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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!).
There is a strong argument for reintroducing predators like Lynx or even wolves. I watched an article recently where Lynx have been reintroduced to parts of Germany. Obviously there is opposition to this, mainly from livestock farmers and for obvious reasons, but I think if managed effectively it could work.
I think that part of the problem may be the numbers of deer in the Highlands being unnaturally high for the estates' shooting interests. Some estates are culling for environmental reasons - see Glen Feshie...
https://cameronmcneish.wordpress.com/2014/02/23/glen-feshie-a-new-beginning/
I think that part of the problem may be the numbers of deer in the Highlands being unnaturally high for the estates' shooting interests.
If this really were the case, then the Deer commission, then SNH, have had the power to impose cull levels on estates for decades.
The complex answer is 'it's not as simple as that', there's myriad factors at play, including Increases in deer population to exploit food availability caused by the reduction in woolly maggot numbers, plus increases in woodland Roe population to exploit food availability caused by the increased red deer culls
https://www.bds.org.uk/index.php/documents/146-deer-mgt-report-6417/file
Personally I think that fences are a big part of the problem, they interrupt the natural patterns of deer migration into the woods in winter, leading to overgrazing on the moor and those areas of woodland that deer can access - I have felt for some years that 'lots of little fences' protecting smaller coupes of regeneration within forests would produce better results than huge perimeter fences to keep the deer out entirely.