I damn near had a deer come through my windshield tonight.
I was driving down a back road in Exurbia, around 5 of 11:00. As another car came toward me around a curve, I glanced at it, dropped my high beams, looked back straight ahead –
And saw a deer RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY CAR!! It was skittering out rom the underbrush to my right, headed for the swamp across the road.
I rammed the brake pedal to the floor as the deer bolted by. There was a light tap as the left corner of my bumper grazed its leg. It must have been unharmed because a look in the rearview mirror as my car halted, a second later, showed… nothing. No deer. Gone. There wasn’t a mark on the car when I got home, either.
But I’m still shaken. A mere foot or two’s difference, and I’d have hit it square on, fast enough to send it over the hood and through the windshield.
I had a very similar experience with a roo the other day, though it’s happened a few times without my having hit one, so the initial psuedo-guilty shock of nearly having whacked a creature and likely hurt/killed yourself at the same time has lessened each time. Still, it always gives one a good shake-up, I’ll agree.
In Alaska, we have a similar problem. Moose have long legs that put their bodies right at the level of the car hood. If you encounter a moose at high speed, it is almost guaranteed that they will share the passenger compartment with the occupants. The moose population fluctuates wildly due to many factors, including predator control (don’t get me started), weather and availability of food. Some years are worse than others, but statewide, we usually have several “moose collisions” each year.
Glad to hear you are well. There was a case here in Topeka a few years back in which a deer was struck by a vehicle going west on a two-way highway, it bounded into the air and came down out of nowhere on the drivers side windshield of an eastbound car. Killed the driver(father) right in front of his wife and little kids. Deer, through no fault of their own, can be very dangerous on the roads.
ACK. I remember seeing those photos when they first hit the Internet. ACK.
I’m the kind of person who tries hard to avoid hitting critters like squirrels – heck, I even brake for frogs – so killing or maiming a deer would upset me horribly. Assuming I myself weren’t hurt so badly as to leave me with no sympathy to spare.
Yeah, the death toll is up this year because of the deep snow. It’s worse than “several”, however. It’s more like 100-200 killed and many more injured every year. The damn things are fearless of anything other than a grizzly, and completely unaware of the danger. They will amble right out into four lanes of speeding cars and seem unable to judge speed or distance.
When I was a young pup of sixteen or so, my mom and I were driving back from the same place, in two separate cars. My mom was in her car, an older, tank-like Mercedes, and I was in a Ford Bronco. My younger sister was in the passenger seat of my vehicle. Mom was about a quarter mile ahead of us, on a very dark 2-lane backroad type highway.
Me: Why does mom keep hitting her brakes? Her brake lights flashed a few seconds ago… there they go again! What the hell’s she stopping for?
SisterArmadillo: I don’t know, you know how she is…
Me: Hrm…
We drive for a few seconds, arrive at the same spot in the road where mom’s brake lights flashed, and I catch a peripheral glimpse of a HUGE whitetail on the side of the road. I look to the side, and in my passenger window all I see is this enormous deer head with a huge rack framed in the window. SisterArmadillo starts shrieking and trying to climb into my lap. We hear two loud thuds as I slam on my brakes and skid to a stop however far down the road it takes to skid to a stop. We hyperventalate for a few seconds, then keep going and catch up with mom who’s stopped a few hundred yards down the road and pull over.
Mom’s side-view mirror was shattered, and there were three large dents down the side of her car where the same maniacal buck(s?) rammed her car, too. I had a dent in the side panel and a piece of the stripping was torn off.
We did go back and look and didn’t find any carcasses, so I guess he had his fun and went on his way.
It’s strange to hear stories of moose and kanagroos getting hit. I guess it’s never occurred to me that those are jumping, big animals that run out into traffic as well. Huh. Sheltered MidWesterner, heh.
Deer stories, both from the first house I lived in:
A road near my old house dug through the tail end of a hill, so there was a, say, 4 foot drop from the hill to the road to one side, and a field on the other. One day, my mom’s driving down this road, and a deer jumped off the hill and landed ON HER HOOD. She was only going 35, but still. Yikes.
The road we lived on was houses and corn fields - not really a lot of field land. My dad’s driving his pickup home with my sister in her baby seat in the passenger side. Suddenly, a HUGE buck jumps out of the corn field an slams into the passenger side of his truck, about 6" behind the door. It left a huge, deep dent in the truck, as well as physically knocking my dad’s truck into the ditch (he’d managed to serve into the other lane to try to avoid the buck). After all this, all the buck did was fall down, stand up, shake his head, and run off into the corn field.
Here’s a moose collision story that was in the paper last year. A man on a motorcycle rounded a corner and came upon what he thought was a lone cow moosed coming up onto the road.
He swerved to the left and thought he was clear, only to see too late the calf that had been hidden by the cow trotting out into his path.
