wandering monster tables

[Hilary]

Random encounters.

The ones that I have seen pay no attention to frequency of appearance. In a real world environment, you should be 10 times more likely to encounter a prey animal than a predator animal.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

And maybe you are continually encountering prey animals - but they're usually dull, and not worth mentioning.

The random encounter tables in games are usually intended to bring in some sort of engaging encounter, not to populate the blank canvas for you.

[Zhorn]

I agree to include more prey than predator in wilderness environments, but I'm also more inclined to have more encounter rolls in general.
My preferred style is rolling up multiple encounters before the session (including peaceful/non-hostile/prey encounters) and then peppering those more frequently throughout the session.
A method could be to set up a list of such encounters, then each time you roll for an encounter chance and it fails, one of those other encounters comes up instead.
From there just work out how often you have these check-for-encounter rolls.

[Unoriginal]

I would say there is a big difference between "random encounter" and "wandering monster".

Wandering monsters aren't random themselves, they're just moving around the map so where you encounter them is random.

Meanwhile random encounters are happenstances based on circumstances not connected to the PCs' own, like "two NPCs start fighting each other on the street, and one of them is a retired assassin".

Also like Altair_the_Vexed said, random encounter tables aren't to simulate the world, they're to provide interesting encounters, or encounters that can become interesting.

[Composer99]

As far as running into prey animals goes, you'd probably be better served peppering description of seeing them throughout the travel day than making them into random encounters. Unless you're running into something like a hippo, mammoth, or the like.