While national security is a pretty big trump card, more than a few wildlife specialists are distressed that people-resistant fences along the Mexican border can impose their most effective stopping on wildlife. In the Arizona Daily Star reporter Brady McCombs describes one Colorado River border restoration project that seems to please both camps. The result will be less underbrush so that border patrols can watch for new two-legged migrants, smugglers, or others, and the resulting riparian habitat also ought to revive the area’s native wildlife and vegetation, it says here.

It’s somewhat a feel-good story up top, but McCombs gets into the environmental downsides of some of the more aggressive fencing strategems going up in the area. One idea that may please everybody, he reports, is “virtual fences” of electronic and optical monitors that let wildlife through unhindered.

See Also: An earlier McCombs story on fences and the peril they pose to plans for a protected, Mexican-US jaguar (that’s the cat, not the car) border refuge. This also has been covered by the AP’s Arthur H. Rotstein, here. For even more, check a High Country News yarn on the big cats by Morgan Heim;

-CP

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