He lays the bike down and slides into the calf, breaking its legs. The calf is in dire straits and is bawling, the bike is lying in the ditch and the rider is picking himself up off the road.
Suddenly (according to the newspaper interview), he hears the sound of rapidly approaching hooves and looks up just in time to be kicked in the head by a furious mama moose. The guy flies about 12 feet into the bushes, and is knocked silly, but luckily his helmet saves his brains from being splattered all over the highway. The moose charges again and he is kicked at again, but manages to evade the still engraged cow and runs for his life.
"I was drivin’ down the road, minding my own mutherfckin’ business…"*
Ha, that story of the guy that put the stunned deer in his back seat, only to have it wake up and trash his car just slays me.
Anybody got a link to the audio?
Glad to hear it was only a brush with nature, ETF.
My mother came home one afternoon from going out to get us drive-through for lunch. She was noticeably shaking when she came in the front door. After some time she managed to explain that she went through a neighborhood, back roads, on the way home (which was pretty well known to have a high population of stray cats…trust me, people knew) and said she had managed to hit a total of 3 cats in 3 blocks before getting back out onto the main roads again to continue home! I was HORRIFIED!! She felt AWFUL!! Must be why I’m now compelled to feed all the stray cats at my office and see that they are “fixed” to avoid more strays. Oy!
i am reminded that sometimes the car doesn’t have to be moving to have a close encounter with a moose.
some moose become… ah… overcome with carnal desires when they spot a…ah… um… particularly attractive vw or volvo. i remember a news report of a man in maine who had difficulty getting to work due to a moose attempting to pitch woo with his vw. finally after a week of unreq. love the moose moved on. hopefully finding true love elsewhere.
About 30 years ago, the Game and Fish department thought that White Sands Missile Range was a lot like Africa and imported a few Oryx. Somehow, they managed to overlook any of its natural predators, and now there are –thousands- on the range.
They’re huge, ornery, and unpredictable. People are much more in danger of hitting an Oryx than any other hazard out here. It didn’t take me long to loose count of how many near misses that I had (although nothing wakes you up more than seeing a charging Oryx coming at you). They’re not called “Oryx” out here, they’re “F***ing Oryx”.
In November I went through a HERD of 8-10 deer at about 70 miles an hour. Jerked the wheel and somehow got in between the lead one and the rest of the herd. Don’t know how I pulled that one off, other than a lot of luck.
When my mom was pregnant with me, my dad hit and killed a ten point buck with his car. Rather than leaving it there, they did what any self respecting southern redneck family would do. They took it home, my mom (pregnant, mind you) strung it up and cleaned it, my dad mounted the antlers, and they had plenty of deer meat to eat for quite a while.
Yeah lots of deer get hit up here… when we lived in a small town that was how we got our meat.
Yes, that’s right. For about 2 years we ate almost solely deer and moose that had been killed after being hit by a vehicle. It happened often enough that we rarely bought meat at the grocery store.
Ok,
After a long deliberation I am going to tell my deer story (and get flamed for being an idiot:
In 1997 I was working a job (oilfield service) outside of Weesatche, Texas (in the San Antonio area) and I was staying at a motel in Goliad. There was a short cut from the rig back to Goliad and I had been using this road twice a day for a few weeks, there was NOTHING on this road, 2 or 3 driveways at one end but the rest was clear, no cross streets (the road was 16 miles long and straight as an arrow). I leave the rig one day and I am heading “home”, I turned onto the road and sped up to 93 MPH (the A/C cut out at 94, don’t ask me how I know this), hit the cruise control and was reading something when BAM! something hit my car!. I stop and there is a very small ding in my bumper (I had a nice, shiny car that I knew inside and out) so I walk back and find a small amount of blood on the road, well I am a city boy and I certainly don’t want the thing suffering so I get the jack out of the trunk to put the deer down with and I go off into the field to find him. Having no luck I come back to the car to find the local sheriff (I was stopped in the road) and when I tell him the story he says “you are lucky you didn’t find him, he woulda kicked your ass” then he tells me to slow down and laughs at me.
Us city folk are idjits sometimes
Allright, flame away !
I read about that in 911 magazine. It was a hoax that was perpetrated by the people conducting training for new dispatchers. Apparently, they used it to break the ice and get them to relax a little. I will see if I can find the article. We have a whole stack of back issues in the break room.
One time I was driving – slowly – down a back road in Exurbia and spotted a chipmunk ahead of me, sitting right in my way and engrossed in gnawing at whatever it held in its tiny front paws. I stopped the car and waited to see the wee beasty dart to safety.
No wee beasty darted to safety.
After a minute, I put the car in park, got out, and walked around to the front. There sat the chipmunk, still gnawing away, completely oblivious to the Juggernaut of Doom looming inches behind him. I had to stomp my foot and yell to make him retreat.
