Slice and dice roadkill- tell me your stories!

After two deer decided to try and commit a murder/suicide in front of me and the Murdercycle at 3:30am, and wiped me out, after the reconstructive surgery on my hand healed, I vowed to never lift again. You wanna die? I'll send your ass to hell. 

At about 25 MPH on a super foggy night I hit a medium sized deer in the middle of a major highway. It appeared to be grazing. Licking salt from the road perhaps. It looked up as I passed close enough to scoop it's jugular vein out with the right front headlamp of a light yellow Saab Sonett V4. The headlamp broke, and the light yellow car was covered in blood. Had to use the windshield washers. No other damage, but it took hours to wash all the mess off. Had to drive home through significant miles of suburbia, fortunately without encountering LEO. Photo of car in story, I don't know if before or after.

Hard to believe this has been six years:

I wasn't driving but it was my team mate at summit point 2013 when a deer leapt out onto track and was hit by an Alfa Milano which bounced it up over our race boat. Video evidence:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0TS0Ve1sUL8

And still frame of the best shot:

I find it kind of amusing the utter lack of facial expression on these things when something absolutely devastating is about to happen. Like, are you paying attention at all?? And I’m so glad I don’t live near something as enormous as elk. I guess I live near tons of beef though, but hopefully they’re better corralled. If a ever hit a bear that disabled the car I guess ol’ Steve-o here would be waiting it out in the car for someone else to come along. No hoofing it after that one. 

A number of years back, I hit a deer going to see my family up in Vermont. Crested a hill on I-91, it was in the middle of the road and I rolled in the gas before I hit it. I had to yank the foreleg out of the wheel well. My (young at the time) kids woke up and I told them we had a flat tire.

We were in a white rental car. There was blood and gore down the driver's side. I took pictures (which I won't link) and washed it before I turned it in for another car.

I've had a deer jump *over* an RX-7, front to back, on I-40 near Durham, NC. The combination of vehicle speed and deer agility made it so the deer never made contact.

I've hit countless smaller critters. I always feel bad about it, too.

Over the last 22 years, I have helped at least a dozen deer move on to their next lives, strangely most of them timed their demise so that they were mid stride and "crouching" when they made contact, minimizing damage to my vehicles. With the deer being at their lowest point the chrome bumpers of my Suburbans took most of the blows. In addition to bent bumpers, I have lost a couple windshields, multiple headlights and grilles, and one or two hits caused significant ($5k+) damage.

The strangest animal/car fatality I've had involved an owl and a CB antenna. Traveling well above the speed limit at night on the NYS thruway a large white owl appeared in front of the car and flared up in front of the windshield. While it cleared the glass, it was sliced in half by the magnetic 48" CB antenna on the roof. The sunroof was open. The collision was so surreal I had to pull over and back up to take a look.  What was left was not pretty. 

One rule of thumb I have always followed: don't swerve. While I certainly make every effort to avoid the collisions, I know of too many people killed crashing when trying to swerve around animals in the road.

My wife hit a deer doing 70 through Nevada at 1 in the morning. I was deployed to Iraq, and she was headed home to stay with family. That was in a ‘99 Pontiac Grand Prix; got a new front clip out of the deal. Funniest hit? I dinged a squirrel with the air dam on my truck. Watched him stagger across the road in my rearview mirror. Worst hit? Driving home after work at 11 pm, and saw a flash of white just behind my headlight beams. My brain registered “skunk” just about the time my front left tire rolled right over him. Took two weeks to get the smell out of the heater vents...

Flying a helicopter I probably average two or three bird strikes a year. With the rotor speed set to 'puree', there usually isn't much left to see and no damage to the aircraft. Just a little smudge and some feathers. My crew saw the body of this one veer to the left and we thought we missed it. I pulled this out of the rotor hub on post flight.

About ten years ago, I was flying at night without NVGs and felt a heavy thump. At first, I thought a bird had glanced off the side. Then I smelled it and my shins felt moist. It was 2 am on a pitch black night over forested hills, so we continued another 10 minutes to our destination. It was a solid hit of what I think had been a duck. I'm really glad it wasn't a couple feet higher.

Deer are nothing, moose are when things get interesting. 

