Michigan's Deer-Crash Hotspots: Eight Counties Never Left the Top Quarter

Measured per mile driven, Michigan's highest deer-crash rate in 2024 was in Huron County: 3,393.7 crashes per billion vehicle miles, ahead of Presque Isle (3,252.1) and Alcona (3,081.8). Eight of the state's 83 counties stayed in the top quarter of rates in every year from 1997 to 2024, even though the typical county's rate fell 33.0% over the same span. A crash rate mixes deer, roads and traffic, so it shows where deer and vehicles meet and does not count the deer.

If the question is where a mile of driving is most likely to end in a deer collision, the 2024 answer is Huron County, at 3,393.7 deer crashes per billion vehicle miles. Presque Isle follows at 3,252.1, then Alcona (3,081.8), Hillsdale (2,735.0) and Sanilac (2,608.0). Charlevoix and Dickinson print the same 2,197.3 at one decimal, so the table below lists them 9th and 10th in an arbitrary order.

The unit divides deer-involved crashes by the miles driven in the county, then scales to a billion miles. That is the fix for the main trouble with a raw count: a county with heavy traffic logs many crashes even when few deer live there. Our paper on why deer-crash maps mislead put a number on the problem in Iowa, where harvest and animal-vehicle crashes correlated at only r = 0.306 across 99 counties, and it named a per-mile rate as the form worth ranking.

Three of the top seven are Thumb counties: Huron, Sanilac and Tuscola. At the low end, Wayne posted 42.3, Macomb 110.1 and Menominee 153.0, which makes Huron's rate about 80 times Wayne's.

A single year mixes real hotspots with counties that had a rough autumn on the road. To separate them we ranked all 83 counties by rate in each year from 1997 to 2024 and marked the top 21, a quarter rounded up. Eight counties made the cut in every one of the 28 years.

The eight are spread out: two in the Thumb (Huron and Sanilac), two in the Upper Peninsula (Dickinson and Iron) and four elsewhere in the Lower Peninsula (Alcona, Missaukee, Mason and Mecosta). Every one of them fell over the period. Huron fell least, 13.5% from 3,921.2 to 3,393.7, and Mecosta most, 59.2% from 4,044.8 to 1,650.4. They stayed on the list because the rest of the state fell as well: Mecosta's 2024 rate of 1,650.4 is still above the state median of 1,152.4.

Set that against the 2024 top 15. Seven of the eight persistent counties appear in it (Mecosta does not), but so do eight counties that are not on the persistent list: Presque Isle, Hillsdale, Tuscola, Oceana, Charlevoix, Manistee, Gladwin and Branch. Each of those fell out of the top quarter in at least one year. Presque Isle ranks second in 2024 and still missed the list, which is a good reason not to plan around a single year's ranking.

The median county rate began at 1,719.3 in 1997, peaked at 1,831.2 in 1999 and bottomed at 842.4 in 2016. Since 2017 it has stayed between 1,041.7 and 1,277.8, and it ended 2024 at 1,152.4, which is 33.0% below where it started.

A rate falls when crashes fall, when miles driven rise, or when both happen, and this record does not split the two. A lower rate therefore does not show fewer deer. The series also has a jump we cannot explain: the median went from 842.4 in 2016 to 1,079.6 in 2017. We did not investigate it, and a step that size is a reminder that a rate can move for reasons that have little to do with deer.

The numerator is deer-involved crashes by county from Michigan Traffic Crash Facts, whose crash data come from police crash reports, so a crash that never reached police is not counted. The denominator is annual vehicle miles traveled on all roads in the county, from the Michigan Department of Transportation's HPMS county tables. MDOT describes those miles as an estimate built from traffic counts, with annualized estimates where counts are missing. The rate is our division of the two. We recomputed four county-year rates from MDOT's mile tables and our stored crash counts (Alcona and Huron in 1997, Iron and Macomb in 2024), and all four matched.

A rate reflects deer, roads, traffic patterns and driving time as well as deer numbers, so it is not a herd count. A county with few miles driven can post a high rate on a modest number of crashes, and a county with heavy traffic can post a low one on many.

The top-quarter list also depends on where the line is drawn. Tighten the cutoff by one county and two of the eight, Mecosta and Sanilac, drop out. At the bottom of the ranking, Menominee, an Upper Peninsula county like Dickinson and Iron, has the third-lowest 2024 rate (153.0), and we did not test why.

For a driver, a rate is the honest comparison, because it is already per mile driven. On that basis the eight persistent counties have carried a high per-mile chance of a deer collision for 28 years, across many autumns, while a mile in Wayne or Macomb County carries far less. It ranks counties, not roads or hours, so it cannot say where on a given route to slow down.

For a hunter the rule is different. A crash rate signals where deer and vehicles meet. In Illinois, our collision-density paper found that a county's exposure-adjusted index tracked harvest only moderately in a single year (r about 0.31 in 2024) and treated the multi-year path as the evidence. Use Michigan's rates the same way. A county in the top quarter across many years earns a place on a shortlist, and nothing more. Then check its harvest record, which Michigan's mandatory registration tallies by county (83 counties, per our paper on the state's two harvest numbers), and check how much ground you can actually hunt. Drop a county when only its crash rate speaks for it.