Animal crossing

FAIRFIELD – A group of nature enthusiasts has taken on a project of cataloging the animal crossings in Jefferson County.

The group is the Sustainable Living Coalition, and on Saturday, it will organize an effort to gather data about the bridges, culverts and rail trestles in the county where animals cross.

The work is being funded through a grant from R. Ross Gipple, founder of BeWildReWild.org and Big River Connectivity.

The coalition is asking for 16 teams to assess between eight to 10 bridges in the county that day, from 9 a.m. to noon. Each team will assess how easily wildlife could cross at that point. For instance, they will decide whether fish could easily swim upstream in a particular river, or whether a small mammal such as a chipmunk could cross under a bridge.

Team members will do this for a number of other animals such as large mammals like deer, coyotes and raccoons, and for categories such as amphibians, reptiles, migratory insects and more. Participants will take a picture of the crossing and upload it with their survey.

Those interested in participating are asked to partake in an orientation session over Zoom, which will be at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday. The Zoom orientation can be accessed at https://yourfreedomproject.zoom.us/my/bobferguson.

Those who are interested in attending can watch a video produced by Dick DeAngelis of Fair Field Productions that describes what Saturday's event is about: https://bewildrewild.org/scorecard.

What is the point of cataloging animal crossings like this?

According to Bob Ferguson, executive director of the Sustainable Living Coalition, this data will provide a foundation for efforts to 'rewild” Jefferson County. Rewilding refers to reverting land back to the way it was before humans altered it.

'We have over-domesticated the world around us, with negative effects,” Ferguson said.

Ferguson said humans have dramatically altered the earth's ecosystems in a number of ways, and one of those is highways.

Roads make it perilous for animals to travel from one forest to the next, or one lake to the next. Ferguson said some parts of Europe build underpasses for animals to travel under highways. In Los Angeles, there are overpasses for cougars to travel over busy highways.

'Apex predators are critical for ecosystems,” Ferguson said.

Ferguson mentioned how the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone National Park improved the health of rivers. Though the two things don't seem related, they share one thing in common: deer. With no predators around, the deer were left to overgraze, which meant vegetation that would normally stop minerals from reaching the river was being eaten.

Once the wolves arrived, the vegetation had a chance to regrow and the river's health improved.

The Sustainable Living Coalition isn't planning to do anything more than collect data at its event Saturday. What it will do with the data will be decided later.

Through his project Big River Connectivity, Gipple is trying to get people interested in rewilding the Mississippi River watershed. Ferguson said the end goal is to rewild millions of acres of land in Iowa, which he said could be done without encroaching on agricultural land. He said that can be done by focusing on land with a steep grade, forests and river bottoms.

On the ReWildBeWild website, the stated goal of rewilding the Mississippi River watershed is to shrink the 'Dead Zone” in the Gulf of Mexico where pollution has reduced aquatic life, and to allow the 'recolonization of apex predators and keystone species essential to a balanced ecosystem.”

Ferguson said he hopes that the project to survey the county's wildlife crossings is a success so it will serve as a model for neighboring counties to follow.

'We want to sensitize people to this idea so they can come to see the value in it,” he said. 'People might think, ‘I'm not a bug or a fish. Why should I care about them?' We assume that posture at our peril.”