[Closed] Increasingly worried about hitting deer on the road.

What would happen if you were driving back late at night at 80 and a deer came through the windscreen?

Your windscreen crumples, as does your roof. You crash into a hedge, you walk away. Your car is a write-off.

Well, that's what happened to my mum - YMMV...

Be worried. We had a local killed by one a few years ago down here in East Sussex. A few months before that I was in a taxi which hit one (£300 of bumper/front-end damage only). Lots here at dusk. Lots of bits of roads though woods where I drive more slowly at dusk/dawn and try to take a defensive middle line where possible.

What would happen if you were driving back late at night at 80 and a deer came through the windscreen?

I guess the deer would die and you would be at least seriously injured.

I remember reading that is a serious problem on Islay or one of the other Scottish Islands.

We've got one in our freezer courtesy of it's final interaction with a vehicle... straight to the butcher...

What would happen if you were driving back late at night at 80 and a deer came through the windscreen?

once the police had worked out the speed pre-impact you would probably be charged with careless or reckless driving or some such offence... 😯

once the police had worked out the speed pre-impact you would probably be charged with careless or reckless driving or some such offence...

For hitting a deer? I think that plod have a little more on their hands than working out speed of someone hitting a wild animal.

A colleague at work has a house in Oban, and has a deer whistle fitted to his car, swears by it. Sounds like snake oil to me...

nobeer - having seen a few similar in my youth when staying out in the countryside, the police are often there given the state of the car afterwards... 2 daft mates were charged for their excessive speed at the time (Howwood- Lochwinnoch back road)

A fair few round here, came within 6" of hitting the rear of a stag as it skated across the road during a night ride a few years back and kept pace with a pair as they ran away from me down a sunken road more recently.
Then there is the tail of our old neighbour finding one recently deceased on the road so took it home for the pot but didn't have a sharp enough knife to let the blood - chainsaw did the trick though

nobeer - having seen a few similar in my youth when staying out in the countryside, the police are often there given the state of the car afterwards... 2 daft mates were charged for their excessive speed at the time

Trick is to only slam your brakes on once you've slowed down to 60 mph 😉

Chainsaw is a decent tip...

I lived in Northern Newfoundland one winter and Moose-related-accidents were the issue there. They are fast and stupid and the lazy way to get one was to cruise in your pick-up truck, lights out at dusk, and shoot them from the cab. But they were so big that the only way two people could get them in the back was to use the chainsaw they invariably carried in the back for getting firewood. Lots of big roadside pools of blood and guts...

nobeer - having seen a few similar in my youth when staying out in the countryside, the police are often there given the state of the car afterwards... 2 daft mates were charged for their excessive speed at the time (Howwood- Lochwinnoch back road)

Police had a little more time on their hands 50 years ago... 😉

It would be worth reporting the deer seen outside your offices to the Countryside Service of your Council. Are these muntjac deer? They're the size of a cocker spaniel and have tusks, not territorial and prolific breeders.

Perhaps cutbacks have reduced culling?

Waits for ninfan to see this thread.

deer numbers are increasing all the time. as a result the range of different species of deer will spread.

if you live in the countryside you'll understand that to barrel along an a road at 70 at dusk or at night with your head in the clouds thinking nothing's about as there are no cars on the roads could end up with serious consequences. often you can see their eyes lit up in the distance. often there will be others about even if only see one.

responsible landowners will be culling deer. the FC culls thousands, they all go into the food chain. a decent local census/ cull will limit the number of road casualties. as well as benefitting the local woods, habitat, crops.

what you're experiencing is probably that you're just noticing more dead deer etc, things haven't necessarily increased that fast.

good to be aware though and raise awareness even on here.

nobeer, aye, very good 😀

Seen two cyclists hit deer in the chiltons one needed a few stitches the other a new wheel.

What would happen if you were driving back late at night at 80

You can't modify the deer's behaviour but you can modify you're own.

Hitting a deer on your bike might be where your problems start. The kicking you get as you try and untangle the bike from the antlers is what you want to worry about- friend of mine looked like he'd been through a threshing machine.

A colleague at work has a house in Oban, and has a deer whistle fitted to his car, swears by it. Sounds like snake oil to me...

