Chapter 6 - The Monkton Wildlife Crossing and the Blue-Spotted Salamander: Vermont’s First Amphibian Crossing Tunnels

Summary

Monkton Road is an approximately 10-mile stretch of road in Northwest Vermont, about 20 miles south of Burlington. For decades, it was a lightly traveled, local road, and traffic was not much of a concern for people or wildlife. In fact, Monkton Road was actually a rural dirt road for over a century until increased development prompted the need to pave the road. As Vermont's population grew, so did the number of vehicles on this road, also in part because GPS devices offered the route as a shortcut to Burlington. Soon, the rate of annual average daily traffic on the road reached between 2,000 and 3,000 vehicles, which became a threat to local amphibian populations who must cross this road every spring in order to breed.

Or, as Chris Slesar, environmental resources coordinator at the Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans), put it more empathetically, 2,000–3,000 vehicles a day “is not a terribly busy road by US standards. However, it is unquestionably and significantly busy if your lifecycle requires you to crawl slowly across the road on your belly in the dark, sans reflective apparel, at least twice a year.” That is, this relatively short section of Monkton Road, just under a mile long, bisects two important pieces of amphibian habitat. Monkton Road runs directly between upland and wetland habitats, which means amphibians must cross this road to breed during their spring migration.

For many years, a greater number of amphibians were being reproduced than were being killed on this stretch of road. More recently, however, increased traffic was claiming the lives of about 50 percent of amphibians who tried to cross this section of the road during their spring migration. Groups of concerned citizens and local researchers would gather at night to help move these amphibians across the road, attempting “nocturnal bucket-brigade rescues for the amphibians,” which was limited in its success and also put people at risk. In 2005, it became clear that this grassroots method, in which citizens manually carried these amphibians across the road, was not sustainable in the long term.