GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Kent County is asking for information from you as part of its joint Deer Management Initiative, which released its initial findings Thursday.

Six metro areas and 21 townships join Kent County in the initiative, which aims to find solutions to the growing deer population program.

The research initiative began with the road commission looking for rhyme, reason and remedies to the rash of deer-car crashes across both urban and rural communities across the county.

“One of our primary responsibilities is traffic safety,” Kent County Road Commission Managing Director Jerry Byrne told News 8. “Twenty-six percent of all vehicle crashes are related to a deer crash. That’s huge, so what can we do about it?”

To get comprehensive answers, initiative members assembled all of the diverse communities across the county to make sure they had a clear understanding of the issue. 

“If the city of Walker does something and Alpine Township isn’t part of that initiative, the deer don’t know the difference. It isn’t going to be as beneficial if one or two or three jurisdictions do it. We need to do it together if we want to see success,” Byrne said.

As members assembled the data, they recruited researchers with Grand Valley State University to help them interpret what they found.

“There is a risk to wildlife and people. There is a risk to everybody,” Dr. Ali Locher, a professor in the GVSU Department of Natural Resource and Environmental Management said of the overpopulation research effort. “Our end goal is to have data-driven solutions.”

A heat map shows where car-deer crashes are most common in Kent County.
A heat map shows where car-deer crashes are most common in Kent County.

The crash data painted a clear picture, visualized with the help of a heat map, showing exactly where deer-car collisions occur the most.

Now, the study is moving on to its second phase of data collection — public testimony. 

“Some people feed the deer, and they think it’s OK to have deer in their front yard. Then, we might hear from neighbors two doors down that say, ‘They are eating all my hostas and they’re pooping in my yard. We need to do something different.'” Byrne explained. 

“The crash data is only one piece of the puzzle,” Locher added. “The people and the location of wildlife are pieces of the puzzle and if we don’t have a complete picture, then we aren’t making informed decisions.”

Those decisions will eventually be proposed solutions to help bring down the deer population, or at least alleviate some of the negative effects. Those possible solutions are varied, including feeding bans, deer resistant plantings, tweaks to hunting seasons, even encouraging more deer harvest to donate meat to food pantries. But everyone involved in the study stressed that any current ideas are conceptual. They are waiting on the study to conclude before proposing solutions.

“I don’t want to sit here and say we know what the end answer is, because we don’t,” Byrne said. “We aren’t spending $65,000 to study it and tell you what the answer is before we get into it. The answer is going to be multifaceted throughout Kent County.”

“I think (the goal) is to find a balancing point where humans and other species can co-exist,” Rob Larson, associate professor in the GVSU Natural Resource and Environmental Management Program said. “As we continue to build and expand, we have to figure out a way as people to be able to live with other species.”