We have plenty of deer kills in my area. There is one area where I have counted about 150 deer at one time in the fields, during the fall after the corn is picked. This was done from the road in one spot.
Where I live you have turkeys and Sandhill cranes to contend with.
The turkeys will walk and then run down the road for a hundred feet before they get off it. Your looking at about 15 to 25 at a time in front of you car.
The cranes just stand in the road and don’t move. You can drive by them in the other car lane, and they don’t take off.
Both make short work of your cars front end when you crest a hill or round that curve and there they are.
I don’t think there’s any way to prevent them. Sometimes the deer just run out onto the road from behind the trees, and there’s no time to stop. But in my experience, it is possible to reduce your chances of hitting a deer.
At night, you can usually spot the deer’s eyes from far away, because of the reflection from your headlights. If you constantly look far down the road, you can usually spot a deer’s eyes long before you can see the actual deer.
I’ve had several near misses on Wisconsin’s highways. I guess I’ve been lucky, because I’ve almost always been able to screech to a halt or swerve around them.
The one time I hit a deer, it was nighttime, there was a pickup truck right behind me with its high beams on, and another car approaching in the oncoming lane with ITS high beams on. I couldn’t see a thing, but when I heard the BANG, I figured it was a deer. It could just as easily have been a person, for all I knew.
The impact dislodged my front passenger-side headlight and caused about $600 damage. I was able to drive to the sheriff’s office, where I reported the accident. The officer on duty asked if I wanted to keep the carcass. Evidently a lot of people in Wisconsin use their road-killed deer for meat.
Temujin, I would like to point out I live in the middle of Wisconsin. The dear are so dense that the DNR has had special hunting for the last couple years to try and reduce their population. You see deer carcasses on the road everyday.
It must be worse now than it was when I lived there back in the '80s. As I recall, Montello is a nice town. With a waterfall near the highway, right? Any way, I hope you’ve been able to avoid the deer.
I live between Portage and Montello with wildlife refuges all over the area. John Muir’s boyhood home is about 2 miles down the road.
The deer have become a big problem in the last 5 or so years. I’ve seen palaces where they’ve cropped down all the young trees and under growth in the woods.
You would think deers would have figured they should look carefully each side of a road before crossing. I mean, they don’t even have to turn their heads to do that, for crying out loud.
Here in Austin TX, deer are everywhere. I’ve been fortunate enough never to hit one, or even to come close, but loads of my friends have.
The deer population has exploded in suburban neighborhoods all over America. Some environmentalist-minded folks like to say “The deer were here first,” but in fact, humans have HELPED the deer population explode! Indeed, human development has made many areas MORE attractive for deer.
After all, when humans move into what USED to be forest land, the first thing they do is drive out all the dangerous predators. The NEXT thing they do is start planting lawns and gardens, filled with yummy grass and tasty flowers. And THEN, they water that grass and those flowers all year long.
In essence, humans are rolling out the red carpet for Bambi! We’re practically BEGGING them to move into our back yards! “Here, little deer! We’ve gotten rid of all your enemies, and laid out a year-round smorgasbord for you.” From the deer’s point of view, Austin (or Westchester or suburban Chicago or…) beats the hell out of the forest ANY day! A few auto accidents are a small price to pay for the good life, from the deer’s perspective.
I read the other day when researching this that in Iowa (where I live), deer numbered less than 1,000 in the 1940s. Hunting of white-tailed deer was outlawed by the state, and wasn’t allowed to begin again until the mid-1950s.
Today, Iowa’s deer population is estimated at well over 200,000 and nearly every city and town in Iowa is debating whether or not to allow hunting within its city limits.
In other strange animal-related statistical news, there are five pigs for every man, woman and child in Iowa. These however, are kept penned up in hog confinement lots and aren’t allowed out, so they pose no threat to motorists. Circulatory systems, on the other hand…
Someone just told me there are special times here in IL where bow hunters can hunt in the forest preserves, with special state licenses, to help control the deer population. (What the heck are we supposed to DO? Build the damn things public housing???) Ain’t gonna claim this is fact, just that I was told this. By a bow hunter. Who claims to have done it.
