Inadvertent damage caused by walls between USA and Mexico...

It was a balmy day in Del Rio, a Texas border town about 170 miles west of San Antonio, when a citizen conservationist looking for wildlife stumbled upon a striking rust and orange caterpillar with fleshy horn-like protrusions that are meant to scare predators.

Eventually, this larva would become the pipevine swallowtail, an eye-catching butterfly that features black, blue, white and orange hues and feeds on a number of native plants, including milkweed.

The glimpse of the caterpillar helped boost the pollinator count in the richly biodiverse region, where volunteers and scientists are increasingly trying to gauge whether federal efforts to build migrant barriers could be harming the natural life.

Most worrying to the environmentalists is the slabs that were built during the first Trump administration. Early research has shown that the walls can stop or deter the migration of pivotal pollinators and that is risky, conservationists caution.

The desert landscape that stretches across southern California, New Mexico, Texas, Arizona and northern Mexico is home to an array of pollinators, including moths, flies, bats, hummingbirds and terrestrial seed dispersers such as desert tortoises.

Among the challenges for native pollinators are habitat destruction and the walls themselves, which sometimes prevent flying insects from crossing.

Plans by the Trump administration for miles of new barriers, and most notably miles of harsh stadium lighting that would confuse all sorts of wildlife, could worsen the situation, environmentalists warn.

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