Deer accidents are a topic of great concern with many people. I believe that almost everybody knows of someone who has hit a deer with a vehicle. I personally have added two deer to the accident list myself when I “grilled” a couple myself with my car. Under the request of the Clinton County Board of Supervisors and the Clinton County Conservation Board, I did a small study of deer vs. automobile accidents. I used data provided by the Clinton County Sheriff’s Department to determine trends and locations of deer accidents in 2004.

The Sheriff’s Department gave me a list of deer vs. automobile accidents that were reported and had a value of damage of more than $1,000. I only used data from outside of city limits. I then plotted the accidents on a map using our GIS software and a digital map of Clinton County. There were 136 accidents involving deer during 2004. When I plotted the information on the map the results that came up with are amazing.

Most of the accidents occurred on state highways to the tune of 80% of all reported accidents. Next were the county blacktop roads, where 15% of the deer accidents happened. Only 5% of the accidents were on county gravel roads. The majority of the accidents were near the city of DeWitt on Highway 61 extending to Welton and Delmar, and on Highway 30 near DeWitt as well. Through this corridor is the bulk of traffic that flows through Clinton County. During 2002, according to the Department of Transportation, 15,900 vehicles traveled through this area daily. Comparatively speaking approximately 400 to 600 vehicles travel on county black tops and 5 to 50 travel on county gravel roads. I know this could be considered old data, however with an increasing population of new drivers I can only expect that the amount of vehicles traveling on all roads have increased.

If you take the high volume of traffic along with higher speeds it yields a greater chance of an accident with an animal. However, the surrounding area and season do have an influence on when these accidents occur. Near DeWitt there are many areas that deer prefer such as nice woods, streams and open areas to forage on. Not only near DeWitt do we have these deer preferred areas. These areas are all over the county. I did a brief survey of where some of the accidents occurred. Most of the areas had a small tree line or creek bed in a field that the deer would run to cross the road to the other tree line or creek bed. Now remember, I am talking about trends, I do know that deer do show up in odd places where there is no cover for them to hide in. The season also has an affect on deer movement. October, November, and December have the highest percentages of deer accidents, these months are during the deer rutting season. Also the deer are losing most of their cover due to the harvest and it is hunting season. Hunters push deer out of their habitats and into new terrain.

Some of this information is a little scary. Nobody wants to be involved in an accident of any kind, much less with an animal. The only advice I can give you is to be alert. I hit a deer when I was taking a drink of coffee from a travel mug while driving to a gas station. They can pop up at any time especially when you least expect it! There is a colored version of this map available at www.clintoncountyiowa.com/conservation/irvm . The information regarding traffic counts were on the Department of Transportation web site at www.dot.state.ia.gov.