A new report on the amount of deer populating Oak Bay is going in front of Committee of the Whole tonight. Once reviewed, it will be sent to the Province, and the municipality can begin working on inoculating deer with contraceptives.
The report counted between 78 and 128 deer living in Oak Bay, with the median coming out to 97.
Oak Bay Mayor Kevin Murdoch says the report is a very important step in order to move forward and take action in reducing the deer population.
"It's a requirement both for us as the council, to the UWSS, who are the Urban Wildlife Stewardship Society, who are the people responsible for doing the work, but also to the Province, this is a requirement. Contraception is not actually considered a production allowable to reduce the population of deer, it's still considered experimental by the Province. So for them to approve this they require this, and to kick in some money, they do require this scientific approach to measuring the deer as best we can."
He says the deer were counted through a combination of GPS collaring and 34 cameras set up across the municipality. Murdoch adds that this method has been used in the wild, this is the first time it's been used in an urban environment.
"Basically they used the GPS collars to get a sense of how far the individual deer's roam and what their areas were, so they can get some level of probability of when they're seeing a deer, how far it is actually roaming. And if they see one deer five times, they get an assessed sense of all the deer, they're probably seeing the same deer, five times."
He says that the municipality wants to use contraceptives to keep the population from growing, which has never been done in an urban environment before. Murdoch adds that they have tried culling the deer population in the past, but Oak Bay has already but aside the funds and received a permit to inoculate 80 deer this year.
The report will be presented and discussed at Oak Bay's Committee of the Whole, before they can send it to the Province and officially move forward and schedule work, which will begin in the summer.