A fence now keeps elephants off the new highway
After two elephants were killed on a widened highway, we worked with the forest department to fence the road and steer the herd to an underpass through our corridor.
A widened highway in the Western Ghats cut straight across an old elephant route, a path the herds have walked between forest blocks for longer than anyone can say. The animals kept using it, because elephants follow memory and a strip of new tarmac does not register as a reason to change a route generations old.
The result was predictable and ugly. Two elephants were killed crossing the road, and the near misses with traffic put drivers in danger too. A bull elephant and a fast car is a disaster for both.
Working with the forest department, we put together a fix that pairs a roadside fence with a purpose-built underpass. The fence steers the herd away from the open road, and the underpass funnels them safely beneath it and out into the forest corridor we have been planting on the far side.
The corridor mattered to the design. An underpass that opens onto cleared land or a coffee estate is one an elephant will not trust. One that opens into continuous forest, where the animal feels covered, is one it will actually use.
Camera traps now show the herd using the underpass rather than the road. It works, which is a relief after the cost of learning that it was needed.
We will not pretend this is a clean success. It took the deaths of two elephants to shake the funding loose for a crossing that should have been built when the road was widened. The fix is good. That it required dead animals first is the part that should not have happened.
