Whether on a lonely country road or a ten-lane highway, sooner or later you’ll encounter them—the tawny hide, the majestic horns, the wide, dark eyes. Deer.

On average, drivers experience 1.5 million deer-vehicle collisions each year, resulting in hundreds of human fatalities and over ten thousand injuries. The wildlife toll is even higher.

“Deer won’t flee until they know that the threat is real,” Samantha Wisely, Ph.D., a conservation geneticist at the University of Florida, tells Popular Mechanics. The problem is that this response time didn’t evolve with modern society in mind. “It’s fast enough to run away from a wolf, but not from a car,” she says.

Plus, deer are crepuscular creatures, active in the hours around dusk and dawn—so their eyes see best in low light. Headlights, intense and bright, completely overwhelm their visual system, leading to the “deer in the headlights” phenomenon.

Accidents are particularly prevalent in autumn, when deer move from higher elevations (where they spend summers) to lower elevations (where it’s easier to find food as the weather turns). “Deer tend to follow almost the exact same route that their mothers taught them,” Blair Stringham, a wildlife biologist at the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, tells Popular Mechanics. And once urban sprawl and bustling thoroughfares cut off these paths, deer can’t reach their best habitat.

Fortunately, researchers are working on various approaches that could be potentially life-changing—for both drivers and animals like deer, alike.

Changing the Road to Accommodate Animals and Vehicles

Wildlife crossings, passageways for animals located above or beneath highways, can restore crucial migration routes. “The more we can reconnect landscapes, or habitat patches, the more resilient and healthy these wildlife populations are generally going to be,” Matthew Skroch, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. conservation program at the Pew Charitable Trust, tells Popular Mechanics.

To map out optimal sites for crossings, scientists go with the (animal) flow. “In the last 10 to 15 years, our ability to track animal movements has just exploded with the advent of GPS collars,” Skroch says. Communicating with satellites, the collars can pinpoint an animal’s location within a yard, every few hours or so. The result: Scientists now know much more about the migratory patterns of animals like deer, sheep, and elk than ever before. With that knowledge, they can identify the most well-trodden paths, placing crossings where they’ll yield the most bang for the buck, so to speak.

But climate change and the havoc it wreaks on landscapes can throw a wrench into the works. “If you build a wildlife crossing in one place, for example, will it still be relevant 20 or 50 years from now?” Skroch asks. One solution may be modular crossings, made with lighter materials, like carbon fiber, that can be moved in a pinch in response to changing conditions.

For Stringham, the wildlife biologist in Utah, a wildlife crossing is the obvious solution for Eagle Mountain, a growing city smack dab in the middle of a major migration corridor. Construction hasn’t yet begun, but in the meantime, the city and its partners have installed infrared sensors at a popular crossing spot that alert drivers when deer approach. Fences a few miles before and after the opening ensures that deer cross at the monitored intersection. And because the warning lights flash only when deer are nearby—similar to a train signaling a sensor to warn cars when it approaches a road—they’re more effective than typical deer-crossing signs, which don’t really work, Blair says.

Changing Cars to Warn Deer Sooner

Other researchers seek solutions in the cars we drive. Travis DeVault, Ph.D., a wildlife ecologist from the University of Georgia, studies deer perception on the road. “Vehicle headlights might not convey to deer: ‘There’s a really fast, large dangerous object moving toward you and you need to get out of the way,’” he tells Popular Mechanics.

To make the threat more clear, DeVault’s team outfitted a pickup truck with an LED light bar (made up of 50 bulbs) and turned it toward the front grille. With the entire front of the vehicle illuminated, “we created a larger image which would loom, or get larger, in the deer’s vision,” DeVault says. Compared to the standard lighting case, “we saw a pretty dramatic reduction in freezing behavior in deer when the light bar was on.” On the other hand, driving an unmodified truck made it 3.6 times more likely to have a dangerous interaction—defined as a vehicle coming within 50 meters of a deer. The researchers are currently working with industry partners to bring this solution to market.

Because people are so bad at seeing deer, Rini Sherony, senior principal engineer at Toyota’s Collaborative Safety Research Center, has designed a car that can see deer. Using a combination of crash data and on-the-road experiments, Sherony’s team first studied what deer-vehicle accidents look like. Then, they lugged lidar and radar equipment to a nearby deer farm to train these sensors to recognize the animals in a naturalistic setting.

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The researchers visited the farm in the spring and again in the fall. “In the real world, you encounter small deer, large deer, all sorts of deer,” so it’s important to test how they appear on radar and lidar at different stages, Sherony explains. The final system would likely incorporate lidar, radar, and a camera, and would be incorporated in cars in the next few years.

Right Now, You Can Change Your Own Driving Habits

While we wait for these technologies to become available, there are a few strategies you can employ now to decrease your chances of an accident. Be especially vigilant in areas where you’ve seen deer before and at times when deer typically roam, around dusk or dawn, for example. And “having your high-beam lights on helps quite a bit, you’ll see the reflection of the eyes,” says Blair.