I witnessed a minor Drama in Real Life the other day while biking along the Western Maryland Rail Trail. Several deer were foraging by the side of the trail as I passed them, then I heard a bang and a scream (deer) and another scream (human). A full-grown deer had leapt into the trail and rammed another biker, throwing her off her bike. The biker had scrapes all over her arms and knees, and she was pretty shaken up. She’d just been attacked by a wild animal! Fortunately, she didn’t hit her head (no helmet) or get kicked by the deer, but she was a mess.
My biking companion and I had some ancient first-aid kits and helped her get cleaned up with alcohol prep pads and some antibiotic cream. Our band-aids were too small and not very sticky anymore, so that didn’t help much. We gave her some water, made sure she hadn’t broken her wrist, and talked with her for a while until she was steady enough to get back on the bike. Again, a very minor Drama in Real Life, but I took away a few lessons that I’ll share in case they’re useful for you.
(For anyone who hasn’t read Reader’s Digest, Drama in Real Life was a regular column recounting just what the title says, and the dramas were typically life-or-death. I remember reading one when I was a kid about a Boy Scout who saw someone in a horrible accident that caused an abdominal wound, and their intestines were spilling out. The scout helped push their guts back in (in my distant memory of the story), and it was the most disturbing thing I’d ever read in all my 9 or so years.)
Anyway, take-aways. Always wear a bike helmet! This trail is wide and smooth and level, with only a few back-road crossings and no car traffic. If it’s okay to skip the helmet anywhere, you’d think it’s there. Even if you don’t get rammed by a deer, there are so many ways to fall off a bike. Skulls are so thick but so fragile.
Refresh your first-aid kit. I’m getting a bunch of new and bigger bandages to stick in my bike bag and backpacks, and more antibiotic and antiseptic stuff. Skin is so thin and so fragile.
Deer are big and strong and fast and stupid, and that is a dangerous combination in a non-human (or human) animal. And they are deadly. Depending on how you do the estimates, 150 to 440 people in the United States die from interactions with deer each year, most involving car crashes. The most dangerous time is in the fall, during rutting season (stupid things are stupider when they’re looking to breed). Deer typically run in groups, so if you see one deer crossing a road, assume there are others behind it and watch out. They’re most active at dawn and dusk, so keep an eye on the side of the road and be prepared to stop. If you can’t stop in time, it may be safer to hit the deer than to swerve and potentially hit a tree or another car.
The deer population in the East is probably higher than it’s ever been. In addition to causing dangerous accidents, deer sustain and distribute disease-vector ticks, and they destroy habitat for ground-nesting birds. I’d love to see a wolf- or cougar-reintroduction project that would bring back their predators, but for now the only thing that kills them is hunters and cars. Be careful out there? And please share your own nemesis-deer stories in the comments.
I grew up in DC and the close MD suburbs. I never saw a single deer until a trip to western MD in 1972 when I was 17. Now there are so many of them, even by the zoo in the middle of DC.
Where I lived later in upstate NY they ate many of seedlings of trees we wanted. The differences inside deer exclosures was striking. There were herds of deer on our campus but the university could not do anything due too the pro deer feelings of many alumni.
The city of Ithaca finally started a program to cull them with sharpshooters using silenced guns. I am not sure how that worked out.
It was near impossible to talk with many of the NY anti hunting crowd. I could appreciate their very urban viewpoint but they had little grasp of basic ecology. And there was simply a lot of prejudice against rural hunters,
The deer population grew so fast just within our lifetimes! I also remember that it used to be a thrill to see one. Maryland parks have so many deer now that they do regular cullings and donate the meat to food banks.