Fuzz, page 18
Anyway. What the film revealed. If the roof collapses as the passenger is thrown forward—and now I borrow the gently evocative phrasing of Swedish moose crash test dummy designer Magnus Gens—“crumbled steel interferes with the head’s path.” Borrowing the less gentle phrasing of “Moose and Other Large Animal Wildlife Vehicle Collisions,” “axial compression … causes bony fragments to be pushed into the spinal canal.” Moose falling on driver’s head crushes neck vertebra, sharp pieces of which slice spinal nerves, causing full or partial paralysis. Also disturbingly common: broken face bones and lacerations from hitting the windshield in mid-shatter. The wounds become infected by “debris, hair, entrails, and feces.” And finally, should the two of you manage to survive the impact, one of you now has a flailing moose in his lap.
Making matters worse: the long legs of a moose may boost the animal’s eyes up above headlight range, eliminating the reflective shine that helps drivers see it in the dark. (The tapetum lucidum, which does the reflecting, is actually there to aid their vision, not ours. It boosts mammals’ vision in low-light conditions by bouncing the light back into the retina a second time.)
If you plan to be driving in far northern regions where tall ungulates are likely to dart into the road, you might want to consider a Saab or a Volvo, as their roof pillars and windshields are designed and reinforced with input from Magnus Gens’s awesome moose crash test dummy. Magnus received funding from the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute, which shortly thereafter received a plea to help design a camel crash test dummy.
A camel is taller and heavier, and therefore even deadlier, than a moose. More of the roof is likely to collapse directly onto drivers’ heads. If they lean or duck sideways to dodge the hurtling ungulate, now their back is likely to be broken instead of their neck. Of sixteen Saudis whose cars struck camels, one study relates, nine wound up with complete quadriplegia. Along certain stretches of highway, camel density has been as high as nineteen per mile. These animals are not wild, but their owners often allow them to roam. Sometimes even, in days past, encouraged it. Because until recently, Saudi law required the driver to pay the camel’s owner for the loss. “Therefore,” reports a team of neuroscientists at Riyadh Armed Forces Hospital, “some camel owners have been known to push their animals onto the highways after sunset to claim compensation after the accidents.” A pox on them. Debris, hair, entrails, and feces on their heads.
Summing up: Do not brake excessively or swerve wildly for a small creature, no matter how cute. Do swerve and brake and run off the road for a camel on an empty desert highway, because there’s nothing to run into but sand. Never speed in moose country. About deer, I don’t know what to tell you. The IIHS study suggests you should brake or swerve only when there’s the space to do so safely, never to the point of skidding or losing control, because deer impacts don’t reliably injure parties other than deer. The alternative is what, plowing into them? Who does this? People brake. And if they brake hard, the nose of their car drops down and the impact happens lower, perhaps at the level of the deer’s legs, causing more of the torso to pinwheel toward the windshield. And the cars behind to rear-end you. What’s a rational person to do?
Let’s ask the most rational driver of all: the autonomous car. If it slams its brakes, does it only do so when no one’s tailgating? If it swerves, does it do so only if the path is clear? If either criterion is missing, will it go ahead and run straight over a beagle or a skunk? I posed these questions to Google/Waymo’s self-driving car media relations person, but she refused to have relations with me. I got no answers and no one to interview, and soon she stopped replying altogether. Somewhere in the middle of our standoff, one of Uber’s autonomous vehicles, traveling 43 mph, plowed into an Arizona pedestrian without braking or swerving. As if she were a squirrel. Seems like they don’t have the answers, either.
In 2012, a North Dakota woman named Donna called in to a morning talk-radio program hoping to draw attention to a situation that had been bothering her. She’d been in three car crashes involving deer, and each time, it had happened near a DEER XING sign on a busy road. “Why,” she lamented in a recorded encounter that would eventually top one million internet hits, “are we encouraging deer to cross the road in such high-traffic areas?” A short silence followed. “You seem to think,” one of the hosts began tentatively, “that deer-crossing signs are telling deer where to cross?” As nicely as possible, he explained that the signs are meant for us, the drivers, to tell us to slow down.
