Animal life can damage our infrastructure—and even cause rail incidents—but ingenious employees at SNCF Réseau and Gares & Connexions are finding natural countermeasures to these threats. Solutions include relocating badgers to new burrows, installing birdhouses for caterpillar-eating titmice, and using falcons to keep Paris-Lyon station clean. Learn more.

In railway stations, pigeons can quickly become a nuisance. Their droppings are not only unsanitary, but can cause long-term damage to façades and infrastructure. So our cleaning teams have adopted a creative deterrence strategy to keep them away from our facilities. A falconer makes regular night-time visits to identify areas favoured by pigeons and send in a trained raptor. Result: the panicked pigeons scatter—and are discouraged from making their home in the station.

Solution: in Eastern France, where badgers threaten the integrity of our earthworks, SNCF Réseau is experimenting with offering the animals a new home.

Working with the Alsace chapter of France’s Bird Protection League, our employees have built an artificial burrow near a natural one. They hope that the badgers will move permanently to this new habitat, well away from the railway embankment. Badgers are formidable diggers, and they love the loose, well-drained soil and abundant plant life typical of rail infrastructure. The cavities they create in and around our earthworks can collapse, and the material they dig out of their burrows can pile up on embankments and slide onto and around the tracks. These risks can cause collisions and—in extreme cases—even derailments.

For SNCF Réseau employees who work along railway lines, processionary caterpillars can be a nightmare. Contact with them causes allergic reactions—often so severe that our people need to take sick leave. In Lorraine, our Infrapôle track maintenance and rail safety unit is fighting this six-legged threat with an eco-friendly solution: the titmouse. In an area south-east of Nancy, workers have installed 23 birdhouses for this pint-sized grey predator, which is especially fond of processionary caterpillars.