Eugene weekly., November 21, 2018, Page 12, Image 12

If there's one, there's likely more
Who Killed Bambi?
According to the Oregon Department of Transportation
(ODOT), statewide there are about 7,000 collisions a year
with deer and elk, causing $44 million in damages and
injuring more than 700 people. An average of two people
die per year in these collisions.
Here in Lane County, according to county spokesperson
Devon Ashbridge and Becky Taylor, senior transportation
planner, there were 79 reported vehicle-animal collisions.
Ashbridge says most of them were in November and
during the early morning, 5 to 7 am, and at twilight after
4:30 pm, in clear and dry conditions. Marcola Road had the
most hits with 12, and three other roads had four collisions
each: Jasper-Lowell Road, Row River Road in Cottage
Grove and 30th Avenue in Eugene.
Taylor says, based on the carcasses removed from
county roads, the number of animal strikes is probably
500 times the reported figures. Roadkill is reported to the
Department of Motor Vehicles if someone is injured (aside
from the animal) or the damage exceeds $2,500.
So the bad news is hitting a deer or elk is bad for you,
bad for the animal and bad for your vehicle.
The only good news is now you can eat the deer — if
you are up for it after it’s just bounced off your car. If it
Look for signs along the road
A loud blast can scare deer
was an elk, it’s highly doubtful you or your vehicle will be
up for butchering and transporting the 700 lb animal after
running into it.
So many deer meet your bumper in November for two
main reasons. One of them is the time change making the
commute darker in the evenings; the other is because the
bucks are running around distracted by lust. They are in
rut.
Right around the time you are thinking about the
holidays and about driving to grandma’s house for
Thanksgiving, Bambi and his buddies are thinking about
making cute little deer babies.
Cidney Bowman, wildlife passage coordinator with
ODOT puts it a little more delicately, saying the males
in rut are “not paying as much attention.” And because
rut means the deer are on the move and because deer are
crepuscular — most active at dawn and dusk — this means
they are also most likely to be in the road and make contact
with your car in the darkness of autumn.
On a map of wildlife collisions in Oregon, the Eugene
area doesn’t look too bad. This area looks nothing like
spots outside Roseburg, Klamath Falls and Bend, which
averaged more than 11 collisions per mile per year. Lane
County is more in the two-to-four range.
But that doesn’t mean that roadways aren’t a problem
for deer and elk. Bowman points out that I-5 north of
Eugene shows up as having no problems at all. That’s
because “traffic becomes a barrier,” she says, with cars
bumper-to-bumper acting like a wall, and cutting off the
animals’ habitat.
“Most of the data is around deer and elk,” Bowman says
of animals and roadways. “But it impacts all species.”
Hitting a deer or elk is costly on a number of levels, and
the impacts on animals can also be environmentally costly.
There’s a loss of hunting revenues, the cost to the state for
maintenance crews, the repair and medical bills and finally
“the intrinsic value of wildlife.”
People like to see deer walking around, Bowman says.
To that end, ODOT’s Wildlife Corridor program, which
she says is currently unfunded, revolves around education.
That leaping deer sign posted all around Oregon just
doesn’t get noticed. “Sign fatigue,” Bowman says.
ODOT has a poster at DMV offices listing the damages
as well as advice for avoiding hitting an animal. And
Bowman says wildlife overcrossings and undercrossings
combined with wildlife fencing to guide animals toward
those crossings are 85 percent effective.
And while the beautiful and dramatic crossings in
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November 21, 2018 • eugeneweekly.com