>>The wildlife center of Virginia is one of the world's leading teaching and research hospitals for wildlife and conservation medicine, providing state-of-the-art veterinary care for more than 3000 wild animals each year.

The center draws on lessons learned from each patient, admitted to teach the world, to care about and care for wildlife, and the environment >>Funding for untamed is made possible by (birds chirping) (water rippling) (upbeat music) The wildlife center Virginia is one of the world's leading hospitals for wildlife.

We receive injured, orphaned animals treat them, and rehabilitate them.

Now the very definition of rehabilitation is that we receive injured orphaned or displaced wildlife, restore them to health, and then return them to their natural habitat, able to function normally.

But what happens when there is no natural habitat to which they can be returned?

That's a problem we have to confront increasingly on a day to day basis.

That really good analogy to understand this issue is to think about the children's game of musical chairs.

Perhaps you played as a child.

It was one of my favorites.

There are a group of chairs put in a line and the children go around and around and around.

And when the music stops, every child has to find a chair, has to find a seat.

Problem is, there are not enough chairs for all of the kids in the game.

Eventually somebody is left out.

Now some of the kids may try to sit two to a chair, no, that's against the rules.

So eventually one person without a seat has to leave the game.

Wildlife and their habitats are just like the children and that game of musical chairs, they move around freely, but when the time comes to stop, they have to have a place to be a place to find food to find shelter, to find water and room to reproduce.

Well if a given habitat is full, they also need a safe way to get to alternative habitats.

And if no safe, corridor is available and the animals are stranded in that habitat, that habitat effectively becomes an Island.

It may be surrounded by highways, or development or simply hostile terrain, but one way or another, those animals are stranded.

Now that presents a real problem.

And just like on an Island, the animals eventually overpopulate and something has to give the animals, will either destroy the habitat through overutilization, or in moving to new habitats across dangerous, and unsustainable terrain, animals, populations and species can be lost.

(upbeat gentle music) >>I had been made aware of a huge population of spotted salamanders at Polo Grounds Road and the fact that they migrated across that road, and the stories were brought to my attention through the good work of Jim and Bess Marie and a community of volunteers.

And I also learned that the tragedy of the population possibly disappearing back in the early 2000s Well, I decided on one night in 2015, when it was cold and rainy, and late winter to come out and have a look, and I didn't expect to find anything, but lo and behold there were salamanders here by the dozens.

I started helping them across the road, stopping traffic as I could, but they were a little bit overwhelming in their numbers.

There wasn't so much I could do.

And it was at that moment that I realized that something must be done.

(upbeat music) >>Most of what humans to a landscape is break it from being a continuous bit of whatever forest of any particular kind, into fragments, and what nobody really appreciated it.

And so we started looking, at this is what that actually means in terms of the number of species that live in fragments.

And that turns out it's much less, much fewer than in continuous forest.

I was worrying about this topic, and how to understand it, and then I just had one of those moments, when in a meeting discussing habitat fragmentation and this whole subject, I suddenly found myself saying I wonder if you could persuade the Brazilians to arrange the 50% they require of any project in the Amazon to stay in forest to provide for a giant experiment.

And, you know, very often you have an idea like that and it goes nowhere.

(chuckles) National science foundation bought me a ticket to go to Manaus in the Amazon, fully expecting me to fail.

And within an hour, I had the blessing of the director of the Amazon Research Institute, a couple hours later the agreement of the head of the ecology department.

And before the afternoon was over, the blessing of the land management agency where the forest fragments project continues to this day.

You know, we designed the experiment in a proper scientific way, so that we were actually studying the intact forest before it was broken up into fragments.

And then we could follow what happened in the fragments.

And we also have matching plots in intact forest so that if we detect changes that occur in both then we know it's not because of fragmentation.

So we saw differences in these newly created fragments almost from day one.

In the first year, the mortality rate of the trees, and the first isolated fragment which is a 10 hectare per fragment doubled.

But to give you a sense of the scale of this, a hundred hectare fragment, which is like 250 acres, loses half of the bird species of the forest interior, not the ones that go around the edge or in the canopy, but in the interior, it loses half of those species in less than 15 years.

