Sandra MacDougall has road kill on her mind a lot lately.

Whether animals have made it safely across Hwy 2 — or not — MacDougall is interested.

Since March, the Red Deer College biology instructor has been investigating whether large animals like deer and moose are using existing bridge underpass sites to avoid traffic on Hwy 2. These are sites that don’t have fencing to guide the animals.

She set up six cameras between Innisfail and Blackfalds.

Each remote camera takes a photo when motion is detected and it records the time, date and outside temperature. Several thousand photos have been taken, with only a small proportion of them being animals. The rest are human activity.

One impressive photo taken in the summer was that of a herd of deer moving through.

“I’ve always been interested in highways and how they fragment habitat,” said MacDougall, while driving in the family station wagon towards one of the monitoring sites.

“People need to move and wildlife need to move. And then when my husband and daughter hit a moose around Bowden, that really brought public safety to the picture, too.”

She said it was lucky her family wasn’t hurt when two moose ambled onto the road in 2006. One vehicle ahead struck and killed the first moose. The MacDougall car sideswiped the other animal, which bounced off and took off.

Wildlife collisions peak at two times of the year, in June and July and again during mating season in November. And they occur most often during low-light conditions, particularly after dusk and just before dawn.

“Deer are involved in over 80 per cent of the collisions,” said MacDougall. “They’re naturally more active . . . and the deer populations are doing very, very well.”

In Alberta, collisions with animals have increased nearly 100 per cent over an 11-year period, nearly 12,000 in 2003 from about 6,000 in 1992. On average, five people are killed per year involving animals. The majority of all collisions with animals happen on rural two-lane roads.

This latest study along Hwy 2 isn’t without problems.

One camera was stolen, others have been vandalized.

Similar cameras are being used for the Banff wildlife crossings project.

That Parks Canada project is also monitoring animal tracks within beds of raked dirt.

MacDougall soon found out she couldn’t do the same here.

“I had lots of quad tracks,” she said.

MacDougall’s project has several partners, including Alberta Transportation and the Alberta Association of Colleges and Technical Institutes, which are providing financing. Alberta Highway Services passes on carcass counts to MacDougall.

College student Leanne Ejack, 18, has been hired to monitor the cameras and to help compile data.

“I’m in pre-veterinary medicine and now I’m wondering if I actually want to do it,” Ejack said. “I know I want to do something in biology.”

MacDougall, 39, was initially interested in the outdoors and management issues around wildlife before she got into the field. A University of Calgary researcher later sent her to Nahanni National Park Reserve in the Northwest Territories to study bear habitats and food habit. She analyzed a great deal of bear scat — a “cool way of saying, ‘bear poop.’ ”

MacDougall, a 2005 recipient of the Red Deer College Award of Excellence, continues to study bears.

She is now investigating bear-human interactions on the Chilkoot trail, which begins near Skagway, Alaska, and ends near the headwaters of the Yukon River in B.C. Parks Canada and the Alaskan National Park Service have enlisted her.

“I’ve been doing (research) off and on since 1994, except for stops to have kids,” said MacDougall.

And now her children — aged six, eight and 10 — are helping out with bridge underpass monitoring project.

“The kids are always pointing out road kill to me,” said MacDougall, chuckling.

A full year of monitoring will be done at each bridge site.

The study should wrap up by next summer.

MacDougall said the data has three purposes: to evaluate whether these bridge designs facilitate wildlife movement; to provide pre-treatment data should any animal-vehicle collision countermeasures be applied at these sites; and to yield student research projects at Red Deer College.

MacDougall said the information should be helpful as the Hwy 2 corridor expands.

In June, a strategies workshop was held in Calgary on reducing animal-vehicle collisions on Alberta roads. Members of the trucking industry, government officials and wildlife professionals came together to explore the latest research findings and to share experiences. MacDougall said some of the discussions centred on the societal costs of such collisions when people are injured or killed.

MacDougall, along with Tony Clevenger and Adam Ford of the Western Transportation Institute, submitted a draft report in November to Alberta Transportation regarding the workshop and its discussions. A number of recommendations were also made.

“You need to integrate concerns for wildlife when planning the roads. It’s going to keep everybody safer.”

Contact Laura Tester at ltester@reddeeradvocate.com