Welcome back.

Before we get into it: This weekend is the Great Backyard Bird Count. This is a huge citizen science project where people all over the world help scientists better understand global bird populations. As the name suggests, you can literally participate from your backyard. Bird nerds unite!

Okay, let’s get to what we’re all here for, which is another issue of Life Finds A Way! These are normally paywalled, but today’s issue is available to everyone, yay!

We have our first returning guest writer, Syris Valentine (read their first piece with us about circadian rhythms/capitalism here), this week writing about what happens when you try to wall out migration, a biological imperative that species from salmon to jaguars to humans rely on for survival.

While border walls claim to stop human migration (spoiler: they don’t), they are devastatingly effective at blocking wildlife. And as climate change forces both animals and people to move further in search of resources, those walls will determine who survives and who doesn’t.

Go count some birds,

— Willow

Every winter, hundreds of bald eagles gather on the northeast arm of Lake Coeur d’Alene in the Idaho Panhandle to gorge on a mobile buffet of parading salmon as they return to spawn.

Witnessing those birds of prey flock, surf thermals, plunge toward the lake, rip chinook salmon from the water, and glide into the branches of a ponderosa pine feels almost sacred—even with the stench of fouling fish rising from the banks to suffuse the air. Any time I’ve had the privilege of visiting Higgins Point, the lakeside vantage where wildlife lovers congregate to admire the event, I feel bathed in reverence for weeks afterward.

Part of the hallowedness owes to the fact that both salmon and eagle traverse hundreds, if not thousands, of miles to converge at the lake.

While the bald eagles confront few difficulties as they cross the US-Canada border, twice, on their way from Alaska, through British Columbia, and across either Alberta or Washington; the chinook face more notable challenges: navigating the many dams that channel energy from the Spokane and Columbia rivers, into which their destination lake flows.

Most of those dams have been outfitted with salmon ladders that ensure at least some of the fish survive the run to spawn. Yet, dams like those faced by Coeur d’Alene chinook have nonetheless inflicted lasting damage on salmon populations throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Because of their harms, the region’s river-plugs have long been the object of campaigns by conservationists, environmental activists, and Indigenous peoples. But salmon are far from the only animals that run up against barriers as they migrate. A growing array of species are having their movements impeded by an ecological threat proliferating around the world: border walls.

The steel pillars lining the US border with Mexico is, perhaps, the most nefarious example.

If judged by its stated objective—to keep out people seeking the same liberties and opportunities that have attracted people to America since it was still a British colony—the southern wall is a failure and a disastrous waste of taxpayer dollars.

“You can't help but see how futile it is when you're down at the wall and you watch someone throw a rope and climb over it,” said Eamon Harrity, wildlife program manager with the nonprofit Sky Island Alliance. “Border Control will officially tell you that the wall buys them 10 to 15 minutes, because that's how long it takes someone to get over it. They don't even say the wall stops people.”

But Harrity has learned, through his work leading the organization’s studies into the wall’s impact on wildlife, that it is incredibly effective at blocking animals.

From August 2022 to July 2024, Sky Island Alliance maintained a network of 36 camera traps surveilling a section of the steel barrier separating Arizona from Sonora, Mexico to study how wildlife reacted to the wall when they encountered it. In late 2024, they published a paper detailing what the cameras saw.

Of more than 9,000 animals that their camera traps spotted in the vicinity of the barrier on the border of Arizona and Sonora, fewer than 2,000 were seen to successfully cross the border. Most of those were smaller species like foxes, bobcats, and coyotes.

But larger animals like black bears, mule deer, white-tailed deer, and wild turkey never managed to make their way through. Mountain lions also struggled to cross with only a few smaller females managing to wriggle through some of the small wildlife passages that have been occasionally cut into the wall.

The camera traps never captured video of the most iconic animal affected by Arizona’s wall, the jaguar, but what they saw makes it quite clear that the big cats would never be able to cross.

Whatever the animal, migration is essential to survival. It’s how populations acquire the resources they need, avoid genetic bottlenecks, and steer clear of known dangers.

“Animals need to move to find food, to find water, to find a safe place to sleep, to find a mate, to reproduce,” Harrity said. “Some animals move just a couple inches in their life. Some animals move hundreds of kilometers a year. Some animals move tens of thousands of kilometers per year.”

The bigger the animal, the more they tend to move.

Jaguars, the biggest cats found across the Americas, roam wide ranges. One 2016 study showed that a single male jaguar will migrate across a territory that can span 55 square miles up to 180 square miles or, in rare cases, more. Naturally, then, the species spreads far to support a large population.

When they were at their most dominant, jaguars could be found anywhere from northern Argentina to the southern United States. They still today occupy most of that ancestral range, except for local extinctions within the borders of Uruguay, El Salvador, and, until recently, the United States.

Four decades after hunters rifled down the last jaguar in the American Southwest in 1963, a few cats were spotted in Arizona after making the border crossing before a wall was planned for that line in the sand. But as Trump's Department of Homeland Security drives yet more piles into fresh-poured concrete to erect pillar after pillar of 30-foot steel, the jaguar’s return is at risk.

One of the highest priority areas for Trump’s latest border plans bisects Arizona’s San Rafael Valley, a grassland bowl flanked by the Huachuca Mountains to the east and the Patagonia Mountains to the west. Erick Meza, the borderlands program coordinator for the Sierra Club’s Arizona chapter, called the valley “one of the best kept secrets in Arizona.”

“It’s a very unique ecosystem,” Meza said. “If you are there and look around, it's not going to look like what people's idea of Arizona is.”

