New Brunswick is taking an important step toward improving both wildlife conservation and public safety with a $6.1-million wildlife fencing and crossing project on Route 8 between the Bartibog and Tabusintac rivers.
According to the Government of New Brunswick, the project is being constructed in an area identified as a hot spot for moose-vehicle collisions. The first phase includes the construction of two wildlife crossing corridors underneath the highway. The crossings are being built using prefabricated concrete segments and are large enough to accommodate animals such as deer and moose. The second phase will involve installing fencing designed to guide wildlife toward these crossings and away from traffic.
This is the kind of project that deserves attention because it addresses two issues at the same time: protecting people travelling on New Brunswick highways and providing wildlife with safer opportunities to move through their natural landscape.
Moose-vehicle collisions are especially dangerous because of the enormous size of these animals. When a moose enters a highway, the consequences can be devastating for both the animal and the people travelling in a vehicle. Preventing even some of these collisions can potentially save wildlife while also reducing the possibility of serious injuries and fatalities.
But there is a much larger conservation issue involved here as well.
Wildlife needs to move.
Animals travel through the landscape looking for food, water, shelter, mates and places to raise their young. Their movements do not follow the roads, property lines or other boundaries that people have created.
When we build a highway through a natural area, we can divide habitat that was once connected. What may appear to us as simply another section of highway can become a major obstacle for wildlife.
Animals are then faced with a difficult choice. They may attempt to cross the road, putting themselves and motorists at risk, or their movement may become restricted.
Wildlife crossings provide another possibility.
Instead of expecting an animal to somehow understand the danger of a highway, we can design infrastructure that recognizes how wildlife naturally moves across the landscape.
That is what makes the Route 8 project particularly interesting.
The crossing structures provide a route underneath the highway, while fencing is intended to direct animals toward those safer passages. If properly designed, maintained and monitored, this approach has the potential to reduce collisions without completely cutting animals off from habitat on the opposite side of the highway.
However, constructing the crossings should not be the end of the project.
The next important step should be monitoring.
We need to know whether wildlife actually uses these structures.
Wildlife cameras could help document which species are using the crossings and how frequently they are travelling through them. Tracks, observations and collision statistics could also provide valuable information.
If moose and deer begin regularly using the crossings and collisions decline in the surrounding area, that would provide valuable evidence about how similar projects could be used elsewhere.
If problems are discovered, we should learn from those as well.
Perhaps animals avoid a particular structure. Maybe wildlife follows the fencing but finds another opening onto the highway. Maybe fencing needs to be extended, repaired or redesigned.
Conservation should be willing to adapt based on what the wildlife itself shows us.
There is also the question of cost.
At $6.1 million, this represents a significant investment of public money. That does not automatically make the project too expensive, particularly when we are talking about protecting human life and wildlife, but it does mean that the results should be measured.
New Brunswickers should eventually be able to see whether the project achieved what it was designed to accomplish.
How many animals are using the crossings?
Which species are using them?
Have wildlife-vehicle collisions decreased?
Is the fencing successfully directing animals toward the crossings?
How much maintenance is required?
What can be improved when the next crossing is constructed?
Those answers could make this project valuable far beyond this particular section of Route 8.
New Brunswick has an extensive road network travelling through forests, wetlands and wildlife habitat. Route 8 is certainly not the only place where animals and vehicles come into conflict.
If these crossings prove successful, I believe we should seriously examine other areas of the province where wildlife collisions repeatedly occur and determine whether similar measures could help.
That does not necessarily mean building expensive crossings everywhere. Different locations may require different solutions. In some areas, fencing may be appropriate. Other areas might benefit from crossing structures, improved warning systems, vegetation management or other mitigation measures.
The important thing is that decisions should be guided by collision information, wildlife movement research and an understanding of the surrounding habitat.
We also cannot allow wildlife crossings to become a substitute for habitat conservation.
A tunnel underneath a highway can help an animal reach the other side, but there still needs to be somewhere for that animal to go.
If the forest, wetland or other habitat surrounding a crossing disappears, the crossing itself loses much of its ecological purpose.
That is why habitat connectivity needs to be considered as part of conservation planning.
Protecting individual pieces of land is important, but wildlife also needs connections between those areas. Forest corridors, waterways, wetlands and other natural features can allow animals to move across larger landscapes.
Transportation planning and conservation planning therefore need to work together.
There is also a responsibility for motorists.
Even with wildlife fencing and crossings, drivers travelling through areas with large wildlife populations need to remain alert. Wildlife infrastructure can reduce risk, but it cannot completely eliminate the possibility of an animal entering a roadway.
Ultimately, I see the Route 8 project as an opportunity.
It is an opportunity to make a dangerous section of highway safer.
It is an opportunity to protect moose, deer and other wildlife.
It is an opportunity to maintain some of the natural movement that highways can interrupt.
And perhaps most importantly, it is an opportunity for New Brunswick to learn how transportation infrastructure and wildlife conservation can work together.
We built the highways.
Wildlife is simply trying to move through the landscape it depends upon.
The responsibility therefore falls on us to find practical ways to reduce the conflicts our infrastructure creates.
The two crossings being constructed on Route 8 will not solve every wildlife-vehicle collision problem in New Brunswick. They will not replace habitat protection, and they will not remove every risk from our highways.
But they can be part of something larger.
If we monitor this project, learn from it and apply those lessons elsewhere when the evidence supports doing so, these crossings could represent more than two structures underneath Route 8.
They could help move New Brunswick toward a transportation system that recognizes that roads and wildlife habitat exist on the same landscape — and that with thoughtful planning, we can do a better job of protecting both the people travelling across our province and the wildlife that calls it home.
Keith Dennis Brewer
Nature and Wildlife Advocate
Source: Government of New Brunswick, Department of Transportation and Infrastructure — Route 8 wildlife crossing project underway, 2026.
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