In reply to dculberson :

Summit Point is a magnet for animals. In the early 1980s we had a cow wander onto the main straight around dusk during the EMRA 4 hour. No one hit it Around the same time at Bridgehampton a friend of mine had a small deer wind up in the cockpit of his LolaT88/90 S 2000 car. He was pretty banged up, but survived, unlike the deer.

L5wolvesf said:

The slice and dice lead in suggests you may be looking for recipes too.

When I was 6 or so, a large bird flew in front of our '57 Ford wagon. We were going cross-country, up a mountain, I think. Found it embedded in the grille, when we stopped at a Wayside Park. Back then, I believe Wayside Parks were more prevalent than fast food places. My Mom identified it as a Chinese Pheasant. The Sears Roebuck campstove was convenient (we always camped) and  we lived on a farm (so plucking a chicken or a duck happened most Sundays). I don't have the recipe, but I recall it tasted pretty good.

In 2004 I absolutely annihilated a good-sized deer in my GTI VR6 on a backroad while heading home from work. I didn't even realize what had happened until after I'd pulled off the road. One second I'm going 45 or so, and all of a sudden it was like someone threw a fur blanket over my windshield for a split-second.

Bag didn't deploy, insurance was on the fence but ultimately paid to fix it. Body shop had the car for the better part of 8 months—completely back burnered me. Knowing what I know now, I should have just totaled it. 

I've come real close a handful of times since, but I'd rather not experience that again. It's the reason I generally avoid country roads if I'm on the bike at night. 
 

I had one rather unusual animal encounter. I was probably doing not much above the speed limit just South of the border into Washington state in my old fiberglass Jensen CV8 when I hit a pig.  Catch was that it was a dead pig that had fallen off the truck right in front of us, which was probably a very good thing, as pigs are a lot of density very close to the ground and can normally do a lot of damage. I got away with only some paint scratches (there is no denting a fiberglass body it either springs back or fractures).

Gave some thought to tossing the carcass in the boot and heading for home, but we'd just come over the border for a lengthy trip so figured that would be a bad idea....

A couple years ago I hit an alligator that must've been crossing the road after I had just dropped a friend off one night in south LA. Judging by how far he was stretched across the lane he was pushing 8-10ft.  I got away with a few scratches but no major damage, surprisingly. 

I have to do it differently.  I got hit by a deer near a shopping mall.  Who knew deer got depressed and were suicidal?  $3500 in damage to my aluminum F150.

Here in semi-rural Michigan, there are two types of drivers: Those who have hit a deer, and those who will hit a deer. I've been a member of the former club for many decades. Last fall, my daughter joined me:

A lot of folks around here, especially those with trucks and SUVs, put brush guards on. I've thought about it in the past, but I've also heard them called "damage multipliers", so I've held off. Basically, the way I see it, there's not much you can do to protect the vehicle, so your best bet is good lighting and being very attentive. Especially on rural road at night, I'm always scanning the shoulders looking for movement. I've had 3-car-deer collisions in my life, and while none have been too serious, I'd like to keep it that way.

Speaking of lighting, I don’t know how much $$$ it is to get an active IR “viewer” (thinking here of a camera that can see reflected IR from a spotlight) with great resolution and refresh rate, but I’d sure flood the area if I could. Wasn’t Cadillac at least experimenting with IR HUD at one point? It was passive though IIRC 

In reply to P3PPY :

Active IR is really good at making LIDAR cameras useless, btw.

Once, on the way back from a concert with a car full of people, I thought it would be fun to roll over a dead armadillo. I was surprised by the resilience of the carcass- I did not steamroll it like I anticipated, it was more like rolling over a curb at speed.

I was also surprised by the pungency of the odor that greeted us when we exited the car.

b13990 said:

Once, on the way back from a concert with a car full of people, I thought it would be fun to roll over a dead armadillo. I was surprised by the resilience of the carcass- I did not steamroll it like I anticipated, it was more like rolling over a curb at speed.

I was also surprised by the pungency of the odor that greeted us when we exited the car.

That reminds me of the episode with a raccoon carcass and a semi I mentioned before. I was maybe 30 feet behind his front tires and I saw it coming. I was expecting explosion or total smear but instead it launched across the lanes in one piece just like hitting a baby carrot with the flesh side of your hand

Revival of the thread:

I've been lucky. I came up on a deer carcass laying in the middle of my interstate highway lane in central NJ. It was 3 AM, there was absolutely zero traffic, and I was fighting to stay awake. Since it was only a dark spot in the road, and very low to the ground, I almost hit it. Swerved at the very last second and missed it.

