after midnight on April 21st when the radio collar of P-97, an eighteen-month-old mountain lion, sent its last signal. P-97 had only recently separated from his mother, setting out east in the Santa Monica Mountains in search of territory to call his own. That night, P-97 reached the 405 freeway, where the parkland of Malibu and Topanga ends and the residential Westside Los Angeles neighborhoods of Brentwood, Bel Air, and Westwood begin.
It was Earth Day; it had rained the night before, and the sky was a brilliant blue over Liberty Canyon, the site of the crossing, whose hills were blanketed in yellow mustard flowers. The crossing is two hundred feet long and a hundred and sixty-five feet wide; the campaign fund-raising goal is more than a hundred million dollars.
It is possible to live in a city like New York and understand the destruction of the natural environment mostly in abstract terms. In Los Angeles, whererage, water use is being restricted, and the deaths of mountain lions make the news, such devastation feels nearer. The wildlife corridor represents more than forty years of conservation work, including decades of negotiations to acquire the land on either side of the highway.
Trappers Point, a crossing in Wyoming that rehabilitated the migration route of mule deer and pronghorn antelope, has two overpasses and six underpasses; in the first three years after it was built, animal collisions with vehicles in the area fell eighty per cent.
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