Doug Wiken at Dakota Today had a close encounter of the Bambi kind.
I was driving the 1/4 mile from our farmhouse to the county highway when I heard a thump and a dark thing with 4 legs hanging down over the windshield for an instant. The old Mitsubishi Eclipse is relatively low and apparently a deer had jumped nearly cleanly right over the top of the car.
As I commented there, I'm glad no damage was done. The car/deer accident is a staple of law enforcement here. It comes in various forms. Mix and match the terms below.......
(1) Car hits deer (2) Deer hits car
(a) little or no harm done except possibly to undergarments of motorists
(b) light damage to vehicle, deer runs off
(c) light damage to vehicle, deer is crippled/killed
(d) vehicle is disabled, deer runs off
(e) vehicle and deer both history
(B-E) b-e with injury to occupants of vehicle
1c and 1d are the most common. The fall rut (which is also hunting season) used to be the main time for them, but increasingly they happen year-round. It's a tribute to the deer's reproductive prowess that there are still plenty to hunt.
I continue to espouse the theory that the deer know when hunting season starts, and they decide that if they're going down, they're taking someone with them. Actually the big motivator (at least during the rut) is similar to the mental "tunnel vision" noted in my previous post; the bucks have sex on their minds, and they aren't paying attention to anything else. Other than that, it's mainly bad luck and/or inattention on the part of the living beings involved.
1 comment:
Hunting season also gets them running into places they don't usually frequent the rest of the year...including highways and roads and even farm yards.
I got some of the grass whacked down before it rained again. Need to get more down that at least gives about 12 feet of clear space along road. I saw nothing until the shadow and legs moved across the windshield.
Seems like if the state owns the wildlife, they ought to pay for the damage their critters do.
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