EASTERN ONTARIO: Two vehicle collisions with bears in Lanark

PERTH — There were 16 vehicle collisions with deer in one week in Lanark County but that’s par for the course at this time of year. Oddly, there were also two collisions with bears.

A black bear got smoked on Hwy 511, just outside of Perth in a head-on collision, Lanark OPP reported. In a separate incident, a vehicle hit a black bear on Roger Stevens Road, east of Smiths Falls on Nov. 4. “The bear took off into the bush,” Constable Joe Tereschuk said. He added that no one suffered serious injuries in either collision. In his 20 years with the Lanark OPP, Tereschuk said there are fewer than 10 collisions with bears in a year. But collisions with deer are “old news,” he said. “We get hundreds of them every year.”

He added that Lanark County has one of the higher rates of vehicle-deer collisions in Eastern Ontario and there is an increase in collisions in late fall.

The first week of November was an average week for vehicle collisions of all kinds, Tereschuk said. There were 49. There were 12 cases of vehicles hitting a ditch after a snowfall.

There were 479 vehicle collisions with deer in Lanark county in 2019.