Few individual animals have ever been more important to their species than 2323M — a red wolf, dubbed Airplane Ears by advocates for his prominent extremities, who spent his brief but fruitful life on North Carolina’s Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge.

Red wolves, smaller, rust-tinged cousins to gray wolves, are among the world’s rarest mammals, pushed to the brink of extinction by threats such as habitat loss, indiscriminate killing, and road collisions. By 2019 fewer than 15 were known to survive in the wild. Against that grim backdrop, 2323M offered hope.

Born at a federal site in Florida, he was released in 2021 onto the Alligator River refuge, a swath of coastal plain on North Carolina’s eastern shore. Over the next two years, he and a female known as 2225F raised 11 pups.

Alas, in September 2023, Airplane Ears was killed by a car on US 64, the highway that runs through the refuge. One of the world’s rarest species had lost its most prolific member.

Airplane Ears was an extraordinary animal who suffered a common fate. Around one-fifth of red wolves meet their end on a bumper, many on US 64, a primary route that vacationers take to the Outer Banks, the picturesque chain of barrier islands that line North Carolina’s seaboard. Black bears and white-tailed deer, and even alligators fall victim to collisions that kill animals and result in “significant harm to humans and vehicles,” according to the North Carolina Department of Transportation. Even the occasional alligator blunders onto the highway.

While US 64’s roadkill rates are exceptional, it’s far from the only perilous highway in the United States, where animal crashes annually cost society more than $10 billion in hospital bills, vehicle repairs, and other expenses. For species from Florida panthers to California tiger salamanders to North Carolina’s red wolves, collisions pose an extinction-level threat.

After 2323M perished, a coalition of conservation groups began pushing the North Carolina Department of Transportation to retrofit the highway with fences and underpasses — essentially spacious tunnels that would allow red wolves and other animals to slink safely beneath US 64. “We knew that something had to be done, quick,” says Ron Sutherland, chief scientist at the Wildlands Network, a conservation group that focuses on habitat connectivity throughout North America. Otherwise, wild red wolves could be lost.

Drumming up millions of dollars for wildlife crossings has always been a tall order. In December, however, North Carolina received $25 million from the US Department of Transportation to build underpasses on Highway 64. Combined with $4 million that Wildlands Network and the Center for Biological Diversity raised in donations, as well as state funds, it was enough to make a stretch of Highway 64 safe for wolves. “It felt really good to know that something had gone right for the red wolf, for once,” Sutherland says.

That the transportation department invested in animal underpasses may come as a surprise — its primary mission, after all, is to facilitate human movements, not the peregrinations of wolves and deer. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), however, contained an initiative called the Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program, which allotted $350 million in competitive grants for animal passage, the largest pot of federal funding ever earmarked for the cause. In addition to North Carolina’s red-wolf crossings, the program has awarded grants for nearly three dozen projects — some of which will aid imperiled species such as ocelots and desert tortoises, many more that will seek to avert dangerous crashes with large mammals like deer, elk, and moose.

“This is not ornamental,” Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden’s transportation secretary, told Vox of the wildlife crossings program in an interview earlier this year. “This is something that ties into the very core of our mission, which is to secure the safety of the American traveling public.”

Unfortunately for the red wolf and many other species, President Donald Trump’s administration may not agree.

The future of the wildlife crossings program, and many similar initiatives that the BIL supports, is uncertain. Shortly after taking office, Trump suspended the disbursement of BIL funds, leaving hundreds of Biden-era initiatives........

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