Nah- snake oil makes more of a hissing sound

cinnamon_girl - Member
It would be worth reporting the deer seen outside your offices to the Countryside Service of your Council. Are these muntjac deer? They're the size of a cocker spaniel and have tusks, not territorial and prolific breeders.

Not sure why the council would be interested in deer numbers? A couple on waste ground is hardly cause for concern... Muntjac do have small tusks, but you'd be hard pushed to spot them at a distance as they just look like an slightly longer canine tooth and are mostly covered by the animals lips (except for very old and mature bucks).

And they are very territorial btw. That's one of the reasons they spread (along with the prolific, year round breeding) - same for several species of deer - once the does are about to drop the fawns they kick last years young out of the territory. Usually happens late spring for roe and why you often see more deer killed on the road at this time of year, as they start to wander looking for new territory.

Perhaps cutbacks have reduced culling?

Again, nothing to do with the council. Private landowners are responsible and I'm not aware of any council who has an active culling programme, as they don't tend to have high numbers of deer on their land.

In general, deer numbers in the NW are lower than many places in the UK - one theory is that the canals have slowed the spread (they can easily swim rivers, but struggle with square edged canals). But deer numbers generally on the increase in the UK.

As for chainsaws... 🙄 You can fully butcher a deer with a single, small knife - that's not a Bear Grylls type of brag, it's just that I can't think of a more inappropriate way of chopping up a deer!

You've more chance of being smashed up in RTC than hitting a deer.

Nah- snake oil makes more of a hissing sound

😆

There has been a vast increase in deer numbers around Glasgow in the last 50 years. Seeing deer around Milngavie/Mugdock Country Park area was an extremely rare event in the 1970s. I only saw them a handful of times before leaving school.

Back living in the same area now they are everywhere. I see deer in the small park beside our house which is surrounds by houses albeit 300 yards from open country.

I'd be interested to know why. Are smallholders and farmers less likely to shoot them for the pot now meaning numbers have increased? My grandfather had a 30 acre holding near Strathblane from the 1940s onwards. My dad only remembers him shooting a deer a couple of times. And that was a guy who shot and snared hares and rabbits for the pot.
If deer had been common he'd have been shooting them

This link suggests red deer numbers have increased from 100'000 post WW2 through 278'00 in 1978 to 380'000 now. I'd guess other deer species have shown similar increases.

http://www.forestpolicygroup.org/blog/a-brief-history-of-the-deer-problem-in-scotland/

Solution? Kill more of them and eat them. I love venison. But as deer are cuddly and start life as Bambi's will the public go for it?

Loads round here (West Berkshire). See them pretty much every road ride, mainly Muntjac.

We had one guy t-bone a baby non-muntjac on a early evening ride, dislocated his clavicle and put him out of the Lejog he'd been training six months for. Deer was stunned but got up and stumbled into the bushes later.

I remember reading that is a serious problem on Islay or one of the other Scottish Islands.

Can't be Islay. It's hard enough getting up to 40mph the roads are that bad!

But even hitting a deer at 40 would make a mess.

Whenever I've seen a dead Red Deer on the side of the road in the Highlands It's usually accompanied by bits of car.

What would happen if you were driving back late at night at 80 and a deer came through the windscreen?

you'd get what you deserve I guess?

The road from Ullapool to Inverness is something else for deer crossing the road at night, proper red deer, in numbers, keeps you on your toes though!

What would happen if you were driving back late at night at 80 and a deer came through the windscreen?

I hit a large red stag at 60 along the side of Loch Lubnaig on way home from hogmanay party three years ago.
Massive swerve to wrong side of road meant that its head hit the pillar and passenger edge of windscreen. It cracked the screen, left dent in pillar and dents/scratches down every other panel of the car. Middle_OAB was in the passenger seat at the time - rest of family_oab was asleep in the back.
Amazingly, the stag, erm, staggered off, and I couldn't find it.
Stupendously lucky in my view - if I hadn't swerved so hard, or the beast had been a few cm more further out it would have been head fully on windscreen and would have come through...
Around the highlands, it is common to see them, sheep and cattle on the road, and usually you are driving slowly enough to stop. The real issue is faster roads alongside woods, where they can jump out with little warning.

I'd be interested to know why. Are smallholders and farmers less likely to shoot them for the pot now meaning numbers have increased?

