Alert to motorists over deer peak

The AA said May is a peak time for crashes involving deer

Motorists have been warned to be alert as the number of deer straying onto rural roads hits an annual peak.

Across the UK more than 150 people are killed or injured in collisions involving deer every year, the AA said.

May is said to be the time of year when young deer leave breeding areas and road incidents involving deer are 25% higher then at any other time.

The AA said the A134 at Thetford Forest on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, was a deer crash hotspot.

The organisation urged drivers to heed warning signs.

According to the AA's figures 14 crashes a year involving deer occur in Suffolk.

"Something between 40,000 and 75,000 deer are killed on the road every year when hit by cars and those same collisions will kill or injure 150 people," Andrew Howard, of the AA, told the BBC.

"There's a huge band that runs across basically from The Wash to the Isle of Wight where they're most common and when talking about Suffolk, the Thetford Forest area, the area that runs south-east from there is a particularly highly dense area against the rest of Britain."