Beyond the valley’s own startling differences from its surroundings, the sky islands it sits between—isolated mountain ranges that seem to suddenly jut from the desert floor—themselves offer sights uncommon in Arizona.

“You can be in the low desert and go to the top of the mountain in a one hour drive,” he said, “and then all of a sudden, it's like you were in Canada.”

The uniqueness of the San Rafael Valley makes it a hot spot for biodiversity as well as a wildlife corridor, a natural highway, for highly migratory species like jaguars and black bears.

In fact, it is one of the only areas left on the continent where those two apex predators may encounter each other. But ongoing construction of a fresh segment of a border wall through the valley will mean that the bears can no longer reach the southern extent of their range in Sonora—where they are endangered—and the jaguars can no longer reach the northern extent of their range—where they are equally endangered.

The Trump Administration is not concerned with further jeopardizing the survival of local populations of either species on either side of the border, nor does it seem to be concerned with the actual security of the border in the valley.

Both Meza and Harrity say that human crossings in the San Rafael Valley are rare, if they happen at all, because it’s difficult to access and lies far from highways on Mexico’s side of the frontier. Given the ease with which committed migrants and border coyotes can get around, over, or through the wall with ropes, ladders, buzz saws, or acetylene torches, there’s little reason for them to venture into the valley.

But the Department of Homeland Security is demolishing a wide stretch of that unique ecosystem even as I write this, and on either end of the valley, the destruction will prove to be, in a very raw sense of the word, epic.

“Some of the areas are so remote and the terrain is so rough,” Meza said, “they're going to have to use a ton of dynamite.”

“They basically have to cut half a mountain down to put the wall there,” said Harrity.

And there’s no shame in this, Meza added: “This is something they’re actually really proud of.” Border Patrol has gone so far as posting multiple videos to social media glamorizing their destruction of public lands and national monuments.

But the fact that this segment of the wall cuts right through what the US Fish and Wildlife Service has designated as critical habitat for jaguars is of little concern to a homeland security department empowered by Section 102 of the 2005 Real ID Act to disregard all federal environmental regulations in its pursuit of building border barriers.

Erecting walls along map-drawn lines that interrupt wildlife habitat while doing little to impede migrant crossing is not a problem restricted to the US.

Since the terror attacks of 9-11, border wall construction has proliferated around the world with around 19,000 miles worth of walls across Europe and Asia alone. This is having a predictably devastating impact on wildlife across the continent. Among other impacts, as Slovenia installs hundreds of kilometers of razor wire along its border with Croatia, wolves in the Central European nation could be driven to extinction.

“Animals don’t know the concept of borders,” Meza said. “For them it’s all one shared landscape, driven by resources.”

As climate change shifts the way resources are distributed—where water can be found, where herbivores can find plants to eat, where predators can find prey, and where temperatures are tolerable—animals will be driven to migrate even further than normal. Border walls could mean they can’t reach the new habitats that would ensure their survival. In this fast changing world, humans can learn something from the geopolitical ignorance of wildlife.

For them, freedom of movement is natural. They don’t even need to think about it. Elephants will march through hotels erected in the middle of migratory paths that their matriarchs have guided them across for generations.

We, too, have long understood the fundamental importance of movement to the human and animal spirit. A dozen nations in Europe have gone so far as to legally protect some version of a “right to roam.”

In a paper published early last year, Noah Smith-Drelich, an assistant professor of law at Illinois Institute of Technology, traced the history of free movement through the legal traditions of England and America from the 1215 Magna Carta to the present day to show that it’s been a right seen as so fundamental that the nation’s founders hardly felt the need to spell it explicitly in the Constitution.

In fact, “restrictions on immigration,” Smith-Drelich said, “actually comes up in the Declaration of Independence.”

“This idea of the open road, of being able to go where you want,” he said, “there is something quintessentially American about that.” It’s hard to imagine beatniks like Jack Kerouac without that American impulse to take to highways and travel across the vast tracts that comprise this country.

But even before American colonies were established, before the Magna Carta was drafted, uninhibited movement and migration was central to the evolution of the human animal and of human civilizations. Even just a cursory glance at a map of the native lands occupied by the First Nations of North America shows that, in the past, borders were far more permeable than we understand them to be today.

And as the climate crisis continues to disrupt weather patterns, induce drought and deluge, drive infernos and famines, and stir up economic and political instability around the world, it will become increasingly imperative for every nation around the world to take a hard look at how we think about borders, immigration, and international aid.

The communities that straddle the borderlands understand just as well as the wildlife does that these cartographic artifacts have no basis in reality.

“When you talk to folks who live and work along the border,” Harrity said, “there are relationships that span the border.”

Ranchers in Arizona, he said, often have the cellphone numbers of their Sonoran neighbors and when the occasional cow wanders too far north or south and unknowingly finds itself suddenly in another country, the ranchers will call each other up and help get the cattle back where they’re meant to be. “It's just this line, and people know that they're just people, and they've existed and collaborated for generations.”

The trouble is getting others with no experience of realities at the border to understand that.

“There's a little bit of a truism tossed about down here,” said Harrity. “The farther away from the border you are, the scarier it is.”

Lessening the fear of the border—and of immigrants and foreigners—is a critical step to finding ways to promote the freedom movement that human beings deserve, a right enshrined in Article 13 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This fight for human rights, and the rights of all life, may seem somewhere between utopian and too far-distant to matter in a moment of national and international crisis, but the fate of border walls and the way wealthy nations respond to increasing immigration will ultimately determine how many people (and how many animals) die — whether salmon confronting dams, jaguars running into walls, or refugees jumping borders — and how many survive, in the face of the mounting pressures of climate change.