Oh, deer!

Two nights ago I was cruising down I80 east in Ohio in the "granny lane" which is, of course, the far right slow lane. (The far left lane is the "hammer lane" as in "put the hammer down" by the way.) The interstate here is 3 lanes wide in both directions with a concrete wall separating them. A fully loaded car hauler semi passes me in the center lane and about the time my front bumper is at the back of his trailer, I see a doe in my lane, trotting quickly across the interstate right to left headed straight into the car haulers path.

Now this is a fairly commonplace event on interstates across America. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration there are 1.5 million accidents a year involving deer and motor vehicles, resulting in over 1 BILLION dollars in damage and 150 FATALITIES. I knew of a woman at our church who hit a deer that flew over the top of her car on impact and and went through the windshield of the car behind her, killing two people. If you want to see some amazing/grusome photos, google car/deer accidents and have at it.

As far as trucking goes, deer are a major nuisence. We don't have the agility of an automobile, so avoidance is difficult. A direct impact will usually take out the radiator of a truck, which can run several thousand dollars, not including body work, and if you are an independent contractor/owner-operator, will knock you out of work several days and cost you even more money. You may have noticed some trucks have add-on equipment to their front ends; large tubular grills that look particularly menacing. They are, in fact, deer catchers, and come in a wide variety of designs and pricing. I have considered getting one for our truck, but keep hesitating, due to the cost, added weight and subsequent increase in wind resistance which leads to declining fuel economy. Plus in over four years of doing this job, we had not even had a close encounter with a deer. A couple of times I have seen deer coming out of the woods toward the interstate at a trot and have hit the air horn before they reach the highway, and they have bolted back into the woods. Most of the time they just stand there, non-plussed, and continue grazing.

But the evidence of collisions are everywhere on the interstates, usually butchered carcasses and bloody smears sometimes stretching tens of yards down the road. I once counted 15 such sites along a 20 mile stretch of interstate in Wisconsin. And almost always both the live sightings and the corpses are does. Bucks are generally too savvy to be hanging around heavily travelled roads, but during the mating season, well, you know where they'll be! Which leads to another occasionally sighting I have noticed: headless deer roadkill. At first I thought that maybe the collision decapitated some deer. Then one day I saw a man stopped on the side of the road carrying a buck's head and tossing it into the back of his pickup, and it dawned on me. It sounds like a Jeff Foxworthy joke: If you stop on the interstate and decapitate a roadkill buck for a trophy rack, you might be a redneck!

Other animals than deer find themselves victims of motorized mayhem as well, of course. It seems to me, completely anecdotely, that raccoons have replaced the oppossum as the number one victims of the interstates. Recently I was driving late at night on a particularly deserted stretch of interstate when I saw a raccoon waddling into my path, cutting across the roadway, from my right to left. He stopped in the middle of my lane, turned to face me, and raised up on his rear legs with his front legs stretching to the sky, as if to say, "AAAAAHHHHHH!" (You really have to stop and get a mental picture of this, it looked like something out of "Over The Hedge".) Because I was aware the interstate was empty, I was able to swerve left and the raccoon recovered enough to cut back to my right and avoid an unpleasant demise.

Spotting live wildlife on the roadside is usually a perk of the job, however, and we have seen a wide variety. Earlier this year on a trip out west we spotted several bald eagles, which we had never seen in the wild before. On our last trip out west we spotted wild turkeys, a fox, a coyote, antelope, and the grand finale, a couple of bighorn sheep rams in the Rocky Mountains west of Denver, all in the same day. And a day later at a truck stop in Denver, I watched a family of foxes playing in a field next to the lot. (I got pictures of that, I will post on Facebook soon. All our pictures are available to look at via a connection at the bottom of the blog.) At another stop in southwestern Pennsylvania I was taking Buffett for a walk off the leash when I saw a skunk stroll out of the woods. Fortunately, I saw him before Buffett did and I was able to get him back on the leash before the olfactory disaster befell us. Buffett has a grand time chasing rabbits at various places around the country, especially the large jackrabbits of southern Texas. My all time Marlin Perkins moment, however, was a couple of years ago in eastern Pennsylvania when early one morning I spotted a young black bear grubbing in a rotted fallen tree.

So, back to a couple of nights ago. I started popping the brakes as soon as I spotted the doe, as did the car hauler. She disappeared from my view as she crossed in front of the semi and he was helpless to employ evasive manuevers. (An eighty thousand pound, eighty foot long vehicle moving at sixtyfive miles per hour is not very nimble, nor can it stop on a football field, much less a dime.) I was not able to ascertain the outcome for the doe. The semi did not stop, which would at least seem to indicate it was not a direct hit. I didn't see her come out the bottom of the semi, but I was too close to see if she cleared the other side. But she would have had another eastbound lane to go, then a four foot concrete wall and three lanes of westbound I80 traffic to negotiate. Not good odds for her. But I didn't actually witness any collision, therefore I will think positive thoughts for her.

But I am rethinking the grill now.