Critter Crashes: How to Avoid Deer and Other Animals on a Motorcycle

Illustration by John Breakey

Updated. For the first three and half decades of my riding career, I was oblivious to the hazards presented by deer and other animals on the road. Even though I ride frequently in the mountains, went to college in Wisconsin, and have ridden tens of thousands of miles in deer country, much it after dark, I had encountered one elk and a few cattle actually on the road and seen one deer. Animals simply weren't a consideration for me until one night in the coastal mountains of Southern California, when a smallish mule deer leapt down onto the road from an embankment on the right. I hit it at about 40 mph just as it landed, punting it across the road and down a steep cliff on the opposite side, fortunately without crashing. Around that same time, a coworker from Sport Rider hit another deer at a higher speed, splitting the deer in two and crashing. The rider walked away mostly because he was wearing good protective gear and a lot of it.

Since then, I've had increasingly frequent deer encounters, so far without further contact. In November, riding on a road in the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains just after the sun went behind them, I was almost hit by a deer bouncing off the front of an oncoming SUV. The other driver and I both stopped and pondered about how to stop the suffering of the animal, but it died before he could carry out the idea of running over its head. Less than a mile up the road, I came upon two more deer simply standing on the road. They didn't move as I approached, and I stopped about 50 feet away. After I honked and revved my engine, they finally got off the road. Months before (fortunately in a car), I had encountered a big mountain lion on the same road after dark. It seemed quite willing to challenge the car for the road and was in no hurry to leave, even when we stopped 20 feet away.

The deer detector "sees" animals using infra-red sensors.

Anyway, during the last few years, my awareness of animals, particularly deer, has risen, as has my interest in avoiding them. This seems to have coincided with a general increase in the deer population nationwide and a resulting rise in collisions with deer. People spend more time in rural areas, since more people are moving out of cities. There is a deer-vehicle crash every eight minutes in Michigan. Of course, deer aren't only animals vehicles hit. During the past year, I have read of motorcycle collisions involving moose, bison, cattle, dogs, and other animals, but deer are the most common impact points. In a few areas, deer collisions outnumber all other accidents. About 150 Americans a year die as a result of 700,000 collisions with deer, which reportedly cause over a billion dollars in damage.

A lighted sign warns motorists of the animal's presence.

A disproportionate number of those fatalities are motorcyclists. The Wisconsin DOT site devoted to the deer problem says that while only 2% of car-deer collisions were fatal to humans, 84.9% of the motorcycle-deer crashes involved human fatalities. (This percentage has increased in recent years.) The deer do even worse. Wisconsin also sponsors the Deer-Vehicle Crash Information Clearinghouse (DVCIC), which has a variety of information on the topic.

The DVCIC site also looks at a number of strategies for reducing deer-vehicle collisions (DVCs) including fencing, roadside repellants, reducing deer population through hunting and other means, managing roadside vegatation, in-vehicle warning systems, alternatives to road salting (which attracts deer), and other ideas, but there is not a lot of encouraging information

At the moment there is no clear method of avoiding those accidents short of staying at home under the bed. (And one Minnesota reader has told me that he simply does not ride at night because of the deer issue.) One company as created a deer-detector that flashes lights when deer are sensed near that section of road, but the device is new and probably too costly for widespread deployment. Roadside reflectors seem to have some promise, perhaps because the reflected light causes deer to freeze before they reach the road. Deer whistles? So far, there isn't much research that supports their use, but they don't hurt or cost much either. There is a discussion of the studies that have looked at deer whistles on this page, which found some that even indicate a slightly negative effect from whistles.

I started doing research and asking people who drive a lot at night in deer country for their advice. Some of it was familiar, but I picked up some fresh pointers too.

Deer and other wild animals are designed to be hard to see. Aside from the flickering white tail of some species or reflection from an eye, they simply disappear. However, this absence of reflected light can also tip you off. A "hole" in a white fence or wall or "missing" roadside reflectors at night might be an animal. A reflector that "blinks" might also indicate an animal passing between you and it.

A bison threw a Harley and its rider into the air when the rider tried to pass through a herd crossing a road.