Wow.
There’s a stretch between my home and work where deer often cross. We’ve seen some near accidents, and most years we see one dead on the side of the road.
A friend hit one once, and had those ‘deer whistle’ things installed on her car. Do they work at all?
The Michigan State Police did a study some years back and concluded that those whistles were completely ineffective for reducing collisions with deer.
The whistles work on my sister’s car. Her car was a deer magnet.
Animals follow magnetic “lines of force”/magnetic fields that have existed for millennia, long before cars or roads happened.
You could call them ancestral crossings, sort of.
Smart road crews know where these are and put up deer crossing signs on them.
I know ALL the ancestral crossings for every species in a 10 mile range, here, and manage to watch out for, see and therefore not hit things, ever.
The animals do not understand cars and cross because they are magnetically programmed to do so.
Currently, the Amazon juggernaut is ripping many places that herds of deer lived and crossed habitually, and now they’re befuddled by the loss of their crossing places, not to mention their homes and habitats.
Deer who used to cross in the wooded suburban copses are now getting run over in the middle of town because they’re trying to find someplace else to go live...unsuccessfully.
It’s heartbreaking.
I’m coming to despise Amazon.
We have two HUGE complexes built last year, in addition to the 4 or 5 others within 20 minute drives and now they’re destroying a beautiful historically significant farm for yet another.
If I live long enough, I’m probably going to be surrounded by nothing but Amazon complexes.