glider pole

Over the last decade we have seen the arrival of many devices designed to help our fauna cross main roads safely. There have been ropes, ladders and tunnels, and now there is the glider pole,a telegraph pole without wires which gliders, our small arboreal marsupials, use as a launching pad to cross the road.

Apparently when these first appeared they caused some bemusement, particularly since they were so erratically placed. You might find a single pole in one spot and whole clump of them in another. One observer suggested that they were an attempt to communicate with aliens.

The explanation is more mundane.  In some places there are enough trees near the road to make one pole precisely placed sufficient to complete the chain. In other places a number of them are needed. The poles vary in height but the average is about 20 metres.

The good news is that they seem to be working.

ZG: 7

This one is a good addition to our strategies for preventing Australian fauna from becoming road kill.