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On March 17, 2005, Cynthia Mallette, 61, was about a mile from home in rural Yell Township, Iowa, when three deer ran into the road in front of her. The retired factory worker hit the brakes, but the vehicle's front left side struck one of the deer. The animal was fatally wounded. Her minivan's front end was crushed.Mallette was mostly unhurt, which made her a typical deer-crash victim. Fellow Iowan James Slobodnik wasn't so lucky. Last August, Slobodnik, 71, was driving on State Highway 92 in Columbus Junction when he hit a deer. The impact sent his car sailing into a ditch. He died at the scene.
The United States has a Bambi problem. The number of vehicle and deer collisions is conservatively put at 1.5 million a year. One major factor: The deer population has grown from 500,000 to 30 million in the past century. Texas, for example, is now home to 3.5 million deer, compared to 225,000 in 1940.
The suburbs, meanwhile, keep sprawling. By one estimate, 2.2 mil-lion wild acres are developed each year. "We're encroaching more and more into the deer's environment," says Keith Knapp, director of the University of Wisconsin's Deer-Vehicle Crash Information Clearinghouse. "This is a big problem."
And a frustrating one. Says Jim Nall, a traffic and safety engineer with Colorado's transportation department: "It's impossible to warn the public exactly when and where wildlife will appear."
In Nall's state, deer-vehicle crashes have more than tripled since 1993. Colorado isn't alone. In a 2003 national study by Utah State University's Jack H. Berryman Institute, one-third of state wildlife and transportation officials said deer-vehicle collisions were on the rise in their states.
Deer aren't the only four-legged hazards. The country's moose population is increasing too. Herds have lately emerged in New York and Connecticut. Massachusetts -- where they were rarely seen through the 1970s -- is now home to about 1,000. Last year, the state had 52 reported moose-vehicle crashes, up from 8 five years earlier.
Those crashes can be catastrophic. At six feet tall and weighing half a ton, moose are far deadlier than deer. One in 250 drivers who hit a moose wind up dead, compared to one in 5,000 who hit a deer. A moose hit by a car typically flies onto the hood and roof, and sometimes goes through the windshield. "I've seen cases where the force of the moose left the car looking like someone took a can opener and opened the roof right up," says Bill Woytek, deer and moose project leader for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. Massachusetts recorded its first-ever moose-vehicle death in July 2003, when high school teacher Amber Ronzoni, 24, hit one on the Massachusetts Turnpike.
Experts say better tools are needed to cut the number of animal-car crashes. What's not working well, they add, are car-mounted whistles that supposedly emit an ultrasonic sound that scares deer. "Deer crossing" signs aren't a lot better; drivers ignore them.
One promising strategy uses roadside reflectors (price tag: about $10,000 per mile) to convert a car's headlight beam into a multicolored moving light "fence." The unnatural light pattern startles animals into stopping until cars pass. Deer-vehicle collisions dropped by 68 percent along U.S. Highway 36 near Boulder after the devices were installed there. Another high-tech fix being tested in 12 states: a sensor system linked to flashing roadside signs that tell drivers when animals are in the road.
Other strategies may be even better. In 2003, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found the best way to cut animal-car crashes was to fence off roads and build under- and overpasses for animals to use. It's not cheap. One estimate pegs fence-building at $42,000 per mile (for one side of the road). Underpasses can cost millions.
In another approach, researchers are studying whether birth-control drugs -- now awaiting FDA approval -- might help control the number of deer. Then there's "herd reduction," aka hunting. "It's very effective," says Allan Williams, the insurance institute's former chief scientist. "And it's very controversial."
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