In November, a white-tailed deer’s chief occupation is to make more deer. The average buck will stop at nothing, not even your Honda, because he has lost his mind and is now bounding around in the dark, chasing every doe in the forest.
Your car becomes the collateral damage of this massive mating ritual. Drivers in Georgia strike deer or are struck by them nearly 50,000 times a year, experts believe, and we’re now driving through the worst time of year for such collisions.
“The incidence of deer-vehicle collisions is tied closely to deer breeding season,” says Karl Miller, the wildlife biologist who runs the University of Georgia Deer Laboratory. “The does typically come into heat over a relatively short span of time — the peak of the rut — and these bucks take on such a fervor that their need to reproduce outweighs their interest in survival. Their minds are on one thing.”
During the "rut," the time when deer feel impelled to mate, deer movement increases substantially – another thing that makes this such a dangerous season on the highway. Oh, and they're nocturnal, so they're all over the place and you can't see them.
The problem, of course, is that deer are now everywhere. Browsing in your backyard, bounding across the cul-de-sac, making themselves at home in impossibly small patches of suburban woods. In Kennesaw, Canton, Alpharetta and Lawrenceville, they are prey that have no predator.
“Basically the front end of a Ford is about the only factor helping to control the species,” Miller said. “A prey species is designed to produce more offspring than it needs … and the deer population has the potential to grow up to 30 percent every year.”
Fifty years ago, deer were so scarce in parts of Georgia that we had to import them, chiefly from Texas and Wisconsin, to restore the herds in the state, Miller said.
It worked.
‘That’s a lot of kinetic energy’
Your odds of not hitting a deer are pretty good, but they’re getting tighter. State Farm estimates that one in 134 Georgia drivers struck a deer in 2013 — worse than the national average (one in 161) and worse than the year before in the state (one in 140).
If you do run into a deer, a short while later you may also run into a guy named Jerry Key. Key has operated Collision Tech on Cobb Parkway for 25 years; he has been a bow hunter longer than that.
Key has seen up close how deeply entrenched deer have become in metro Atlanta. Right off U.S. 41 near Kennesaw, during trail rides with his German shepherd Max galumphing ahead, Key has pedaled past a herd of 30 or 40 of the animals living in the swampy areas around Noonday Creek Trail. Last week he saw a 12-point buck near Kennesaw State University.
After a quarter of a century of body work, he has seen just about everything a deer can do to a car.
“If a 200-pound animal runs into your Lexus while you’re traveling 60 miles an hour, that’s a lot of kinetic energy,” Key said.
The Lexus in question was towed to his shop a few years ago. The buck did massive damage to the front of the car and then somersaulted over the hood. Its antler holed the windshield and ripped a furrow along the roof, even tearing up the interior head liner. No one was hurt, save for deer and Lexus.
“They’re smart,” he said, “for 10 months of the year. Then, during these two months, they get stupid.”
One of the results is sitting outside his window: a 2009 Honda Civic that recently struck a buck.
‘It seemed to be a huge deer’
Ryan Butterfield of Dallas, Ga., bought the Civic about two weeks before the buck crashed into it.
“Hadn’t even made the first payment on it,” said Butterfield, who was not hurt in the collision, which occurred on a recent Friday night at about 11:30.
“I’m going down (Ga.) 92, just cruising along, listening to sports talk radio, just kind of zoned out,” Butterfield said. “No lights on the main road, and I don’t see it until it’s right in front of me. It seemed to be the full width of the car. It seemed to be a huge deer. It had antlers on it.”
Butterfield and the buck almost went their separate ways.
“He almost got by me, but I clipped the back half of the deer with my right front bumper,” he said. “I just kept going because if my car was messed up I didn’t want to stop someplace so dark.”
He pulled into a nearby supermarket parking lot and got out to have a look. That momentary encounter at about 45 mph damaged or destroyed the Honda’s front bumper, grill, quarter panel, even the radiator and air-conditioning condenser.
Butterfield figures the total bill will run to about $4,000, of which he’s paying a $500 deductible.
Gwinnett leads metro area in wrecks
So, yes, there’s a Deer Laboratory at the University of Georgia, with Professors of Deer (actually, wildlife biology or ecology) and up to a dozen graduate students, all focused on deer research.
They’re assessing such issues as the impact of Georgia’s new and growing coyote population on deer (coyotes prey on the fawns, mostly), and whether a certain kind of highway fence cuts down on car-deer accidents.
Graduate student James Stickles recently presented a paper on predicting the peak of the rut for a given area based on how many deer are struck on the roads during that time. One very useful product of this research is a map on the state’s Department of Natural Resources website showing the peak of the rut by county. See http://georgiawildlife.com/rut-map/.
Counting car-deer collisions is an inexact business. The state Department of Transportation collects data on such crashes, but those are only accidents that involved a call to police. The UGA Deer Lab estimates those reports cover only a fraction of total crashes, since most drivers don’t call the police when they hit a deer.
Even by those limited DOT numbers, however, metro Atlanta is a dangerous place for deer and people.
For 2012, 2013 and the first eight months of 2014, Gwinnett County led the region with 1,082 car-deer collisions reported by police. Henry County followed with 864; then came Fayette with 636.
‘What’s going on in a deer’s head’
Body shop owners tell of deer accidents in which the deer lunges into the side of the car. One said he’d handled two jobs on which a deer had vaulted through the passenger side window, coming face to face with the driver and then wriggling out and taking off as soon as the car stopped.
Karl Miller, at the Dear Lab, says such deer aren’t angry. A deer lover since childhood, he takes the animal’s perspective.
“Think about what’s going on in a deer’s head,” he said. “Particularly at nighttime, it just sees these two bright lights coming toward it and it hears a noise. It has no realization that there’s a ton of metal behind that.”
Just now, chances are excellent that the deer on the roadside is a doe being chased by a buck, or a buck chasing after a doe.
“Usually when they hit the side of a vehicle, it’s just a misjudgment or a misunderstanding. They don’t have a way of judging a vehicle traveling at 55 mph,” Miller said. “It’s not out of aggression. It’s just their ability to perceive what the threat is.”
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