Pacific Highway

• Next time you’re road-tripping along the east coast, keep an eye out for a little-known Aussie invention piercing the skyline: glide poles.
• For Australia’s gliding possums, or gliders, they’re the next best thing since tall trees.
• These tall timber structures, with timber cross arms near the top, give gliders a way to cross big roads.

Biomimicry with wooden poles

• The glide poles would act as substitutes for tall trees, so it was a very simple and elegant form of what’s known as “biomimicry”.
• Ross directed the placement of glide poles on either side of a powerline easement at Bomaderry Creek near Nowra in southern New South Wales.
• More than ten years later, a series of successful trials at Mackay and Compton Road in Brisbane demonstrated gliders would readily use glide poles.
• Since then, glide poles have become a fixture of upgrades along the Hume Highway in Victoria, the Pacific Highway in NSW and the Bruce Highway in Queensland.

Do the poles reconnect glider populations?

• Squirrel gliders, sugar gliders and feathertail gliders have been recorded using glide poles to cross roads at several locations.
• Mahogany gliders, yellow-bellied gliders and southern greater gliders have also been recorded using glide poles.

Celebrating some of Australia’s most iconic wildlife crossings

• Glide poles are one of many structures designed to provide safe road crossing opportunities for wildlife.
• My new book combines an exploration of the how, when, where and why wildlife crossings evolved in eastern Australia with a travel guide to 57 of its most iconic sites.

The road ahead

• Carving up the landscape for road networks has been particularly bad for wildlife, with many populations becoming increasingly fragmented and increasingly isolated.
• Engineers and ecologists have come together over recent years to find new ways to support the safe passage of animals from one side of the road to another.
• Certainly worth a nod when you pass by on your next great Aussie road trip.