I saw a dead coyote in the road last weekend. Of course, in the last month I’ve probably seen two dozen dead deer in the road, but you just can’t say “never.”
Now I’m starting to think about which animals you DON’t see dead on the highway.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a run over rabbit. Or crow. Actally, pretty much any bird.
I’ve seen a lot more cats run over than dogs. But maybe the dogs are bigger so get shoveled off the roads faster? Probably not, I don’t recall seeing any loose dogs in my neighborhood, but quite a few free-roaming cate.
I live in a suburban neighborhood where there is a lot of traffic nearby. The posted speed limits are about 35 to 45 miles an hour and yet there are several wooded lots and lots of deer. If the deer is fleeing from one predator, she or he is not likely to look both ways before darting across the street.
I had the top down on the convertible and two grandchildren in the backseat when I came within a microsecond of hitting a buck a few years back. There would have been nothing I could have done if he had been a step slower or I had been a mile faster.
I’ve seen five deer in my grandchildren’s backyard and nine in my mother’s when she still lived in a house in a small town. I am two blocks from one of the busiest intersections in Tennessee and I’ve also had a deer come through my yard.
We are in their territory.
Another reason is that there are a lot of deer out there. With the decrease in predators and increase in fields and pastures there are actually more deer in Minnesota (and probably elsewhere in the US, possibly Canada too) than there were in pre-Columbus times. Figures for Minnesota estimate there are 800,000 deer in the state and 15,000 killed by cars annually (1997 figures).
They run out right in front of you. A deer frozen in the headlights is pretty easy to deal with because it’s in your headlights and right in front of you. All the deer-car accidents I’ve heard of involved the deer jumping out from behind cover so that the driver either can’t avoid the beast or would risk a more severe accident by trying to avoid the deer.
My thinking is that deer haven’t evolved to understand cars & roads. They see something coming and react, and because predictable=dead, they have to have some probability of running right in front of the danger. (The first time I saw a wild turkey fly was when it was off the road, but along a curve. Since I was going straight at it, it started flying out of my path and almost got itself creamed when I followed the road directly underneith the bird.)
Other times they may not even see the car coming. If they’re running in a column, you’ll see several deer cross a road in succession (sp?). The deer near the back have to decide between trying to beat the oncoming thing and following the leader or getting split off from the group.
When I had my deer-car accident, the deer jumped out so quickly that I literally didn’t even have time to hit the brakes!
Yeah, the typical pattern is not that the deer is standing in the road and you run into it. A more typical accident is the deer standing at the side of the road. As you approach the deer decides to run…and runs in front of the car. Or a group of deer start to run, the first few run across the road and others follow, even if it means running in front of the car.
I’ve never actually seen a deer standing in the road. When they are on the road they are always running to the other side. They do seem to like standing and browsing on the side of the road, I imagine because of all the new growth there makes better food.
Deer are usually only hit in the fall during their rutting season. Their minds are on one thing, and they pay no attention to anything else.
I hit a rabbit the other day while driving. I swerved to the right, and it looked like the rabbit was going to make, but at the last second the suicidal bunny suddenly reversed directions, and ran straight under my left front tire.
That explains all that sad, depressing poetry found on oak leaves.
Won’t somebody think of the fawns??!
I almost hit not one, not two, but three deer this morning as I took the kids to school.
[hijack]
How come the plural of deer is not deers?
[/hijack]
As you are the only poster who admits to having hit one, let me commiserate with you. Mine hit me while I was driving southbound at 70 mph (the legal limit) in the left lane of a 2-lane (each way) interstate on a sunny weekday afternoon in January (no snow). It had to have jumped the fence at the west edge of the highway right-of-way but the first I saw of it was when I heard a thud and saw only its white tail sticking up above the hood of my Dodge Intrepid, in front of the driver’s seat. The deer had crossed the shoulder and the righthand travel lane and most of my lane when it ran into the left front corner of the car, bounced around and dented the driver-side door and fell dead in the median. It put the car out of commission and it had to be towed, with front bumper, left headlight and quarter panel destroyed. The investigating highway patroller checked to see if it was dead, if not, he would have dispatched it with his handgun, I do believe. Had the deer been larger, or if I had seen it coming and braked, with resulting nosedive, I would probably not be here. More recently, a multi-pronged buck went thru a windshield and one of its horns struck a teenage girl directly in the eye and then out the side of her forehead. The girl survived. Beware and pay attention to the Deer Xing signs, though the stupid things can come from “nowhere”.
BTW, /hijack/ I hope you solved your low parking lot lightpole dilemma, js_a.
Deer are a traffic hazard through out the Upper Mississippi River Valley all year long but especially in this time of year. It is not the fall rut that brings on trouble (although testosterone filled bucks with only one thing on their poor little minds don’t help) it is the harvest. A corn field is a White Tail Deer’s heaven – cover, food and windbreak combined. Once the harvest starts the deer have to move from the fields to the wood lots and forests. They might not understand automobiles but they have figured out that combines are to be avoided. The field to forest thing is a major migration and a lot of it across high speed highways.
