Drivers around the country should be especially cautious in the coming weeks as it's peak season for deer-automobile collisions. "Costly auto-deer collisions make a special jump during the mating season, usually October through December, and peak each November," Erik Eckholm of The New York Times reports. Billy Higginbotham, a wildlife specialist at Texas A & M University, explained, "The bucks throw caution to the wind as they chase does during the breeding season. If this happens to carry them across a roadway, they don’t seem to care."
State Farm Insurance estimates that deer collisions over the past two years reached 2.3 million, up 21 percent compared with five years ago, and still more encounters go unreported, Eckholm writes. Terry A. Messmer of Utah State University estimates the true number of annual deer-automobile collisions may be as high as two million. "These crashes are usually most catastrophic for the animals, but they also account for billions of dollars in car repair and medical costs and hundreds of human deaths annually," Eckholm writes.
The collision risk is greatest in West Virginia where a drivers' odds of hitting a deer over the course of a year are one in 42. State Farm noted in a report last month that Iowa is second, with a 1-in-67 chance, and Michigan is third, at 1 in 70. A driver in Hawaii, on the other hand, has only a 1-in-13,011 chance of hitting a deer — "roughly equivalent to the odds of finding a pearl in an oyster shell," Eckholm writes. Feral hogs also run up the risk of collisions during the fall in states like Texas, Florida and California. (Read more)
No comments:
Post a Comment