A deer, a badger, a boar, a fox ... If you come across these dead animals, you can help identify them on Via Fauna.

Illustrative montage.

-

Mary Evans - Thomas Winstone - Richard Bowles - Hennadi Minchenko - Sipa

  • Weasel, wild boar or deer, collisions with animals are legion.

  • In Occitania, the Via Fauna project, launched by hunters, offers motorists and residents the opportunity to help identify road mortality of wildlife.

  • The idea is to seek solutions with the operators of roads or highways to limit the damage.

  • In the Lot, for example, reflective stakes have just appeared on the side of a departmental road to dissuade deer from crossing when passing cars.

It looks like a wild exhibition of cans.

The 125 reflective stakes recently planted along the departmental road 802, between the small Lot towns of Durbans and Cambes, are in fact lifebuoys for motorists and deer.

By reflecting the light from the headlights, they are supposed to create a light barrier and prevent surprised animals from crossing at the fateful moment.

The poles are there until May, regularly ragged by the agents of the departmental council.

The objective is to test their effectiveness on this small stretch of road where five deer were struck last spring.

This experiment is a concrete consequence of the Via Fauna program, launched in 2017 by the regional federation of hunters in Occitania.

“The idea was to combine the issues between maintaining biodiversity and road safety,” explains Johan Roy, the ecologist in charge of the project.

And in conjunction with the operators of roads, highways or canals, to identify “interruptions in ecological corridors” to restore them.

Nozzle shells, badgers or hares

The Lot experience is the result of modeling Via Fauna, now funded by the Region or the French Biodiversity Office, and which until now was satisfied with field observations of hunters or agents.

But the program has just taken on another dimension with the opening to the public of its “wildlife road mortality observatory”.

Now anyone can report their wild boar crossing, the nozzle stunned on a windshield or their unfortunate colliding with a hare, via an Android app or a website.

From the doe to the snake, through the birds and the badger, all the wild animals that have fallen on the asphalt can be identified and mapped in real time.

A sow crosses the road 3,300 times ...

What to feed figures for the hour incomplete.

"A 2008 study evokes 24,000 animal collisions per year in France and 180 million euros of damage", notes Johan Roy.

An example of Via Fauna cartography.

The birds are in purple.

- Via Fauna

Since then, not much, except the hunter's intuition that the calm of the confinement may have temporarily changed the habits of wild animals.

And some precise data thanks to wild boars equipped with GPS by the hunters of the Haute-Garonne: “a female followed for a year crossed the road 3,300 times, another wild boar spent three nights on the Palays interchange in Toulouse during confinement ”, lists the ecologist.

And still near the Pink City, around thirty deer drown every year in the Saint-Martory Canal, hence the idea of ​​imagining floating bridges with the departmental council.

Another concrete development of Via Fauna, the reflection in progress with the State and the ASF on a "black point", animal life is understood, on the A20 motorway, near Montpezat-du-Quercy (Tarn-et-Garonne) .

The motorway constitutes a natural barrier there, but the asphalted municipal road which passes below does not really appeal to wild boars and deer either.

“We will try to remove a strip of bitumen to leave an earthy passage, says Johan Roy, and install sound insulation with wooden panels”.

The bet of a rural path without obstacles, under the expressway.

Planet

Ariège: In all illegality, loggers cut down parts of forests in private homes

Miscellaneous

Cahors: A wild boar charges and injures two passers-by in the city center

  • Accident

  • Toulouse

  • Animals

  • Hunt

  • Planet