The Belgian town of Uccle apparently has a soft spot for squirrels, or at least it’s tired of scraping them off the roadways when they try to cross busy streets.
The town is installing three ‘bridges’ between a town park and the Plateau Avijl at three separate points; the bridges are essentially stretches of fabric netting connecting trees on both sides of the street, way above human height. The squirrels hopefully, will scamper across the nets rather than chancing traffic. The bridges cost very little but installation costs will run to a few thousand Euros for the crews that need to climb and install them.
Will the squirrels use the bridge? A spokesperson for Brussels Environment is hopeful: “We don’t have cameras hanging by the bridge in Jette (another site where a bridge was installed)… “They are not easy to place there and it also takes quite a lot of time to read the images. So we cannot put an exact number on the number of animals that pass. At the Groenendaal ecoduct in the Sonian Forest, a much larger investment, there are cameras, but based on the reduced number of dead squirrels, we can say that the bridge in Jette is also a success.”