It's mostly roe deer you're seeing around glasgow. Compared to reds they're really difficult to shoot, but also as the outskirts become more built you running around with a rifle becomes less practical

irc - Member

I'd be interested to know why.

In simple terms, no primary predators any more and changes in farming / forestry practices. For example, massive increases in Roe numbers following all the coniferous plantations in Dumfries and Galloway in the 60's. Previous farming uses in the area didn't support high (any?!) deer numbers but the forestry allows them to thrive.

Basically they breed faster that they die / are being killed, so their geographical range is also spreading.

Compared to reds they're really difficult to shoot,

How do you figure that out?? They have different habitats and behaviors, but it could be argued that they're easier to shoot than reds. Certainly no harder.

The point about controlling numbers in urban environments is a good one though.

At considerably less than 80 (B road) both the deer and the car were write-offs. the deer didn't fit through the windscreen so I was ok.

I think that fifty years ago there were more people actually working on the land, more likely to spot resident deer and with access to rifles.

I've been told that mature females can be followed by calves, so be aware of the risk of another, a second or two behind.

I believe fallow deer are currently calving, the calves currently stay parked in patches of nettles. I don't know abot others.

bull bars.

shoulda kept your landy globalti

I must say I've never even come close to hitting one but then im aware that i live in an area where deer are common and so drive accordingly.

like nobeer a few of my colleagues swear by the deer whistles.

Personally, I would go for a 50% plus reduction in deer numbers. #passmeagun

I've hit 2 in the car in 6 months (rural commute), one a write off the other a glancing blow

I saw a large Suzuki once that had hit a deer while going down the A68 at night. The fork stanchions were bent back so that the tyre was almost hitting the radiator but there was very little other damage. They'd been going so fast that they'd actually cut the deer in half.

The smell from the bike a couple of days later was outstanding though 😳

The road from Ullapool to Inverness is something else for deer crossing the road at night, proper red deer, in numbers, keeps you on your toes though!

#passmeagun

Reintroducing Lynxes would probably help as well.

Shirley the STW answer (according to the walking up Cannock DH track thread) is that you should only be driving at a speed that you know you can stop if a deer jumped out at you without hitting it.

Reintroducing Lynxes would probably help as well.

If you reintroduce them from Europe would they be Axes?

The road from Ullapool to Inverness is something else for deer crossing the road at night, proper red deer, in numbers, keeps you on your toes though!

Try the next 40 miles north of Ullapool... They lie hidden in the roadside ditches and jump out suddenly, so it is a road for taking your time on (or letting the North Coast 500 racers take them out for you).

A north coast surf trip some years ago, small hours of the morning in the later stages of the eight hour hike up there, end of June and the road must've still been warm from the day as they were lying on it and we literally had to drive right up and push our way through...

loads of roe round us and I think I've seen fallow. Rode right up on a roe the other day and, concentrating on staying on the bike, couldn't quite process what it was as from behind it looked like some kind of bald alien blob on two legs (I may be losing it). Until it turned and jumped over a shoulder high wall from standing.

Bloodiest accident that I ever saw was the collision between a car and two horses one of which ended up on the crumpled roof of the ironically named vauxhall cavalier

There are well known deer crossing points, as well. I was driving a mate back down the road outside Forres one evening, came to a junction and a bend, he advises me to slow down a bit as his uncle hit a deer at that spot a while back. Foot off, right on cue a couple of deer dart across the road...

Try the next 40 miles north of Ullapool... They lie hidden in the roadside ditches and jump out suddenly, so it is a road for taking your time on (or letting the North Coast 500 racers take them out for you).

Bizarrely I've not seen too many deer between ullapool and lochinver, the trees south of ullapool, glascarnoch and loch garve are really bad though. And yes now it's basically a racetrack I expect there'll be some more serious accidents.

I drove back from Skye to Glasgow through the night a few years back.

Locals told us to be careful of the deer between Glencoe & Glasgow.

Had 2-3 near misses, and up there they are not small deer, full on Stags with pointy things.

Deer are ace, just slow down....

