Has anyone noticed that they've been having far less close calls with deer while driving?
My theory is they've begun to evolve to not jump in front of cars. Which makes sense since getting obliterated by a car is certainly a selective pressure
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Has anyone noticed that they've been having far less close calls with deer while driving?
My theory is they've begun to evolve to not jump in front of cars. Which makes sense since getting obliterated by a car is certainly a selective pressure
Every year the forests get smaller and more fragmented. More land gets turned into lawns, and fields or covered with concrete. The air and the ground water gets poisoned. The native plants replaced by invasives.
Most likely, there are just fewer deer.
Overall deer population is steady to growing, and has grown since the 1950s. This website has a nice graphic
https://www.deerfriendly.com/decline-of-deer-populations
If anything I'd expect way more collisions give the rising populations combined with the issues you listed
In my area they literally wait to cross the street it's kinda nuts
Same, I have a small area on the edge of town with a road that only locals use which cuts through a lot of trees. All the older deer will wait and are rarely a hazard. All the fawns though? Gotta be extra careful of them.
I lived in SE Idaho and the amount of roadkill was staggering. Without fail everyday on the way to work I would see new deer carcasses and other assorted roadkill.
I live in Alaska now and I had a deer standing on the side of the highway suddenly decide to cross right before I reached it. I slammed on the breaks and hit if going about 15 miles an hour. It went directly underneath my rig without my tires hitting it and got back up and ran off. Too close of a call and I hope it was not seriously injured.
Interesting, coming from rural Georgia we used to have to dodge deer all through the fall in my childhood. Slamming on brakes was a common occurrence. But when I got older it became rare. I traveled much of the state for work and during "peak" seasons with much less issues.
Georgia does have a much higher population density than Idaho and Alaska. Meaning deer would be under more pressure to adapt to avoiding cars
Explain squirrel behavior then.
Here's something absolutely everyone should know:
If you ever have an animal running on the road (that you can see in time), slow down and dim or turn off your lights. They'll run into the forest almost immediately. When the lights are on they are just trying to get away from them by running in with the lights at their back, they don't know that the lights are moving and that they won't follow them.
I know I shouldnβt, but Iβm gonna hit that like a freight train.
One of my favorite copypastas:
Trains are really unpredictable. Even in the middle of a forest two rails can appear out of nowhere, and a 1.5-mile fully loaded coal drag, heading east out of the low-sulfur mines of the PRB, will be right on your ass the next moment.
I was doing laundry in my basement, and I tripped over a metal bar that wasn't there the moment before. I looked down: "Rail? WTF?" and then I saw concrete sleepers underneath and heard the rumbling.
Deafening railroad horn. I dumped my wife's pants, unfolded, and dove behind the water heater. It was a double-stacked Z train, headed east towards the fast single track of the BNSF Emporia Sub (Flint Hills). Majestic as hell: 75 mph, 6 units, distributed power: 4 ES44DC's pulling, and 2 Dash-9's pushing, all in run 8. Whole house smelled like diesel for a couple of hours!
Fact is, there is no way to discern which path a train will take, so you really have to be watchful. If only there were some way of knowing the routes trains travel; maybe some sort of marks on the ground, like twin iron bars running along the paths trains take. You could look for trains when you encounter the iron bars on the ground, and avoid these sorts of collisions. But such a measure would be extremely expensive. And how would one enforce a rule keeping the trains on those paths?
A big hole in homeland security is railway engineer screening and hijacking prevention. There is nothing to stop a rogue engineer, or an ISIS terrorist, from driving a train into the Pentagon, the White House or the Statue of Liberty, and our government has done fuck-all to prevent it.
... the buck?
No. The buck stops here.
But they are already buck naked. Might as well go buck wild.
What the buck are you on about