Oh, deer.

A University of Missouri researcher is trying to better understand the car-accident-prone woodland creature by strapping a video camera to its head and recording its day-to-day routines.

As a pilot program for future research, professor Joshua Millspaugh attached a camera to the head of a deer and recorded close to 200 hours of footage, in hopes of learning what causes the animals to run across roadways.

“I think more than anything, what the cameras do and what they provide is a mechanism to better understand deer behavior, and how deer respond to vehicles, how deer respond to roads, in a much finer scale than we’ve ever been able to evaluate in the past,” Millspaugh told Land Line.

Millspaugh said current research doesn’t take into account specific environmental factors, such as habitat or nearby deer.

“We don’t actually see how they respond to those activities,” he said. “As a result, as it results to things like deer/vehicle collisions, it gives us a much better understanding of how deer respond. We’re able to see what they see.”

Millspaugh said the technology has a wide array of uses beyond accident prevention.

“There are so many different applications for these deer cameras and animal-mounted cameras in general – everything from potential disease transmission to the whole deer collision idea,” he said. “I definitely think that it will lead to some of that additional research.”