Wildlife Crossings Will Save Wolves Like OR-93
This month marks one year since the remarkable wolf known as OR-93 was struck and killed by a vehicle. OR-93 made international headlines when he traveled from Mt. Hood to just north of Los Angeles.
His tragic death highlights the importance of a recently passed California law designed to prevent wildlife and vehicle collisions — and the fact that still more needs to be done. While the new law is called the Safe Roads and Wildlife Protection Act, I like to think of it as the “OR-93 Memorial Act.”
As I consider OR-93’s travels in our beautiful state, I have this image in my mind: A silvery gray wolf is covering ground quickly. Long legs effortlessly propel him across rugged chapparal painted with blue-tinged sagebrush and into valleys bursting with blood-orange hued poppies. They carry him across sun-drenched agricultural plains.
Ascending grass-covered foothills, the wolf disappears into the shadows of mountains cloaked in dense forests. He stops at each road, cautiously observing traffic. He finds a way across, through a creek or culvert beneath the freeway, or using a wildlife crossing overpass that’s been specially built above the freeway. The wolf is safe.
That’s how I like to imagine OR-93’s return journey after he left the central coast. Maybe it’s what could have been.
Who was this wolf, and how can we protect other wolves and wildlife from vehicles? OR-93 was born into the White River pack on the reservation lands of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs in 2019, southeast of Oregon’s Mt. Hood. When he was about a year old, he was captured and radio-collared by Tribal biologists. Several months later, OR-93 left his family behind to seek a mate and territory of his own, quickly making his way south.
In February 2021, he slipped across the border into California and kept on going, making his way south through Yosemite and the Central Valley. By the first week of April, he was in Monterey and San Luis Obispo counties, reaching the coast. OR-93 reached Highway 99 and crossed it. He reached Interstate 5 and crossed it. He reached Highway 101 and crossed it. That’s three of California’s busiest roadways traversed — no easy task without wildlife passages.
His radio collar stopped working shortly after that. A trail camera shot video of him in Kern County in May. In September a cell-phone video caught him trotting along a two-lane road in a national forest only 80 miles north of Los Angeles.
In early November, I drove from my home in the San Francisco Bay area to the Lockwood Valley in Ventura County, where OR-93 had last been seen. Joined by two colleagues, I went to the location where the video had been taken, hoping to find tracks. We hiked for hours, searching the neighboring Chumash Wilderness. I returned home after two days, finding no signs of him. Three days later, OR-93 was found dead along a frontage road next to Interstate 5, in southwestern Kern County near the town of Lebec. I wept when I heard the news.
OR-93 was the first known wild wolf reported in Monterey or Ventura counties in at least 200 years. I believe he had given up looking for a mate and decided to retrace his steps, back to Northern California.
On Sept. 30 of this year, exactly one year to the day that OR-93 was filmed in Ventura County, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 2344, or the Safe Roads and Wildlife Protection Act, into law. It was sponsored by the Center for Biological Diversity, where I work, and the Wildlands Network, and paves the way for more wildlife crossings and road improvements across the state.
The new law directs state agencies to develop a projects list for places where wildlife-passage features could reduce vehicle collisions with wildlife and enhance connectivity. These passages can reduce collisions by up to 98% while facilitating the movement of animals like mountain lions, elk, deer and wolves.
These are crucial and inspiring protections, and had they been implemented sooner, they may have saved OR-93’s life. And more can be done to protect both wildlife and people. California should put more funding towards wildlife passages to make roads safer for wildlife and people. Cities and counties, which are not subject to the state bill, should implement similar ordinances to protect our state’s cherished wildlife.
In the coming decades, more wolves are bound to return to California. Wildlife passages are an invaluable way to do right by them, and by the memory of OR-93.
Amaroq Weiss is the senior wolf advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity.