I’ve seen bird road kill.
Small things like pigeons look much like the squirrel/chipmunk/kitten spectrum of squashies. You pretty much have to get out of your car to identify these things, and note, for example, that there are feathers there instead of fur. I mostly notice this when I’m on my bicycle as opposed to the car. Unless you have an intact wing flopping in the breeze, that’s a bit of a tip-off.
For some reason, along route 30 we have Canada goose vs. semi-truck encounters. I think the geese are airborne but flying very low when they get nailed by the upper part of the truck. This tends to leave identifiable goose beside the road. I’ve also seen a mallard in similar condition.
Can’t recall seeing squashed crow - but then, the corvids are among the smarter varieties of birds. They’be been known to figure out street light signals when using traffic to do things like break open walnuts for them. In general, crows seem to understand those big noisy objects are a hazard and to be respected.
I grew up in suburban Chicago, and saw a couple dead crows in my life there. Not many, but a couple.
My bf when I was 17 hit a deer once when I was in the car with him. Cops came, shot the deer broken-hipped deer, and let us take it home for butchering, as he’d explained his parents were avid hunters and could (and would, and did) butcher it properly, keep a portion of it, and donate the rest to their church’s food bank. One of the cops even helped him field dress it for transport. :eek:
As a side note, I’m not sure if that was even legal or not for the cops to do, (meaning the legality of releasing the carcass to us…I’d be fairly surprised if it was standard OP to help with the field dressing) but it was a relatively rural area (for far NW suburban Chicago), so there’s a good chance the cops didn’t care and preferred to ignore some bureaucratic red tape to allowing the perfectly good meat to go to waste.
That is the SOP in WI. If you clip a deer with your car (or believe it or not, with your airplane), the meat is yours if you want it. I don’t know about the cop help, though.
I almost want to take up deer hunting again just to do my part to keep the roads safer.
Yeah. He was talking about applicants who immediately cry foul at lower lights because they’ll have to add so many more. It turns out that he wasn’t making blanket statements that seemed logically flawed, but was talking about why developers’ knee-jerk reactions weren’t necessarily valid. It was a miscommunication problem.
We see plenty of bunny roadkill around here. They dart in front of cars all the time.
We rented a motorhome for vacation one year. I pulled into a gas station after driving most of the day, and the woman in front of me got a very sick look on her face. I got out and found a dead bird embedded in my front grille. Yuck!
Balderdash. Cite?
That’s illegal here. You can’t pick up a dead deer from the side of the road. In fact, I hit one a couple of years ago. The impact broke its spine, but didn’t kill it. I borrowed a gun from a friend who lived nearby and put the deer out of its misery. I mentioned this to the sheriff a couple of days later, and he informed me that what I did was illegal: I (a) discharged a firearm within 50 feet of a public highway, (b) shot a deer without a hunting licence, and (c) shot a deer without a valid deer tag.
He said if you take home a dead deer by the side of the road without having a hunting license and a deer tag, he would have had to confiscate the meat and fine you heavily. When we see big, fresh roadkill, we call our local nature center. They come and pick it up and use it to feed the carnivores (they have wolves, mountain lions, coyotes…).
Deer. Hooved rats. Vermin.
I’m a member of a motorcycle club in New York State (most of us live in New York City). We ride every Sunday, year round, mostly in areas in and around the Catskills, the Delaware River, and the Berkshires. All of these areas, especially the Catskills, are just polluted with deer. It’s a big problem. Obviously, the consequences of a deer/motorcycle collision are going to be a lot worse than those of a deer/car collision (OK, I guess they’re the same for a deer, but for the motorcyclist, it’s going to be worse).
Several of our members have had collisions, and most of us have had very close calls.
Here are a few observations (admittedly anecdotal and not scientific):
Deer are dumb. But they do seem to have a few built-in survival mechanisms, and one is random behavior. I’ve observed that, when confronted with a large, frightening object, like a car or motorcycle or wolf, they first freeze, then bolt in a random direction. It’s just as likely to be right at the threatening object as away from it.
Although they’re not exactly herd animals, if a few are traveling in the woods together, and the lead deer crosses the road, the others will follow, no matter what’s coming down the road at them.
Deer whistles do absolutely nothing.
If one hits a deer, at least on a motorcycle, they disintegrate completely, covering the (hopefully not to badly injured) rider in shit. They’re basically big bags of excrement with four legs and a head. And other stuff. We were picking bits of fur out of a member’s bike for weeks after he collided with a deer. He literally cut the deer in half with his bike. Miraculously, he stayed upright, but did thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to his bike.
Well I don’t have a cite, but have you ever heard of anyone hitting one outside of the rutting season? I certainly haven’t, nor have I seen dead ones beside the road any other time.
Four of my family members have struck dear, all between mid October and early December.
Not a week goes by I don’t see a splattered ex-pigeon… and they’re very accustomed to traffic.