Border wildlife cameras show animals facing 'completely unprecedented' barrier

While contractors build a 30-foot-tall steel border wall southeast of Tucson, wildlife advocates are racing to document where animals cross the border most often and hoping federal officials will consider taking down sections of wall that block those corridors. When the new wall projects are finished in Cochise County, they will seal off nearly 75 miles of the border to animals larger than a rabbit, despite that area being the home or migratory route of mountain lions, deer, bear and numerous other species. Where sections of the new wall are in place, wildlife advocates already have seen javelina, bobcats, and other animals spend hours struggling fruitlessly to find a way through the wall. To identify the corridors most used by wildlife, the Wildlands Network in January set up scores of motion-activated wildlife cameras in the San Bernardino Valley in southeastern Cochise County, where contractors already built some 15 miles of new wall. Meanwhile, the Sky Island Alliance is running a similar camera project east of Nogales in the San Rafael Valley and the nearby mountains, where Customs and Border Protection officials are trying, so far unsuccessfully, to obtain funding for a wall...MORE