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A round-up of good news.
Dear Reader,
We know all about the wild lives saved when we enable animals to cross busy roadways (such as these LA commuters). And we all loved this Bluedot story about a family of gibbons who were reunited thanks to the restoration of a tree canopy, which allowed the members to travel freely high over a railroad track.
And now we can add this Feel-Good story to the list: About eight canopy bridge crossings in Brazil are facilitating 15,000 trips by arboreal wildlife, including the endangered buffy-headed marmoset, a primate, without a single fatality. “A canopy bridge serves two purposes,” one of the project’s biologists told Mongabay. “The first is to improve connectivity for wildlife, allowing animals to move from one side to the other in these fragmented forest areas. As a result, we also reduce roadkill.” This is particularly important in a region with a number of endangered primates. More canopy bridges are in the plans, expanding the project outside of the region and into other areas where endangered primates see high traffic fatality rates.
A similar initiative, also reported by Mongabay, aims to connect the Yellowstone region of the U.S. with Canada’s Yukon territory via a 2,100-mile corridor that “spans five U.S. states, two Canadian provinces, and at least 75 Indigenous territories. … It’s a question of building connections between different partners, learning from centuries of Indigenous stewardship,” the story tells us, “and using science to inform decisions that work for both wildlife and humans.”
In Germany, a former “death strip,” between East and West Germany, designed to keep citizens on either side from crossing, has been recreated as a green belt, a unique nature reserve home to hundreds of endangered species.
And anti-poacher pooches in India are hot on the trail of the tough-to-track-down bad guys. “Sniffer dogs are emerging as the secret weapon of Indian wildlife authorities,” says Nitin Desai, director at Wildlife Protection Society of India in a story from Reasons to Be Cheerful. “When there are no eyewitnesses, dogs find evidence that no human eye can detect.” Since 2008, WWF-India (the World Wide Fund for Nature-India) has trained more than 120 sniffer dog squads, each comprising a dog and two handlers, and deployed them across 22 states to assist forest departments in detecting poaching and wildlife trafficking. The squads have helped seize tiger skins, pangolin scales, ivory, and live animals, while also deterring poachers in vulnerable landscapes. Those are some pawsitively powerful poacher-busting pooches!
Positively,
Dot
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