And the really great thing is that just because this experiment existed, the authorities in Brasilia paid attention in every protected area they made afterwards in the Amazon was large, is sort of a rule of thumb, and biology called a "species area curve" which basically says, you know, the larger, the area the more species that can hald.

But what we were seeing was the reverse of that which is when suddenly you have a bunch of species that were there because it was part of a larger area.

And now it's small.

They just can't make it >>Here at the wildlife center of Virginia.

One of the most frequent causes of injury that brings wild patients to our door, is having been hit by a vehicle.

It's so common in fact that we don't even write that out anymore.

We have a shorthand notation, HBV, for hit by vehicle.

And you can find that notation on the files and records of many different species, everything from the smallest songbirds or squirrels or rabbits to the largest mammals like deer and bears.

Highways across the landscape, and the need of wildlife to cross roads as they move across the landscape is a deadly hazard.

>>Patients that have been hit by a vehicle are incredibly common at the wildlife center of Virginia.

We see patients that have been hit by a car almost every single day, if not every single day.

Well, not all patients are observed being hit by a vehicle.

Many patients are found in or along a roadside which makes me immediately suspicious that that patient was probably hit by a vehicle.

Usually the injury is traumatic in nature.

Cars are moving with an incredible amount of force.

And that force is unfortunately distributed right onto that animal that was hit.

Commonly external injuries we see are things like fractures, so broken bones, wounds or even crushed shells in our turtle patients.

And that's just what we can see on the outside, in the inside of these patients, there's also immense internal trauma.

So things like bruised lungs, internal organ damage, and even damage to the brain.

The patients that are most commonly presented to us after being hit by a car are the ones you're going to see on roadsides on a day-to-day basis.

So I think of things like opossum, squirrels, turtles.

Raptor patients are commonly admitted to the wildlife center, after being hit by a car.

The reason for this is they're often on roads and roadsides foraging for food, that food can sometimes be deceased other animals on the side of the road, such as small mammals, that were maybe already hit by cars, or live prey on the side of the road, that is drawn to that area by human litter.

In the spring we admit many white tail deer fawns that have been orphaned.

These individuals are usually orphaned by their mother being hit by a car or a vehicle in the roadway.

While they've species have evolved over millions of years, to avoid danger and survive in the environment.

On an evolutionary scale, unfortunately, cars are a very new danger to them but they may not always know to avoid.

Each animal has incredible adaptations and sensory systems to avoid danger.

But those sensory systems, and adaptations may not be in tune to sense something dangerous like a vehicle.

For example, some prey species like deer and rabbits have evolved to actually freeze in response to danger versus runaway.

That's why when you're driving down the road, and a deer sees your car they don't immediately get out of the way.

This evolutionary adaptation has actually proved very beneficial for them when evading things like foxes and wolves and coyotes, but for your car it doesn't work so well.

Because of these things, assuming that wildlife should be able to evade and perceive cars and roads as a hazard is an extremely anthropomorphic way of thinking, that's really dangerous to wildlife.

If you see an animal in the road while you're driving you're gonna have to take into account many considerations.

You're going to need to think about how large is that animal.

What kind of road are you on?

And is there traffic around you?

It's never advisable to swerve dramatically in traffic to avoid an animal is that could cause a serious human accident, and human health and safety needs to be paramount to wildlife collisions.

Slowing down and observing the speed limit is a great way to avoid wildlife collisions.

Being really aware of your surroundings, looking in the ditch and alongside the road, especially at dusk and dawn, can help prevent wildlife collisions as well.

If you accidentally hit an animal on the road, first and foremost, you need to think about human safety.

If you're on a small side road where you can pull over, and safely contain that animal and it's safe to do so then you should, if you're on a major road or highway and you hit an animal, the best course of action is to take note of where you're located and notify the state or highway patrol.

Unfortunately, it's just not safe for you to pull over on a major interstate, or highway to assess an animal.

And in these instances, human safety has to be paramount.

