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Learn all about wild deer behavior, habitat improvement, food plots, hunting techniques, and much more with over 500 free articles available on our website. If you enjoy our content, we'd love to have you as an NDA member!

Hunting

How to Host Your Own Field to Fork Hunt

Jun 19, 2025 Elizabeth Kligge

Learning to hunt is a rite of passage that many take for granted. They grow up in hunting families with longstanding traditions and hunting camps. Their friends hunt. Their neighbors hunt. There’s hardly anyone they…

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Hunting

How Much Gear Do You Really Need to Hunt Deer? These 3 Budgets Get You Started.

Jun 18, 2025 Brock Rosenkranz

Growing up in a non-hunting family, I turned to the hunting industry for guidance. I devoured every deer hunting show I could find, absorbing ad after ad that flooded my impressionable young mind. I became…

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Hunting

7 Easy Steps to Improve Saddle Hunting Comfort

Jun 11, 2025 Brian Grossman

One of the biggest concerns I hear from would-be saddle hunters is that it doesn’t look comfortable. But going into my fifth season hunting from a saddle, I can attest it is a very comfortable way…

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Deer Science

What Makes Those Holes in Deer Antlers? And Other Odd Antler FAQs.

Jun 4, 2025 Kip Adams

They grow for about 150 days a year. They can grow nearly 1 inch per day, making them the fastest normal growing tissue known to man. Humans have cherished them for thousands of years, and…

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Mapping Antler Expectations

Jul 24, 2013 Bronson Strickland and Steve Demarais

All wildlife biologists learn in their first ecology class about a relationship called Bergmann’s Rule: within a species, or group of similar species, body size increases with latitude from south to north. It’s assumed this…

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Food Plot Species Profile: Austrian Winter Peas

Jul 5, 2013 Bob Westerfield

Austrian winter peas are a cool-season annual legume that can produce a great food plot on their own or as an addition to a seed mixture planted in the fall to attract deer. Easy to…

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Know Your Deer Plants: American Beech

Jun 25, 2013 Matt Ross

Most white-tailed deer hunters east of the Mississippi recognize the importance of the fall acorn crop and how it directly impacts their hunting opportunities. The majority of NDA members also understand the effect this cyclic…

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3 Ways to Track Fawn Recruitment

Jun 25, 2013 Dr. Will Gulsby and Dr. Karl V. Miller

Over the last decade, predators, especially coyotes, have greatly altered deer population dynamics in many parts of the country by reducing fawn recruitment (the number of fawns per doe that survive to 6 months of…

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Momentum Beats Speed for Lethal Arrow Hits

Jun 18, 2013 Bill Badgley

Lethal shots without wounding deer are every ethical hunter’s top priority, and shot placement and an understanding of anatomy are paramount. However, momentum should be the most important part of arrow selection if we want…

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QDM vs. Trophy and Traditional Deer Management

May 29, 2013 Kip Adams

Quality Deer Management (QDM) is a household name to modern day deer hunters. You can’t pick up a hunting magazine, watch outdoor television, or talk to the guys at camp without seeing or hearing the…

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When Bucks Don’t Shed Their Velvet

May 28, 2013 Joe Hamilton

The hunt on Saturday November 9, 2013, was a heart-breaker for Ryne Wade of Marion, Illinois. A huge buck he had been after was in bow range when a doe winded Ryne and spoiled the…

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The Reality of Doe:Buck Ratios

Apr 23, 2013 Kip Adams

Deer sex ratios are a common topic of conversation among whitetail hunters. Other than deer density, few subjects ignite controversy as quickly as a discussion of the number of does per buck in any given…

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