By MATT PIKE
St. Joseph Post
Fall means harvest season and hunting, but with that also comes more deer on the roadways.
Seargent Shane Hux with Troop H of the Missouri Highway Patrol warns motorists to be on the lookout for deer
“You know we got harvest going on, that’s pushing the deer out of the fields, less daylight, going to have Daylight Savings Time coming up, the deer patters going to definitely be changing,” Hux tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post. “So, always be alert for deer, not just where the signs are posted but deer can be anywhere.”
Hux says the peak times of deer movement are around dusk and dawn. Hux with Troop H in St. Joseph says if you see a deer in the roadway, you should slow down and do what you can to try to get it off the roadway.
“What we don’t want people to do is to swerve to try miss the deer, on a two lane highway you may have other traffic there in the way, and what we see a lot of the times is people do swerve, miss the deer, but yet they travel off the roadway strike a fixed object and then overturn,” Hux explains. “It becomes a more severe crash just because someone chose to swerve to miss the deer.”
Hux adds another important thing to think about if you crash into a deer, is the deer’s carcass.
“You know if someone doesn’t report the crash, the possibility the carcass could be laying in the roadway and cause a hazard,” Hux says. “So, it’s very important anytime you hit a deer, even if you don’t need a crash report, still notify law enforcement so we can go out there and make sure the deer itself is not laying in the roadway to make a hazard.”
Hux says an influx of deer is seen around dusk and dawn and to keep in mind if you see one, there is probably another one right behind it.