(upbeat gentle music) >>The Center for Urban Habitats is a hybrid organization, part nonprofit and part LLC.

And we advanced biodiversity education and conservation in the Piedmont region with a variety of services, environmental services that are educational oriented, and usually volunteer inclusive.

This project is in a high traffic area, and in the middle of a development.

And it involved a very large population of animals that were going to be impacted, and also a large population of people.

The journey of the spotted salamander through a year is a very complicated one, particularly on landscapes that are impacted by modern humans.

So this salamander let's start as a, an adult salamander and say summer, and autumn is spending its time in the Woodland, possibly a forest.

And at this particular site, it's this Upland landscape behind me, across on the other side of the road.

And it's a fossorial animal, that means it spends its life.

Most of its life in the ground, or on the ground surface, under logs, hunting for an eating arthropods.

And at those very first, slightly warm rains, and sleets in late February, just after dark.

It is coaxed to start migrating.

And we don't think of salamanders as being a migratory species like a bison or a monarch but they are, and it's relative to their size.

It's a pretty big distance.

They can travel up to 400 meters or so, in their migration.

The journey begins in that upland setting.

And then in order to evade predators they travel at nighttime as quickly as they can.

And they can move along pretty quickly on the ground surface, down the slopes, and towards their breeding grounds which at this particular site are on the floodplain of the Rivanna River.

On that flood plain, there are temporary pools of water that are very seasonal and scientists call these "vernal pools".

They have their unique ecology, that's very temporary, and they come and go every year.

That's where the salamanders are headed.

And when they get there, that's where they breed.

That's where they mate.

Roads and related architectural structures make the migration of the spotted salamander quite difficult.

First, there's the obvious problem of having a vehicle, that's moving pretty quickly and combine that with the fact that the salamander migrates usually during rush hour in winter.

A lot of these animals get hit by cars.

And so we tried to figure out how we could find a balance between the development that was going to happen here, this particular location, and conserving the ecology of the sites.

One of my first onsite meetings was with Riverbend Development, and I gave them a tour of the ecology of the site.

I showed them where the salamanders lived, where they reproduced, and the challenges they face, and right away the developer, and the construction company were interested in trying to do something about it.

And so I looked a little bit at other projects that were similar particularly in the Northeast and in Europe there were situations where people had put in wildlife underpasses specifically for salamanders.

And so I did some research, came up with some specs that I thought fit this site.

And particularly the, how many tunnels might be needed to go under what would be a new road, how far apart they should be spaced and what the size of the tunnel should be so that it could accommodate animals in addition to the salamander, and I presented a schematic to the developer who gave it to his engineer who refined things, and we had a plan.

And so then it was their job to get it approved.

They not only did that, but came up with the resources to fund the project.

Theoretically, this is supposed to work by funneling the salamanders, spring peepers, great tree frogs and other animals, to these small tunnels that are roughly a foot wide, 18 inches tall.

Go to the full length of this three lane road beside me.

From the Upland side to the floodplain side >>The value of wildlife corridors is increasingly understood as we see what's happening to wildlife.

Now across this country and indeed around the world, governments, nonprofit organizations, and private citizens are looking for ways and new strategies to make it safer for wildlife to move across the landscape.

More effective ways are being developed every day.

But collisions between wildlife and vehicles remain one of the biggest threats facing wildlife, but such collisions not only present a deadly risk to wildlife, they're a threat to humans as well.

(upbeat gentle music) >>I'm the executive director of Wild Virginia and we're a grassroots nonprofit based in Charlottesville.

And we work on protecting and connecting Virginia's wild places.

The Virginia Safe Wildlife Corridors Collaborative or VSWCC is made up of organizations like mine that are grassroots nonprofits and advocacy orgs.

And then it's also made up of agency representatives from a host of different agencies throughout the state.

And we even have members from different universities to help us with the research we need to figure out.

And the reason we have so many different people involved and so many different groups is because this is a really complex issue and we need to approach it from a very complex direction.

VSWCC was created so that we could start to get a handle on the enormous number of crashes we have on our roads with wildlife and humans.

