This Joshua Tree highway keeps killing wildlife. Enter the poop-hunting dogs

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Set us as preferred JOSHUA TREE, Calif. — Rescue dogs Merlin and Siska are readying for an important mission out in the Mojave Desert: find animal poop.As the fall brings cooler temperatures, the pups will trot among the Joshua trees wearing orange vests, “doggles” to shield their eyes from the sun and booties to protect them from the prickly cholla cacti.As wildlife biologist Christina Aiello searches for droppings of bighorn sheep, which are relatively abundant, the dog duo from Rogue Detection Teams will sniff out harder-to-find bobcat and mountain lion scat.Here, conservationists are planning to build two wildlife crossings over State Route 62, which connects Los Angeles and Joshua Tree National Park and is the site of hundreds of collisions between cars and wildlife every year.

Dead sheep and bears strewn along the pavement have disturbed local residents for years, but ecologists fear the road may also cause a much slower and quieter die-off, with mountain lions inbreeding as they are cut off from other lions.As California works to build dozens more crossings like these around the state, researchers are hoping their animal poop surveys will show that the benefits of these crossings extend hundreds of miles beyond the roadway.“The isolation, long-term, of those populations could mean that those wildlife species aren’t viable into the future,” Aiello, a biologist with Wildlands Network, said.

“You can lose those populations even though you have a large protected space,” like Joshua Tree.Traditional surveys of carcasses along roadways have shown that crossings do reduce wildlife collisions.

Now the researchers working along SR 62 plan to go a step further by analyzing the location and DNA of dozens of poop samples for each species, before the crossings are built and after.That will enable the scientists ...