I did contact somebody the first time we saw the roe deer on the waste ground out back; I think it was the British Deer Society. Whoever answered the phone told me they had had several reports from the Bury and Radcliffe area, they are spreading down from Cumbria and up from Staffordshire and Cheshire and that as far as they knew the deer hadn't yet made it across the M66 to the West Pennines so they would be interested in reports from Rooley Moor, Rochdale, Calderdale etc. This morning's traffic victim didn't make it across anyway.

Shirley the STW answer (according to the walking up Cannock DH track thread) is that you should only be driving at a speed that you know you can stop if a deer jumped out at you without hitting it.

Probably, but not entirely practical as the deer I hit jumped out while I was driving below 30mph. I didn't even see it until it was flying over the top of the car.

So, let's say 15mph past even the smallest clump of trees and the deer should be safe enough.

Reintroducing Lynx might work in the uplands and areas like Kielder and the lakes

Not going to happen in Surrey though

Theres a couple of aspects here:

population growth and repopulation - wild deer were nearly extinct in England in the 17thC, but escapes from deer parks (tied in with lots of Capability Brown manors) particularly escapes that took place in the aftermath of WW1 (loss of a large tranche of countryside workers, collapse of big estates) and a number of known escapes of fast breeding species like Muntjac and CWD around Bedford in WW2, changes in farming practice with internal combustion engine leading to less people working on the land, changes in society.

Another aspect is the Deer Act, introduced to protect deer in the sixties, alongside increasingly strict firearms legislation meaning a lot less people with guns - allied of course to societies view of shooting and hunting, and societies view of wildlife. I know without doubt that a number of the wildlife trusts and local authorities (who many would argue have essentially been doing 'rewilding' for years by leaving their estate unmanaged, much to its detriment) have utterly ignored the issue of deer damage and impacts on their own estate and neighbours out of fear of bad press and upsetting the fluffy bunny brigade.

All the above have led to a massive increase in both range and density, especially in peri-urban areas with lots of juicy rose bushes to eat, and thats why you are seeing more.

Shirley the STW answer (according to the walking up Cannock DH track thread) is that you should only be driving at a speed that you know you can stop if a deer jumped out at you without hitting it.

Seeing as I have seen one panic and run into the side of a stationary minibus, in a car park, this tactic may not be as effective as you expect... 😆

There is a large increase in what you would call urban deer.
This is because of the large increase in habitat.
New tree planting everywhere around towns, tree planting along roadsides all these new areas on new housing estates to catch and hold surface water runoff usually lots of long grass, shrubs and trees planted.
You also have lots of small urban parks popping up everywhere as well.
Planners have unintentionally created a fantastic place for them.
Unfortunately not many people realised the problem these deer would cause.
Because they are urban and mostly on local authority ground or a large amount of developers land there is no plan in place for control and because of the urban nature of controling them you start to clash with the public who just see the fact that Bambi is being slaughtered and not the problems they cause.
In the countryside there has not been a huge increase in Roe and Red/Sika numbers but Muntjac are an increasing problem as they extend their range. Wild Boar are also becoming a problem as well.
I can't comment on Fallow as i don't know a lot about them, there's not a lot of them in Scotland. Although they had to have a cull in the Dunkeld area as they were coming down to the side of the A9 to feed at the roadside.

Or cycling at 40 down a hill and a deer jumped out of the hedge in front of you?

Had exactly that, on the drops head down pedalling to get a strava best .. leapt off the bank in front of me, who was more surprised its difficult to say.

Crapped myself, applied the anchors, weaved across the road a lot (thankfully no traffic, as it was instinctive). The deer did much the same thing.

I'm less bothered about segments now.

@Grey - I recall when i was working for the FC and the large scale roadside tree planting operations were taking place, the wildlife guys were saying back then 'erm, has anyone thought about this' ?

but then we said much the same about planting oak trees in the watercourses in one of the last major bastions of the red squirrel in England...

[i]"Decisions being made by people who spend three years in Edinburgh being taught by someone else who spent three years in Edinburgh"[/i] as Ronnie Rose used to say 😕

Chap on one of our rides got taken out by a deer, he didn't hit it, it hit him, full pelt at head height. Gave the poor sod a proper hit. Smashed his helmet and was the last straw on a damaged hip. Had his hip replaced last week.

