Deer-Car Collisions, on Rise, Peak in Mating Season

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

These are fraught weeks for drivers, deer and the nation’s car insurers: costly auto-deer collisions make a special jump during the mating season, usually October through December, and peak each November.

“The bucks throw caution to the wind as they chase does during the breeding season,” said Billy Higginbotham, a wildlife specialist at Texas A & M University. “If this happens to carry them across a roadway, they don’t seem to care.”

State Farm Insurance estimates that deer collisions over the past two years reached 2.3 million, up 21 percent compared with five years ago, and still more encounters go unreported. The annual number of collisions may be as high as two million a year, according to Terry A. Messmer of Utah State University.

These crashes are usually most catastrophic for the animals, but they also account for billions of dollars in car repair and medical costs and hundreds of human deaths annually.

Collisions have risen with deer populations — mainly of white-tailed deer, which now number more than 30 million and have adapted well to suburban life — and with the spread of housing into woodlands and prairies.

The risk is greatest in West Virginia, where a driver’s odds of hitting a deer over 12 months are 1 in 42, according to calculations by State Farm. Iowa is second, with a 1-in-67 chance, and Michigan is third, at 1 in 70. A driver in Hawaii, on the other hand, has only a 1-in-13,011 chance of hitting a deer — “roughly equivalent to the odds of finding a pearl in an oyster shell,” State Farm noted in a report last month.

In a typical fall sequence, a driver may spot a bounding doe and brake for it, then speed up only to hit the chasing buck.

Feral hogs are adding to the hazards of dusk-to-dawn driving in many states, including Texas, Florida and California. The collisions are surging with the unchecked spread of the animals, which breed prolifically and can weigh up to 300 pounds.

Many deer are saved by their physiology: their eyes brightly reflect a car’s headlights, making them easier to spot in the darkness. Hog eyes do not reflect light that way, and the animals, low-slung and dark-hued, can be hard to spot on a cloudy night.

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