Quote:
Originally Posted by basjoos
Around here, I've never seen deer run along the road, either on the pavement or the shoulder. They are always either crossing it or having a social interaction with other deer or or next to the road. As soon as they see the car they head straight towards the nearest woods.
<snip>
Of course if you are traveling and going around corners faster than is safe for conditions, then you are asking for an accident, be it from deer or from that windfall tree that laying across the road just past the blind curve. The same goes for overrunning your headlight coverage at night.
|
I've never come up on deer running parallel to the road either, but they don't always cross it at a 90* angle either - 45* is just about as common.
| |
| |
| |\
| | \
| ^| \
| ^|
If the buck's line of travel (running to the doe it has scented across the road) is as indicated above and it reaches the shoulder of the road a little a head of your car (traveling 35-45 mph), more than 90% of the time it will change it's direction of travel and go back down into the ditch. Some percentage of the time it will not change it's line of travel. A smaller percentage of the time it will marginally change its direction - as if it thinks it's going to be able to out run you.
That you have not seen this behavior probably has a lot to do with the differences in terrain. Here on the prairie, there are no trees unless someone planted them. You'll find a windrowed copse of trees about every 1-3 miles or so along the road. During the day the deer like to bed down in them. At night you general find them quite far from these little groupings of trees.
The roads generally run along straight grid lines and any curves in the road are few and very far between. Given that and the lack of trees you might think that it would be easy to spot the deer. But the deer don't like to be seen and hang out in low spots (like the ditches along side the road). The road's although paved and laid out along nice straight lines tend to follow the up and down lay of the land rather closely. Ditches are deepest in the troughs between hill tops and shallowest at the top of hills. Naturally, that is where farmer's like to put their field access gates, so there is often a pull-out for the deer in the ditch to hide behind as you top the hill. Unless you're prepared to take some risk, you'd have to drive at about 20 mph for most of the 150 mile route. The people that publish the paper don't get it to me in time to allow that and still meet the delivery times promised in my contract.