Quality Deer Management

5 Easy Ways to Meet Your Deer-Hunting Neighbors

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I know I’m not the only one who has been guilty of assuming that any deer management I tried to accomplish would be negated when a deer crossed the fence onto the neighbor’s land. It turned out, however, that after meeting my neighbor and sharing my passion for deer hunting, we actually had similar interests …

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QDM Works. Culling Doesn’t.

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Donnie Draeger used to believe in culling deer to improve antler genetics. Over his career as the wildlife biologist at the Comanche Ranch in southwest Texas, he’d spent a lot of time and the ranch’s money on such efforts. Then the results of a years-long scientific culling study at the ranch started to become available. …

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The Payoff of Passing Young Bucks

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As the buck edged along the creek, I tried to get a better glimpse of him. I had yet to see his body well enough to put an age on him. He turned toward me, thrashing a small sapling. I decided to call him over for a better look. Five or six years ago, I …

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QDM Cooperatives: All the Cool Kids are Doing It

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What do bell-bottoms, pegged jeans, parachute pants or in todays era, skinny jeans, have to do with deer management? Two words: peer pressure. Our friends wore them, so we wore them. Luckily, I have discovered the pegged-jean equivalent of a technique that will help improve your deer hunting this fall. In my experience working with …

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Kill the Right Bucks

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Where is the line that separates bucks you will try to kill this year from the bucks you won’t? Maybe it’s between bucks with six antler points and those with more. Maybe it’s based on inside spread, beam length or gross score. With a little homework using local information, you can devise an antler-based rule …

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