They might as well be talking to deer. Drivers don’t slow down when they see a DEER XING sign. This is true of Uniform Traffic Control Device W11-3, the standard black-on-yellow, diamond-shaped sign, and it’s true of fancy blinking neon deer warning signs—including the model with three neon deer “activated in sequence to give the impression” of a bounding buck. I am familiar with this technology from a neon sign in front of a strip joint across the street from a San Francisco pizzeria I used to eat at. A bosomy nude danced a sequence of three moves, over and over. I bet you drivers slowed for her.
Warning signs work slightly better when drivers can see some evidence of real danger. This was demonstrated by a researcher who, every Tuesday at dusk, for an unnamed number of weeks, hauled a deer carcass into place a few feet away from a flashing deer-crossing warning. Cars slowed by an average of 7 mph. Likewise, a “realistic taxidermist deer mount” set up in the brush just back from the road, near a blinking neon sign proclaiming “Deer on Road When Lights Are Flashing,” caused a 12-mph drop in the average speed.
Did drivers slow down to heed the danger posed by what they took to be a real deer, or did they slow down to gawk at a carcass or, more arrestingly, the odd spectacle of a taxidermy museum specimen in the weeds? I’d guess the latter. That’s what drivers do: they ease off the gas and rubberneck. Who wouldn’t slow to check out a stuffed deer? Maybe throw it in the back of the truck? Pull over, Jeb, somebody left a full-body deer mount by the side of the road. Now you need JEB CROSSING signs.
Nonetheless, a valid concept: pair the warning device with the danger, at least intermittently. Don’t cry deer unless deer are around. The best results have come from systems in which the warning message is activated by a signal from solar-powered animal sensors. For instance, a sign that only lights up when something more or less the height of a deer breaks a radar or laser or microwave beam near the road.
So why are we not seeing these systems everywhere? The answer perhaps lies in the woe-laden tale of the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University. In 2005, they tried out one such system in Yellowstone National Park. Alas, the contractors were unaware of certain laws and park regulations pertaining to what could and couldn’t be put up on the side of the road. The system called for erecting eighteen poles per mile, which was far too many, and, PS, they had to be wood, not metal, and they couldn’t be that garish color. There were software problems, faulty hardware, budget troubles, topsoil issues, signal failures, false negatives, false positives. Lots of false positives. Drivers were warned a deer was lurking near the road when really it was snow falling. Or a car pulling onto the shoulder. Or moving plants. Caution! Milkweed swaying in wind!
When the danger is strictly to the animal, not the driver or the car, forget about it. In 2009, the National Park Service decided to see whether they could save endangered tortoises by installing flashing lights and WATCH FOR TORTOISE signs along two stretches of highway in Mojave National Preserve. A short distance along, they placed a model of a desert tortoise on the side of the road. Then they hid nearby to see if drivers slowed or braked or even craned their necks in a way that suggested they were, in fact, watching for tortoises. Nope.
If only it were possible, as Donna believed, to communicate with the animals rather than the humans. With deer, this has been attempted in various disappointing ways: bumper-mounted deer whistles that don’t work, roadside deer repellents that don’t work. What has sometimes seemed to help is to mount angled reflectors along the highway to redirect the beam from approaching headlights and enhance “ungulate awareness” of an approaching car. A study in Wyoming recently delivered some promising results, though not with the reflectors they were testing. It was the study’s control—reflectors wrapped in white canvas to keep them from reflecting—that worked. The researchers speculate that the deer might have been responding to the white bags as they would to the white butt and underside of a fellow deer’s tail. Tail flagging—raising the tail and flashing the white—is thought to be what a startled white-tailed deer does to communicate danger to its companions.
I am skeptical, only because I have read the 1978 paper by researchers at Pennsylvania State University who tried to warn away white-tailed deer by erecting roadside plywood cutouts of deer rear ends with tails a-flagging. On some, the raised tail was painted white; on others, an actual deer tail had been nailed in place. Sadly, because who wouldn’t want to see our nation’s highways lined with plywood deer asses with decomposing tails, none of it worked.