I had a really weird bird hit. I crossed a really rough railroad crossing that was elevated about four feet above the road, with a steep incline before and after the railroad bed. I had slowed to between 5 and 10 MPH, and as I came over the crest, there was a pigeon walking in the road about 25 feet ahead, walking out of my lane and into the center lane. I proceeded slowly (speed limit 25), barely gathering speed.

Timing it perfectly so that I was too close to see it, the pigeon reversed course, and walked directly into my path.  There was a small, soft, crunch from under the left front tire. I think it was depressed.

You guys have me spooked a bit. I see deer frequently on my nighttime commute home from Daytona Beach. Also saw a bear cross the road along there, about 9:30 on a Sunday morning. While Florida deer are relatively small, they're big enough to do plenty of damage. Florida black bears on the other hand, aren't small at all; this guy was all of chest high to me on all fours (I'm 6').

In reply to dculberson :

A deer bounced over our race boat has to be one of the funniest sentences in racing.

My weirdest hit was driving 70mph in TX, SW of Ft Worth. I did not know at the time that roadrunners (the bird, not the car) could fly short distances. I saw it running to cross the road, guess it got scared and tried to fly; so instead of getting squashed under my Dodge 1500 tires, it smashed full force into the windshield! Scared me silly, but I still had a better day than it! I thought sure the windshield would explode, but it surprised me and held. Bit messy, though.

Hit a deer in OH on Turnpike driving a tractor-trailer; right front corner. Took out the Aero-bumper, bounced 3 times down the side... turned out to be $3500 in body damage. And it was small.

I leased an 04 Mazda RX-8 back in August of 04. It was a two-year lease. About 1 year into the lease I decided that while I really loved the car, I didn't need it, and we had just bought our second house so the $300 a month could be better used towards the house instead of towards a toy. I set uo an ad on swap-a-lease and a guy from CT contacted me about taking it over. We spoke with Mazda, and the dealer, and set up a day to do the swap.

My sister loved that car(maybe more than I did), and requested that before it went to the other guy that she'd like to take it for one last spin. I said no problem, and headed over to my parents house where my sister was still living. Set her on her way while I hung out with my parents, and my then maybe 3 year old son. I figured she'd be gone maybe 15 to 20 minutes. Well 45 minutes later I was getting worried. I think I tried calling her, but got no response, and then really started panicking.

Turns out during her last spirited drive she hit a rather large raccoon that got stuck in the drivers side wheel opening. It did some damage to the front bumper in the form of the paint being a bit spider webbed from the urethane bumper popping in and then back out. The other thing was it partially ripped the inner fender liner out with those stupid plastic clips. Apparently this all happened near where a friend of hers lived. She limped the car over there, and they figured out how to hold the inner fender liner up so it wasn't rubbing the tire, and then she came back home, tail between her legs. 

Now granted I was meeting the new owner at the train station near the dealer at around 9 AM the next morning. I left early, went to the dealer, and found that they had a few of the stupid clips in stock, and I put the inner liner back together as best I could,  and then went to get the new owner at the train station. The transaction went smooth, and he never said anything about the paint(it wasn't really noticeable anyway). I found out years later that he gave the car to his 17 year old daughter and she totaled it about 7 months later. 

The legend of this story in our family is pretty funny, because my son who was around three or so remembers it differently. He claims Auntie hit a moose with daddies car. Lol . The legend of the RX-8, and the moose. There are no Moose in South-Eastern MA by the way.

I just came back from a 15 hour each way drive and I realized that the 14 hours of the Press On Regardless RoadRally oddly took the edge off my fear of hitting a deer! I mounted the rally car's light bar to the front of the minivan for the trip so I even saw more deer in the periphery than I otherwise would have, but I think the difference is that I drove through all these crazy back roads and saw mice crossing the road (a first for me when driving) and frogs, even an angry raccoon but I never once hit or saw a deer! I think it kind of reset my odometer on realizing what the odds are. 
 

That's all -- and yes I saw a truck ahead of me that had just wiped one out- airbags deployed and all