I wouldn't fancy it, they're sharp heavy, strong and fast. 😐

Isn't the deer population the highest it's been for centuries? & I'm not talking Bambi & Co's state of mind!
I've read that the most dangerous time for hitting deer is late evening,yet a couple of years back I came across the scene where a car had hit & killed one in the middle of the afternoon so I guess you can come unstuck anytime of day..
The other week around dusk I saw 3 of them in a field close to the M6 at Standish.I've even seen one on the hard shoulder of the M62 in broad daylight,I think it was licking the salt from the gritter.I really wouldn't want to hit one at motorway speeds..

@ninfan, I used to work for the FC as well as a wildlife ranger.
I wasn't to popular when the boss asked about Sika deer and eradicating them and i told him it was to late the horse has bolted and they were wasting their time. Went down well 😆
I covered a lot of the Central Scotland woodland and in the time i was there never shot a deer in them, they were only interested in controlling the numbers in the Trossachs at the time.

Hit a Muntjac a few years back, it shot out of a gap in the hedge and I thought I'd hit a labrador. Was in a courtesy car luckily so the bumper damage wasn't my issue.
Last year I woke up in the earl;t hours to a commotion in the back garden. A roe deer had somehow got over the 7ft high fence and was desperately trying to get out. I went down to open the side gate but was relieved when it clambered up and out via a fence rail, the gate is down an alley which I didn't want to be stuck in with a panicked deer!

@Grey, I trained at Kielder, but there ended up being no full time jobs (it was dead mans boots, and then they decided to consolidate beats rather than replace the next two retirees - and more recently when the Ranger I trained under retired it seems to have gone out to contract 😯 )

Though they were shitting themselves that Sika would get a hold in Craik or Eskdlemuir and spread over.

What would happen if you were driving back late at night at 80 and a deer came through the windscreen?

You'd hopefully be taught a lesson for driving like a proper dickhead at the expense of another creatures life?

There are a few...

Holy cow! There must be well over a thousand in that herd.

It's certainly true that there are more trees, look at any photo of the countryside in the 60s or 70s and you can see that huge amounts of deciduous growth have appeared alongside roads, railways and on disused industrial land.

Hit a large muntjac at 70mph, early one Sunday morning last summer. Shot out of a heavily overgrown dual carriageway verge, with no chance to even start moving my foot towards the brake pedal. Made a helluva mess of the front of the Golf - bumper, grille, bonnet, rad all totalled, flesh & skin all over the front of what was left. £2,800 repair bill.

Rats wi' antlers...

Many many years ago I was in the front passenger seat of my friends new XR3i when we where driving up to Ballater from Liverpool for skiing. It was very late at night with quite a bit of snow on the road when a huge stag walked out into the road in front of us.
Luckily, we were going really slowly as the XR3i didn't have the most sensible tyres for the conditions.
We hit the stag side on but the leading lip of the bonnet was so low that we caught it just below the hip and it gently rolled onto the bonnet then off again and it ran off into the night!
Somehow or other, there wasn't any dents or scratches on Phil's car.

Another time, in Utah, I hit a deer very very early in the morning (driving to watch sunrise over Bryce Canyon). This time I (and the deer) weren't so lucky as the car sustained (minor) damage and the deer was badly injured but ended up in the middle of the (still dark) road.
Not knowing what to do but knowing that I had to get a report for the insurance company, I drove off to look for a ranger or the police (thinking they may be able to call a vet as well) but left my girlfriend at the side of the road to warn other traffic, which was probably not my finest hour as she was hysterical about the poor deer! 😳
Not long after I drove off, a local ranch hand drove past and just dragged the injured deer off the road to die. Later that same day, in daylight, on the same stretch of road, we saw at least half a dozen dead deer carcasses on the road side, most of which looked pretty fresh 🙁

Nearly hit a deer a few miles out of Skeg the other evening, and saw a dead one the week before, a few miles further south, both on the A52, about a mile inland and with very little tree cover around - the fields are full of vegetables round here, I wouldn't have thought deer could hide in the cabbages, kale or broccoli.

At least deer tend to bounce off. Fallow, and a few Roe and Muntjacs round here. Little ones get pushed aside and big ones have their legs taken out. They still screw a car though. I always watch the verges when driving round home. It's boar that are the worry here in the FoD. Big black lumps of muscle. They truly shaft a car. Had a Munty wander across the road in front of us this morning. Rather nice actually but as I often come down that road at speed on the bike it does have its worries.