The Wyoming group also theorized—and I’m with them here—that the reason the death rates were lower with the canvas bags is that drivers were slowing down to look at them. Hold up, Jeb. White thing on a stick.
Getting back to Donna for a moment. You could in fact direct deer to where you want them to cross the road—not with a DEER XING sign but with a wildlife-specific overpass. If the overpass is combined with fencing along the side of the roadway, the animals can essentially be funneled to the safe crossing point. The challenge is that crossing structures and fencing are costly, and it may be impossible to install them in the places they’re needed. And with white-tailed deer in some parts of the country, at some times of the year, they’re sort of needed everywhere. (Wildlife overpasses and underpasses tend to be used for species that migrate en masse to breed or find food or for populations whose genetic health is threatened by a highway that fragments their population.)
Here’s the problem with deer and headlights. When it’s dark, deer don’t necessarily make the connection between the little lights and the big car behind. Even if they do, a pair of automotive headlights communicates practically no useful information as it hurtles closer. Pinpoints of light don’t “loom” perceptibly, so it’s not obvious that they’re approaching, let alone how quickly. Travis and Tom have been testing something that could help: a rear-facing light bar that illuminates the vehicle’s grill. The hope is that deer, now able to make out that there is in fact a large object barreling toward them, will get out of the way more quickly and dependably. Now that it’s dark, we’re headed out onto the Plum Brook back roads to collect some data. The idea is to compare flight initiation distance—FID—and the likelihood of freezing behavior (deer in the headlights) with and without the helpful lighting.
The main Plum Brook parking lot faces a field of corn stubble, that dry, dead snowdusted brown that is, to me, the color of an Ohio winter. Tom is squatting on his heels, attaching the rig to the front of Travis’s truck. He looks up. “Do you hear the woodcock?” The buzzing I assumed was an insect is in fact part of the courtship dance of the male woodcock. In keeping with that rural paradox I will never quite grasp, Tom has a fondness both for wildlife and for hunting it.
While the men ready the equipment, I take their range finder and walk off toward a clique of deer in the field. A range finder is a sort of laser tape measure. Aim the beam onto an object, and the readout tells precisely how far away it is. The FID of these deer, by my estimation, is about three hundred feet. They’re wary, with reason. Range finders around here are used mostly by hunters, to calculate bullet-drop compensation when taking aim at distant targets.
Travis yells that we’re heading out. I leave off harassing the deer and head back to the truck.
The back roads have few streetlights, making it hard to see a deer in the distance. We’re feeling them instead, with a heat-sensing system called FLIR (forward-looking infrared). FLIR displays the world by relative temperature, on a dashboard-mounted display. The image is rendered in a grainy gray scale, like a charcoal drawing. Snowbanks are black. Skunks and racoons in the roadside brambles glow an eerie white. They look like they’re made of that strange filament in old camping lanterns. On hot summer nights, a mammal’s body heat may match the heat of the asphalt, and Travis and Tom have lost sight of deer standing in the middle of the road twenty feet off.
“There …” Tom points into the murk. On the FLIR screen, our first test subject stands in the rough off the righthand side of the road, a couple hundred feet ahead of us. Travis accelerates to a steady 37 mph. Tom’s arm hangs out the passenger window and his eyes are on the FLIR screen. He’s holding a small bag of gravel covered in reflective tape. As the deer turns back toward the woods, Tom drops the bag. A few seconds later, the truck arrives at the place where the deer took flight and we stop. Tom gets out with the range finder and waits for Travis and me to back up to the gravel bag Tom dropped a moment before. Then he aims the range finder at us. The number it gives him is the FID for this deer.
I’m going to fast-forward here, because I want to share the results of Travis and Tom’s project. Their light rig worked, a patent is pending, and the NWRC is seeking a partner to build and market the technology. Although the deer’s flight initiation distance wasn’t significantly different, adding the rear-facing illumination caused a dramatic decrease in the incidence of “deer immobility.” With the rig in place, only one deer froze in place, as compared with the ten deer that froze in the headlights of the same truck without it.
