Wyoming Math: Watch 47 Pronghorn Cross an Overpass in 90 Seconds
I love pronghorn and I love math so I have no idea how this escaped me for so long. Wait. OK, so maybe I don't love math, but I do love pronghorn. There's a video that is math that could only happen in Wyoming. It's 47 pronghorn crossing an overpass in 90 seconds.
Wyoming Game and Fish shared this video a couple years ago showing one of the brilliant highway wildlife overpasses. It's a genius implementation of the strategy to lessen wildlife and vehicle collisions and provide a safer migration route for pronghorn and other wildlife.
Here's where we get to the math part. 47 pronghorn crossing an overpass in 90 seconds means there's one coming over every 1.914 seconds approximately. Thanks to Game and Fish, you can count them yourself.
Let's do some more addition and multiplication. According to my eyes, that super wide overpass could allow for another 50 pronghorn to cross per second. If that were to happen (and please share video if you ever see this occur), it would equal a grand total of 2,350 pronghorn crossing the overpass in 90 seconds.
That would be...AMAZING.
This is all part of the ongoing Wyoming Wildlife Crossing initiative. They estimated that there are over 6,000 vehicle collisions with big game every year and this is an effort to greatly lessen that. The Nature Conservancy is having another summit this year to discuss more possibilities.
Maybe the best Wyoming wildlife math of all would be 0 wildlife/vehicle collisions to report. That would equal awesome.