(HOST) Commentator Willem Lange finds cell phones handy; but their news isn’t always good.
(LANGE) There was a quaver in Mother’s voice on the cell phone. "Will," she said, "I’m going to be a little late. I just hit a deer. It’s dead"
"How are you? And the dogs? And the car?"
"Everybody’s okay."
"You want me to come over?" She was only a couple miles away. I went.
It was the classic situation: just after dark, near apple trees, the lights of an oncoming car cutting her vision. Many times we’ve said to each other, driving through the night, that was the most likely scenario for a collision with a deer.
There are more deer in North America now than when the first European settlers arrived. They’re not creatures of deep evergreen forest, but rather of the edges of open fields and hardwoods. So they’re happiest in the habitat that loggers and farmers have created for them on the edge of the woods. The farmers’ crops are an attraction, too; deer’s impact on agriculture is greater than that of any of the other wild vertebrates.
As farms disappear under the pressure of development, the deer are disturbed, but not displaced. They can live quite well on flowers and vegetables and ornamental bushes. Wintertimes, they often find a softhearted homeowner who, against the advice of biologists, puts out feed for them. In some suburban locations they’re epidemic. Pennsylvania leads the nation in deer-vehicle collisions. State Farm Insurance estimates 1.5 million collisions a year nationwide, which cost about 1.1 billion dollars and result in an average of 150 motorist deaths. Vermont and New Hampshire, surprisingly, don’t make even the top ten states.
Deer are crepuscular, from the Latin crepusculum meaning dusk or twilight. They’re most active just after dark and just before dawn, which is why we always leave hunting camp at an ungodly hour, and linger in the woods in late afternoon till dark. I suspect clear skies and an early-rising moon combine to make deer even more active than usual.
If you’ve never hit a deer, you shouldn’t take much credit for it. Only if you drive much more slowly during darkness will you affect your chances of a collision. Deer don’t always stand still and reflect your headlights. Most often they leap suddenly from the shoulder of the road. After dark I constantly scan both sides of the road. But that sort of focused attention can’t be sustained for long; it’s during the breaks that it happens.
Experts advise slowing down and driving with high beams as much as possible. I like to drive about 100 yards behind another vehicle, watching his brake lights and using his headlights to extend my own. Tests of grille-mounted whistles have demonstrated they’re ineffective.
So we’re left with the same advice our parents once gave us: slow down and pay attention. There’s not much else we can do to avoid a collision. It helps to carry a cell phone. Then we can call home to say we’ll be a little late.
This is Willem Lange up in East Montpelier, and I gotta get back to work.