Back inside the cab, Tom fills out a data sheet. I watch the FLIR screen. A ghost coyote moves through the trees. It stops, looks over at us, continues on its way. A security gate in the distance appears to be manned by a yeti. To see by heat is to understand something key to this work: There are other ways to perceive the world. If you want to communicate something to an animal, you may need to translate your message.
For instance: the light that Travis and Tom are shining on the front of the truck has a strong blue and ultraviolet emission, because that’s the part of the spectrum across which deer see best—far better than we can. Deer vision was explained to me in some detail by a man who has studied it: Bradley Cohen, an assistant professor of wildlife biology at Tennessee Tech University. “At dusk, when deer are most active, UV light is the most available thing,” he said. While we struggle to see detail in a purply dark dusk, a deer sees it clearly in a bright blue. Our twilight is their noon.
Laundry detergents that claim to give you “whiter whites and brighter brights” provide a service to deer. The manufacturers of these soaps have added an optical brightening agent that emits in the ultraviolet range. To us, it adds no detectable color. To a deer, the clothes are, Cohen says, “luminous.” Joke’s on you, hunter who washed his camo pants in Cheer.
Whatever advantages a deer has on the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, it lacks at the other end. To a deer, red and orange are perceived as an absence of color. Orange is the new black. So while a safety orange/red hunting jacket makes the hunter stand out to other hunters, to deer it may be more camo than store-bought camo.
Here’s something else unusual about deer vision. Deer see best in an elongated strip across their field of vision—a “visual streak”—rather than in a central core of visual acuity, as we do. It would be like reading a book with your peripheral vision. Deer can’t read, obviously, but the setup helps them detect a predator trying to sneak up on them.
Some birds have a visual streak, too. It’s useful for hunting prey and for traveling. A migrating bird with a visual streak can study the whole horizon without moving its eyes or head.
Tom Seamans used to do a lot of bird research. He didn’t study their field of vision so much as put strange things into it.
* How is it possible to identify the species of a bird that has slammed into a nose cone or passed through the whirling blades of a jet engine? Forensic ornithology! Feathers, down, beaks, talons, and/or “snarge” (tissue scraped from the plane) are collected and shipped to the Smithsonian Institution’s Feather Identification Lab. The United States Postal Service happily delivers snarge. They also, I learned on their website, will deliver live animals that are intact—including leeches, goldfish, scorpions (double container required), birds lighter than twenty-five pounds, and “small harmless cold-blooded animals,” whom they have also hired, at least once, to man the counter at my local post office.
† To clarify, a turkey vulture is a vulture, not a turkey. Though turkeys, too, have crashed into planes. But only wild ones. Supermarket turkeys have never hit planes, but supermarket chickens have, because they are fired at jet parts to test their ability to hold up to birds strikes. The device that fires them is called, yes it is, the chicken gun.
‡ Or probably more. Figures for roadkill prevalence tend to be underestimated owing to the speed with which scavengers arrive to eat the evidence. Within twenty-one hours, one Mojave Desert survey found, all that remained of a crushed tortoise on the centerline of the road were scattered pieces and “two withered limbs eight meters from the point of impact.” At ninety-two hours post-impact, the tortoise was but a “faded stain.”
11
TO SCARE A THIEF
The Esoteric Art of the Frightening Device
Tom Seamans has worked at Plum Brook Station for thirty-one years. He has hair the color of a white-tailed’s rump and a soft-spoken, folksy manner. I didn’t take a photograph of him while I was here, and my brain, in coming months, will go ahead and substitute Orville Redenbacher in a quilted tan hunting jacket. Tom is a Cornell-educated wildlife biologist and a born tinkerer. He and Travis share a workshop where, you can tell, they pass many contented hours. I’ve been poking around while they put away the light bar and close up shop. In many ways, it’s a typical workshop, and in a couple, it isn’t.