There's a far higher chance of hitting a badger at speed than a deer, I base this on the fact that as I'm doing on average at least two hundred miles a day, sometimes double that, I rarely see dead deer by the road, but I must have seen a couple of hundred badgers by the roadside, and that's from the east as far as London and Eastbourne, all along the south coast, all the way down into Cornwall, into South Wales and as far north as Birkenhead on the west and Bruntingthorpe in the East, oh and Norfolk for a while last year.
I guess I may have seen half a dozen deer in the same time, that's eleven months.

Badgers, they need shooting too

I was behind a truck that hit and killed a pregnant one before, that was sad as it pretty much exploded and little unborn baby deer parts were strewn across the road.

I guess I may have seen half a dozen deer in the same time, that's eleven months.

Depends on where you live/drive. Country roads through woodlands are littered with dead deer, often just in the verge rather than on the road though - maybe they are more likely to get knocked into the verge rather than squished.

I saw half a dozen dead deer on my 20 mile ride to work yesterday. One badger, maybe two.

Where do you live and work?

Newbury to Reading, via back roads. Honestly, we're infested with Muntjac here.

I've always loved the FC 'wildlife ranger' title, gives people the image of someone bottle feeding poor woodland creatures, when in actual fact it's the control of anything that might nibble a tree.

A failure in their continued management and they have taken the advantage, can't cull enough, plenty of difficulties in doing so as already covered.

In FoD they have realised that they have massively underestimated boar numbers. Due to crosses with domestic breeds, litters are bigger and more frequent.

There was a great radio 4 programme a while ago on Boar in the Chase, they essentially ignored it too long. Once they finally started culling some of the German guys came over and told them that they needed to be culling about four times as many as they were just to stop the increase.

My late uncle was a wild life ranger in the FoD. 51 years exactly with the FC. Not an ounce of sympathy for any animal life that was on his patch. Dead humane to all he shot!

My father in law was following a car that hit one a few months back. Made a right mess of the bumper and bonnet apparently.

I'd have loved to see the guys face though as Ian pulled out his openel and gutted it by the side of the road. Took it home and hung it in the cellar and they've still got half of it in the freezer. Nice meat!

Can I suggest a blueberry jeu for anyone doing venison steaks 😉

I hit a large deer between Christmas and New Year last year. We were staying at Lochearnhead for Hogmanay and had travelled to Fort William for a day trip. Coming back through Glencoe around 6p.m. in pitch black, One ran across the front of the car around 15m in front of me. It was surreal in that it just came of of the darkness and full speed. I was doing around 50 and braked. It was the second deer that followed the first a second or two later which I hit. My nearside took out its hind quarter (it had almost full closed the car right to left) and bounced off into the roadside. It wasn't safe to stop where I hit it, so I pulled into the next layby. Bonnet, front wing, front light and bumper damaged and a large chunk of deer wedged under the bonnet.

Driver in a Landy Discovery was killed by a deer through the windscreen on the A82 a few months ago. It leapt to just above bonnet height and went straight through the screen and into the boot, striking the driver's head on the way past. Short of bolting a grill to your windscreen, there isn't much you can do to mitigate that sort of risk. Scary and tragic.

Previous comments about driving at 80 are typical...but if you don't sit around that on a long night time motorway drive you're in the minority. And I'd hate to hit a deer at that speed!

I've hit one at 50 before, new bumper, bonnet, radiator, headlight just about bodged it up.

Saw surprisingly few last week on our jaunt around the Highlands, just a couple here and there really but did include seeing one on Lochinver Main Street.

Last month nearly got taken out by one when cycling between Oykel Bridge and Rosehall: there was a gap of about four bike lengths between my wife and me and it ran across between us, had about a second's warning.

It was the second deer that followed the first a second or two later which I hit

I was going to mention this. Often if you see one another will be close behind and it's often that one you hit or hits you in the side.

If you google "BMW Z4 deer" there are some graphic shots of what hitting a decent sized mammal at 140kph on an autobahn will do to the car. Although to be fair, there's a lot of doubt about what it was that the car actually hit - more likely a fox than a deer - certainly not Red Deer size (and it also looks like an 3-series not a Z4!).