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As North Carolina's green spaces shrink, man and deer are running into each other at a record rate.
A new study shows deer-related crashes reported to police hit a high last year in Mecklenburg and across the state, as new residents and increasing development gobble up habitat.
With annual deer-mating season just beginning, drivers should really watch out, as crazed deer are more prone to run into traffic and cause accidents, experts say.
Rapid growth across the state also means fewer places to hunt - still the most effective way to cull the deer population, said Jon Shaw, an N.C. Wildlife Commission biologist in charge of Mecklenburg and nine other western counties.
"There are more vehicles on the road and probably more roads than two years ago," Shaw said. "We have to figure out a way to allow hunting in more (populated) areas."
Mecklenburg ranked sixth among N.C. counties last year, with 519 deer-related crashes. That's a 92 percent increase from 2002, according to UNC Chapel Hill's Highway Safety Research Center.
Statewide, nearly one in 10 crashes last year involved deer. Wake County counted the most, with 1,084.
The safety research center, which recently released its study of 2008, has been counting deer-related crashes since 1994. It calls last year's tally an "all-time high." The numbers include incidents where drivers hit deer or swerve to miss them and hit something else.
The study says many more wrecks are likely left uncounted because they aren't reported to police.
"If I see deer and I can stop, I do, to let them by," says Melissa Hagopian of Matthews, whose minivan window was smashed when a six-point buck ran into her in the fall of 2001. "I tend to scan areas by the woods more. ... I'm really tuned in."
The 19,693 deer-related crashes reported statewide last year caused $42 million in damage, according to a spokesman for AAA Carolinas.
For Lincoln County resident Robert McElrath, two collisions he had with deer last year caused more than $8,000 in damage, he said. The latest wreck came in November 2008 when a big buck ran out of the woods onto N.C. 73 and slammed into the side of his Silverado truck.
"He hit me all of a sudden, out of nowhere," said McElrath, a truck accessory salesman. "I never saw the deer and my 12-year-old son asked if I hit something. I stopped, and there he was lying in the road."
McElrath loaded up the kill and took it to a processor in Cleveland County that donates the meat to charity. He hunts and already had a refrigerator full of venison, he said.
"I'm trying to stay away from them, except for during hunting season," he said. "But they're finding me in the road."