This morning was cloudy and pitch dark. I got onto a bridge and saw deer right in front of me. I came to a stop in the middle of a herd of deer on the bridge.
Living where I do, I’ve leaned never leave anything on the seats not belted down, or under the drivers seat. Anything on the drivers seat ends up under your foot pedals. Anything not belted to the seat hits the dash.
But, Shirley, how do the deer know that they’re supposed to cross at those signs? Aren’t they illiterate?
On a somewhat more serious note, I live in a fairly civilized suburb, where one is unlikely to see deer (locally known as “rats with hooves”) more often than once every couple of weeks. Drive ten miles into the backbeyond, however, and one is in a different world. I am told that a popular after-market mod to pickup trucks there is to remove the front bumper and tie on a 6x6 in its place. This apparently reduces the amount of damage that the truck takes when it hits a deer. The amount of damage that the deer suffers, however, remains the same (“Honest, Officer, that deer leaped into the road only…ummm…three or four miles in front of me, and I just couldn’t stop. By the way, can I take the carcass home and butcher it?”)
“Kings die, and leave their crowns to their sons. Shmuel HaKatan took all the treasures in the world, and went away.”
Here in Upstate NY, many of our trucks are equipped with a “push bar”…a set of bars (looks like a rack) to go on the front of the truck- saves you from a huge amount of damage…
By the way, I just took my dogs out to run, and there were 4 deer in my backyard hanging out. We are overrun!!
(we also have loads of turkeys in our yard)
I also forgot…when you hit a deer around here, the cops will give you a special tag to take to the butcher so you can keep the meat (yum).
No thank you! Something about road kill that doesn’t appeal to me. Very Beverly Hillbillies.
They do that in Michigan, too. Call the Michigan DNR and they’ll give you a special hunting tag or somesuch. I’ve never, ever hunted, but if I’m ever unfortunate enough to “automotively process” one of our national resources/nusances, I just might get one.
“I had a feeling that in Hell there would be mushrooms.” -The Secret of Monkey Island
See, what you all have to do is move to a former desert, where there’s not enough water to support large animals like that, and then irrigate your yuppie lawns with water gotten from well upstate, and then you won’t have these problems. No, L.A. has too many immigrants anyway. Of course, being one might reduce my ability to gripe about that.
What we have, living on the northern edge of Orange County, are coyotes that often get themselves into howling choruses at night. I’v seen them running down the road at night a few times now. At least they wouldn’t wreck a car if you hit them. And they’re too timid to be dangerous, unless you’re a cat exploring the hills or something tasty like that.
Hitting a deer is no big deal - just keep driving and slow down in a controlled manner. Your car might be trashed, but you’re going to be physically OK in nearly every case. (Think about the mass of a deer and then think about the mass of the oncoming car that inspired your car’s safety features.
People get hurt when they get swerve and lose control of the car and collide with another, more massive, object, or roll their car into the ditch.
In West Texas, a big problem is running into vultures (“turkey buzzards” down here) as they sit in the middle of the road picking on the roadkill from the night before. See, the deer will usually stay at or below the level of your bumper. These birds will get high enough to come through your windshield, which just happens to slice open their stomachs and cause a big nasty smelly mess in your car. Happened to my dad twice and it was not a pretty experience.
Hey,
I hit a buzzard myself–I was lucky it didn’t come through the windshield!
I travel a lot at night and slow down. When I started looking at the sides of the road I started seeing deer EVERYWHERE!
We need long doe seasons to control the population! Killing just the bucks doesn’t help much.
I’m with B_Line12. I have a Green Emergency light on the roof of my van ( NYS uses green for EMS volunteers)> GOD they get spooked by it ! I’ve used it just a few times, when I’ve seen them ahead.
Many years ago, I was working out in Colorado, which is antelope country. The place I worked was located at the end of a long, deserted road. It was also government property, so there was no hunting, and the antelope had figured this out. One of the guys I worked with left work Sunday morning (at the end of the graveyard shift) after a major snowfall and freeze. The road hadn’t been cleared.
Well, he was driving home at about 20 mph (on glare ice), and a herd of antelope trotted out in front of him. He ended up hitting about 8 of them before he could stop. It was (according to witnesses) absolute carnage. The game commission had to send someone out to put them out of their misery.