Although QDMA will offer suggestions and give presentations on forming local cooperatives, there are a few things hunters can go ahead and do if they’re not quite ready to go that far just yet.
Most hunters have heard of browse surveys and camera surveys, but they might not know how to properly implement these deer-management strategies.
“That’s where the QDMA website is such a valuable resource,” Brett Deshotels said. “It has several free resources that hunters can download to their computers to assist them in conducting their own surveys.”
While at www.qdma.com, navigate to the RESOURCES link in the left-hand website menu. That will bring up a drop-down menu immediately to the right of the main link. Click FREE DOWNLOADS, and you’ll arrive at a page with six different herd-monitoring resources and two habitat-management resources.
“The camera survey is really good,” Deshotels said. “Basically what you do is put out feed and one camera per 100 acres. The downloadable PDF camera survey file has a computation form where you just fill in your numbers and complete the easy math to learn how many deer you have on a piece of land and how many unique racked bucks you have.”
Other available resources include a jawbone aging guide, peak date of breeding, browse impact survey, tracking deer health with kidney fat, a pellet count survey, grafting technique for persimmon trees and benefits of timber cuts.
With so many readily available free resources, there’s no reason hunter can’t start the process of learning how to better manage deer herds on their own.
