Though the song “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” is a perennial holiday favorite, in Iowa, a more apt song this year may be “Grandma Just Ran Over Another Deer.”

Last year, Iowa hunters harvested approximately 149,000 deer, a record in the state. During the same period, motorists slammed into nearly 13,000 deer on Iowa roadways. When both the hunting and holiday driving seasons were over, there were still an estimated 400,000 deer roaming the state, or one for every man, woman and child in Greater Des Moines.

Iowa, like many other states, is wrestling with how to deal with the growing deer population and the resulting crashes that occur, particularly near urban areas.

Last year, deer-vehicle collisions resulted in an estimated $60 million in insurance claims in Iowa.

“Agents will tell you on that Monday morning their No. 1 call is (people reporting) deer collision accidents,” said Bob Skow, chief executive officer of the Independent Insurance Agents of Iowa, which represents about 5,000 agents in 1,000 agencies across the state.

Next month, representatives of the state’s insurance industry, hunting groups and state officials plan to meet to discuss potential ways to address the problem.

“We’re looking at ways to reduce the risk to motorists,” Skow said. “One of those, obviously, is to reduce the deer population.”

State agencies, including the Iowa Department of Natural Resources and the Iowa Department of Transportation, have tried a variety of approaches to deal with the problem, ranging from the conventional to the exotic.

The DNR has made about 30,000 more antlerless deer tags available than last season and has already issued approximately 60,000, or 10 percent more than last season. That’s a pretty good trend, considering that muzzle loader and bonus doe seasons are still to come in January, said Dale Garner, chief of the DNR’s Wildlife Bureau.

“I know the insurance industry is going to be working on it (this legislative session) and we’ll work with them,” Garner said. “But we already have one of the most liberal hunting programs in the country. It’s a matter of hunters working with landowners, and the landowners’ responsibility to report if they have too many deer. Getting the two connected is what we’re trying to do.”

Though many more out-of-state hunters would like to hunt in Iowa, that’s probably not a good solution, Garner said, since many of them are after trophy bucks and would do little to reduce the number of reproducing does.

“Obviously, the reproductive portion of the population is what you need to control,” he said. “We have some hunters who still refuse to shoot antlerless animals. So it’s a matter of education to let people know they need to step up to the plate.”

Towards that end, the DNR issued about 1,600 bonus-doe tags last year through the Help Us Stop Hunger program, in which hunters can take an extra doe or two and donate the carcass to a meat locker, which is paid by the DNR program to process the meat for use by food pantries. The agency’s goal is to issue 2,000 HUSH tags this year.

On the research side, the IDOT last week sent one of its traffic safety engineers to Montana to learn more about a promising system that state is using that employs laser beams to detect deer on roadways.

A technology would have to be proved effective before the agency would consider implementing it in Iowa, said State Safety Engineer Tom Welch.

“It takes several years to implement in the real world,” he said. “I think we’re just in the infancy of looking at the technology.” A limitation to using any such system in Iowa, he added, is that deer tend to cross highways at random points, rather than at well-defined crossings.

“We feel that there may be isolated locations where it might be useful in high-incident areas, just like we were able to fence off an area by Interstate 35 (Iowa River crossing in Franklin County). That’s been very effective, but it’s very expensive.”

On the education side, the Governors Traffic Safety Bureau plans to release a new 12-minute video within the next couple of weeks.

Developed by the state of Michigan, it describes deer behavior, the most frequent times for car-deer accidents and what steps drivers can take to avoid one, said Carson Whitlow, the bureau’s state programs director. “We’re encouraging people not to veer, because that’s when they’re going into the ditch and rolling and you have fatalities.”

Wearing a seatbelt is the best defensive measure, he said.

“You can’t control the deer, but the seatbelt has the greatest impact on reduction of injuries and deaths of anything.”