Drivers Need to be on the Lookout for Deer

(Radio Iowa) Iowa motorists are reminded to stay alert as fall weather means a host of potential obstacles on the roads, from slow-moving farm equipment to prancing deer. Jim Coffey, a forest wildlife research biologist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, says if you spot one deer, expect there to be more.

“We see that first deer and we’re a little bit in awe, ‘Oh, there’s a deer in front of me,’ but we have to remember that many times, that’s an adult doe deer, and she’ll probably have one or two fawns behind her that really aren’t paying attention to anything other than their mother running across the road,” Coffey says. “In other cases, it’s that buck deer that’s trailing that doe, because he’s trying to tend her, and so we watch the doe and we don’t look and see that second or third deer that’s coming across the highway behind us.” Coffey says drivers need to slow down, use sweeping eye movements from ditch to ditch, and be aware of their surroundings.

“The one that really bothers me the most is tailgating,” Coffey says. “You can’t tell if a deer runs across in front of the car in front of you, but you still need time to break, and so we see people that break and then they get rear-ended by the car that’s behind them. We need to maintain that proper distance — just like the DOT tells us — to allow stopping conditions to happen.” He says Iowa’s deer herd is managed to provide a harvest of up to 120-thousand deer annually. A report from State Farm ranks Iowa as the nation’s fourth-worst state for car-deer accidents, with claims for such wrecks averaging around four thousand dollars.

(Brian Fancher, KLMJ, Hampton)