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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

Don’t Be Afraid to Call an Audible When Hunting Mature Bucks

Nov 12, 2025 Cole Gander

For many hunters across the whitetail’s range, the rut represents the best time to be in the deer woods and provides the best opportunity all season to fill a tag on a mature buck. Buck…

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Habitat

5 Forest Wildlife Species That Benefit When Hunters Improve Deer Habitat

Nov 11, 2025 Kip Adams

Deer are valuable for many reasons. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates big game hunting provides over 250,000 jobs and nearly $70 billion in federal, state and local taxes annually. Whitetails provide American families…

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Deer Science

New Study Investigates Peak Rut Buck Movement

Nov 5, 2025 Lindsay Thomas Jr.

Bucks move more during the rut than any other time of year. The rut will peak at the same time every year in a given location. These two basic rules of the whitetail rut keep…

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Hunting

There is No Such Thing as a Nocturnal Buck

Oct 29, 2025 Cole Gander

We’ve all heard it before and some of us may have even said it ourselves at some point: “That buck has gone nocturnal.” After capturing countless daylight trail-camera photos all summer long, those same cameras…

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Leading Other Hunters to QDM

Mar 8, 2012 Lindsay Thomas Jr.

One November, my brother, Rans, showed me a video clip he filmed while bowhunting a small, suburban tract in Georgia. The clip included several minutes of footage of a nice 9-pointer working a scrape and…

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What Are Hybrid Oaks?

Mar 8, 2012 Lindsay Thomas Jr.

In fall 2005, QDMA received a house-warming gift for our newly constructed National Headquarters in Georgia – four containerized hybrid oak seedlings from Charlie Morse of Morse Nurseries in Michigan. Charlie admitted he wasn’t sure…

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How to Build a Food Plot Browse Exclosure

Mar 8, 2012 Lindsay Thomas Jr.

Often, food-plot farmers complain about crop failure because nothing seemed to grow in the field they planted, especially in small plots. The plants germinated fine but never grew more than an inch or two. While…

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Can Ticks Affect Antler Development?

Mar 2, 2012 Joe Hamilton

Recently someone asked me if ticks had been known to affect antler development, and then I captured the pair of photos above on my trail-camera. That prompted me to give this question more thought. The…

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Detecting the Rut Peak

Mar 2, 2012 Kip Adams

Fetal aging sounds like a technique used by Ob/Gyn doctors and ultrasound technicians, but deer managers can learn a lot about the population they’re managing by taking some annual fetal measurements. Joe Hamilton, QDMA’s founder,…

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Finding Un-Pressured Deer

Mar 2, 2012 Kip Adams

Density, distribution and travel patterns are things we often seek to learn about deer, but researchers from Penn State University set out to learn the density, distribution and habitat use of deer hunters. They used…

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The Biology of Bachelor Groups

Mar 2, 2012 Matt Ross

If you are monitoring local whitetails during summer through the lenses of your binoculars, or through the lens of a trail-camera, you’ve probably seen what are known as “bachelor groups.” These are groups of bucks…

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How to Establish a QDM Cooperative

Jan 25, 2012 NDA Staff

“We would love to participate in a deer management program on our property, but those dirtbags across the fence shoot everything that moves. So, what’s the point?” Sound familiar? I’ve heard this countless times over…

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