So for instance, every year, Virginia is in the top 10 of States for the most wildlife vehicle collisions especially with deer.

And so this is a big problem, not only for wildlife but it's also very expensive, and it's dangerous for everyone involved.

And so our collaborative is working on finding solutions to that problem.

Collisions between vehicles and deer in particular are extremely common in Virginia because we're out and about doing what we want to do at the same time, animals like deer are out doing what they want to do.

So dawn and dusk, we get up, we go to work we're rushing around deer doing the same thing.

They're getting up, looking for food, moving around.

And so we are in a great position to run into each other and we do right?

On these roads.

And one of the reasons we keep seeing more and more crashes in Virginia it's because we keep building more and more roads(chuckles) and encroaching on more and more of their habitat.

So we have one of the biggest road networks in the country and we have a very large deer population.

So you can just see how we are basically setting ourselves up to fail.

If we don't look at the landscape through the eyes of these animals.

Roads are really difficult for wildlife to cross for a bunch of reasons but especially because we go so fast, we all know that we tend to go even more than the speed limit, and even the speed limit, if we follow it, is very fast for an animal.

So when they're trying to assess whether or not it's safe to cross the road that's really difficult for them to do.

And especially if you're a very small animal like a turtle or a salamander there's no way they can make it across the road fast enough, in order to stay out of our way.

The Virginia Wildlife Corridor Action Plan, is a bill that was passed in 2020, in the Virginia General Assembly.

And it's a really exciting bill because it actually calls on our state agencies to identify where our wildlife corridors are, where animals are trying to go, and then also to plan for the protection of those corridors.

So this is a big difference in how we've done business previously, and it's really gonna change the way we conceptualize the landscape and think about where animals are trying to go.

What I love about this bill is it not only identifies wildlife corridors, but it thinks about where they're interacting with roads.

So where are animals being hit on our roads and what kind of infrastructure can we put in to protect them?

And so the bill actually calls on our Virginia transportation department to come up with a list of priority projects.

And these would be projects that we could put on the ground to really improve the way that wildlife can cross our roads.

I like to tell people that there's things you can do right now today to make a difference.

On the back of my car, I have a sticker that says watch for wildlife and that's to remind me as well as drivers around me that the best thing I can do for wildlife is to observe speed limits and then slow down especially at dawn and dusk, and for deer in particular between the months of October and December we know that's when most crashes happen.

So if you can't do anything else just try to slow yourself down during those times of day.

And during those parts of the year where we know there's a lot of activity on the roads, and now of course we don't want to hit any animal, but that's just one example of one species you can really help out, if you just slow down >>After several years of community involvement in helping the salamanders get across this dangerous road, we've finally got a salamander underpass, and we eagerly await the outcome.

>>As we humans move across the landscape and dominate the environment, we make it a pretty dangerous world for wildlife but there are still things we can do, to make wildlife movement safer for the animals.

Now, the first thing you can do is find out if in your area there are any wildlife corridor initiatives.

You can check with your local conservation organization perhaps your local highway department or even your state wildlife agency to find out if there are opportunities to get involved, to volunteer, or even to include your land.

Now, if you do on property, be sure to protect the areas through which wildlife moves, the cover, the habitat that lets them safely cross your property to get from one area to another.

It's often easy to do, and it's often critical, for wild species.

And finally, as you move across the landscape, keep an eye out for wildlife.

If you're driving your car, or frankly even riding your bicycle on public roads or highways, remember that crossing those roads and highways is one of the most deadly circumstances facing wildlife in their routine lives.

Watch them.

If they're on the side of the road, know that they can bolt into traffic without notice.

If you find a turtle, on the pavement, if it's safe to do so stop, and help it cross the road.

Each and every, little thing we do to make the world a safer place, helps wildlife survive.

And at the end of the day, just like in that game of musical chairs, we played as children.

When the music stops, wildlife need a place to be, and a safe way to get there.

>>Funding is made possible by.

(birds chirping) (water rippling) (upbeat music) (upbeat instrumental music)