The Deer Project

WVDNR is tracking how deer live and why they die, and you can see the results as they develop.

This story was originally published in the January 2025 issue of Wonderful West Virginia. To subscribe, visit wonderfulwv.com.

Written by Taylor Maple

As long as humans and animals coexist on this planet, a delicate balance must be struck. A state like West Virginia, the third most forested in the country, may be primed for world-class hunting excursions, but its people also take pride in ensuring the creatures that share those forests and rolling hills and echoing hollows are allowed to do so for generations to come.

Any responsible hunter knows that, at its best, their practice is steeped in respect: in minimizing environmental harm, in communing with the wilds that surround them, in knowing their limits. It’s thanks to the tireless work of folks like Brett Skelly, deer project leader for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources (WVDNR), and his team, that these limits can be put in place thoughtfully and with an intimate knowledge of wildlife to inform the rules and regulations that govern hunters in the state.

In early 2026, the largest study of white-tailed deer ever conducted in the state will conclude after five years. A treasure trove of data on West Virginia’s most-hunted game species has already been produced to help Skelly’s team understand the animal better in both life and death, inform management decisions moving forward, and ensure its numbers in the state remain stable for generations to come.

The Trail Here

In 2021, 2022, and 2023, Skelly and his team took to the woods to capture, collar, and release more than 350 deer across Barbour, Hampshire, Jackson, Mason, and Upshur counties. The goal of the project is to generate data that will inform deer management decisions for the state—such as bag limits, disease management, and season structure—by providing a deeper understanding of where the animals typically spend their time, what resources they consume, and, importantly, how and why they die.

Each collar has a lifespan of about three years and is equipped with a GPS system and a mortality sensor. The GPS sensors send out a set number of pings per day, and after five pings, the collar updates the deer’s location online for easy biologist observation. The mortality sensor is triggered if the collar lays motionless for more than four hours; then Skelly and his team can head out to investigate the cause. Collared deer are legal to hunt throughout the duration of the project—human harvesting is simply another data point the researchers have been collecting—and the team also notes when a predator, illness, or vehicle led to the deer’s death.

Skelly says that, aside from the typical heft of logistics that always comes with projects of this scale—talking to landowners to gain permission to monitor deer activity on their property, dispatching technicians to investigate when a deer dies, dealing with a faulty collar here and there—the project has more or less gone smoothly. Even when they reach a deer late or the cause of death seems murky, the team springs into an investigation worthy of a CSI primetime drama: blood patterns, bite marks, signs of trauma, and other biological clues usually give them a good idea of what happened and when.

What They’ve Learned So Far

As of late October 2024, Skelly says there have been 180 mortalities of collared deer. 66 of those have been hunter kills, 27 have been deaths following a vehicle collision, 26 have been predator kills, and 20 are directly related to Chronic Wasting Disease, as detected in the Hampshire County study area.

Early survival and behavior data generated from the study, Skelly says, more or less fall in line with what he expected to find when he began the research. There have been a few outliers—one buck in particular has moved much greater distances than they expected any would, and in strange patterns. It’s not unheard of for deer to travel notable distances; yearling bucks typically engage in dispersal movements during the fall, wandering to adjacent lands to find new permanent homes. But this particular animal traveled more than 20 miles between two different areas, and made the trip multiple times.

“That was surprising for us,” Skelly says. “It’s definitely not the norm, and it’s more distance than we would have anticipated given how forested our landscape is. I don’t think we’ll ever have an answer why.”

Visualizing the Data

As more data rolls in, it will be used to inform deer management in the state for years to come. Skelly is working on his Ph.D. at West Virginia University, where this project will be a part of his dissertation. And on the WVDNR website, the data generated thus far has already been gathered into a sleek, easily digestible digital format full of maps and snappy statistics for anyone who wishes to follow along.

“It’s really important to get this information out to the public. White-tailed deer are a public resource. They’re held in the public trust,” Skelly says, noting that the study is funded in part by the sale of West Virginia hunting and fishing licenses as well as a Wildlife Restoration grant administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. These federal grants—sometimes called Pittman-Robertson grants—are funded by excise taxes on hunting equipment including guns, ammunition, and archery equipment. “So it’s really important for us to be able to get the word out on what we’re finding and how we’re using those types of funds.”

It’s sometimes difficult to reach a broad audience when it comes to sharing data from a state agency, especially as mail and paper handouts can often get lost or discarded, so he’s excited that the website offers a way everyday folks can check in on their work in real-time.

“I’ve got a bunch of business cards printed out that have the QR code for the website, and I hand those out to as many people as I can, just to try and have a more informed public so they know what we’re doing. There’s a little bit more transparency,” he says. “And then all the landowners whose property we trapped on and all the hunters on those properties that I’ve interacted with—I’m trying to get the word to them, because they’re super interested.”

Moving Forward

The survival and cause-specific mortality data generated from the study will be added into an integrated population model, Skelly says, which will essentially help the state predict changes in population sizes and survival rates. “That’s going to be used to help us when we make our harvest- season bag-limit recommendation,” he says. “That will be very informative for us.”

Other data, like home range size and movement patterns, will also lend themselves to estimating deer density in any given area, which is essential when making management recommendations from a disease standpoint, Skelly continues.

Instances of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) are also being measured in the study, and Skelly expects interesting forthcoming data in that realm as well. “This is one of the first studies in the East that has really looked at the effects of CWD in a survival-type study like this,” he says. “So there’s going to be some interesting things, I’m sure, that come out of that.”

And of course, even the tiniest bits of knowledge generated help mankind grow a little bit closer to and a little more in tune with these animals that have shared our space and wandered through our backyards for centuries. Skelly and his team will use the data to draft hunting regulation proposals that the Natural Resources Commission will review and consider implementing for future hunting seasons.

The lift this project required was staggering. “I can’t emphasize enough how big it was to put 350 GPS collars on deer in West Virginia,” says Chris Ryan, supervisor of Game Management Services for the WVDNR. “At the time, the deer project was the largest, most expensive project that the WVDNR had ever undertaken, and there’s a lot of moving parts. Our staff worked extraordinarily long, hard hours. I’m very proud of Brett and Ethan”—that’s Ethan Barton, WVDNR Wildlife Disease Specialist, who is also on the project—“and the rest of our staff.”

And the work is not yet done. Skelly and his team continue to monitor deaths, head out into the field with a moment’s notice when a hunter calls in a kill or a collar begins to sound the mortality alarm, and observe other data as it rolls in. He would like to remind readers that collared deer are legal to hunt, and says it’s integral to their research that hunters not let the collar influence their decision on whether to hunt a particular deer. A tag is affixed to each deer with contact information for the WVDNR Elkins Operations Center—304.637.0245—and it’s very helpful when hunters alert the office about the harvested deer.

If you want to learn more about what Skelly and his team are up to and the data they are collecting, you can visit arcg.is/q9DT5 to see videos and photos from the study, GPS data, and discussions of preliminary results. The StoryMap will be updated as the project progresses, so check back regularly for updates!