Not everybody’s going to have a chance to hunt a 150-inch deer every year, but they can be out in the woods and hunt and form memories. It’s all about the drive to be outdoors and enjoy every bit of experience you can gain during hunting season. The Quality Deer Management Association is the leading whitetail organization dedicated to conserving North America’s favorite game animal. In this episode, Bruce Hutcheon is joined by QDMA Regional Director Corey Slater who talks about their programs and what it takes to be QDMA Regional Manager.
—
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE:
Announcing Corey Slater of QDMA With Corey Slater
I want to welcome the newest member of the QDMA family, Quality Deer Management Association. In the past, you’ve heard from Kip Adams, Lindsay Thomas, and others at QDMA. I want to bring in their newest member to help him share with you what it takes to be QDMA Regional Manager. He’s in charge of Region 2 and you’ll know the exact states that he takes care of. Corey Slater is one heck of a young man. He went to school at Kent State and he transferred after he met his girlfriend at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania. He decided after graduation as a teacher coach, he went ahead out to Iowa, the land of giants. That’s where he met Bill Winke and spent some time with him. He learned a lot from Bill Winke of Midwest Whitetail. He moved back to Pennsylvania for his family. He was checking out whitetail properties and saw an ad for QDMA. As they say, the rest is history. You’re going to enjoy Corey Slater from QDMA.
—
I’m with Corey Slater. He’s the newest member of QDMA and he’s going to tell you all about that. He’s the Region 2 Director. Corey, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Bruce, for having me. I’m definitely excited about being the newest member here on QDMA. I’ll be the Regional 2 Director and that area covers Eastern Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey and Delaware. That will be the territory that I’m in charge of and reaching out with those local branches and helping them do their thing.
I’ve talked to a guy in Maryland and he was telling me some ungodly numbers about deer densities. What’s up with that?
In some parts of the Eastern United States, the deer densities are through the roof. I don’t have the exact numbers for you. I am the new guy and I’m a totem pole here. There are some pockets that wouldn’t be uncommon there to be over twenty deer per square mile and different things like that. They are densely packed in behind neighborhoods and cul-de-sacs where gun hunters can’t get in because of the restrictions. Bowhunters sometimes find trouble getting permission on the properties.
You said Eastern Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware and West Virginia. That’s suburban land where the deer herds are. What do you think your biggest challenge is going to be for QDMA as you open up those branches?
The suburban hunting is definitely prominent out here. Where I grew up, it’s knocking on doors and getting access to small little parcels of lands behind people’s houses, in and out around the neighborhoods at the end of cul-de-sacs. A lot of our members are that type of hunter. They don’t have a big tract of land. To do something like that, if you want to follow the QDMA practices, forming cooperative might be the best option for them to ask the other hunters around the area. Also, try to get land managers to form cooperative so that they can get on track with trying to be selective on the deer that they are harvesting out there. The small tracts of land are valuable when you put them all together and get people on the same page working towards the same goal.
I’ve heard of cooperatives in Kentucky and Missouri when I’ve had the other guys and girls from QDMA. I’m sitting here going, “Cooperative, because we’ve got 40 here, an 80 there and 100 acres over here.” We’re talking less than an acre on some of this land, aren’t we?
Some people have less than an acre behind their house. Those people can be in and they definitely are not holding the deer on that one-acre piece. Those deer are going to be all over the place, but when they’re on those one-acre lots or those ten-acre lots and under, you’re focusing on trying to hopefully have a pinch point on your property, a little funnel that those deer are traveling through that you can set up. A lot of those times, the deer are used to people. I’ve found hunting in Pennsylvania and around Pittsburgh, some of those areas behind cul-de-sacs and whatnot. The deer don’t mind human scent or traffic quite as much when you’re out in the country a little more. It can pose some challenges trying to even find deer on those one-acre pieces. I’m trying to get access to multiple 1 to 10-acre pieces so that you don’t burn one area out. At the same time, the deer are used to seeing people all the time. They’re coming into backyards dealing with dogs, pets and kids in the backyard all day long. They’re a little more relaxed around the people I’ve found but definitely poses some unique challenges there.
For the people that might not know, talk a little bit about your co-op program. How that works? Why does it work? If somebody is interested in talking with you, how do you get in touch with you?
The cooperative program boils down to getting like-minded individuals together and managing a larger chunk of land than you have access to on your own. If you and I both had access to ten-acre parcels of land or 100-acre parcels of land, whatever it might be, if we put both of ours together with this managing cooperative, we would agree not to shoot certain bucks or let certain age class deer pass. Maybe put an antler restriction on the area. Personally, we’re only holding ourselves accountable too. It doesn’t give you access to hunt on my property. It doesn’t give me access to hunt on your property, but it gives us a better chance at reaching and developing the habitat for the deer overall and keep them between our two properties. Expanding on to try to get the most properties involved that we can. At QDMA, we also have a new initiative and we’re trying to engage and get more cooperative built in the next few years. That’s definitely a big push of ours.
If you want to find out more about building a cooperative or how to do that, you could contact me directly at [email protected] or my business phone number is (724) 816-0693. If you’re in my region, I can definitely help you get a cooperative developed or get started on that and answer any questions you have. If you’re in one of any other regions, you can go ahead and call our home office. They’ll get you hooked up with your Regional Director that’s around you. They could help you out in your specific situation.
A lot of people ask me, “I want to be in the outdoor industry.” As far as this guy is concerned, QDMA leads everybody in research and scientific data. People that are on the ground are trying to make whitetails bigger and stronger. Even more than that, they’re trying to build the relationship between hunters. Corey, why don’t you give us a background about why you joined QDMA?
Growing up, I was fortunate and lucky to have a few large tracts of land to hunt on. The landowner was not involved in QDMA as the organization but follow the Quality Deer Management principles. He was heavily read on things like that nature. I was able to mentor and learn from him. As I got older, when I started getting to high school, I was able to drive around to my own hunting spots and not have to be driven or mentored by an adult. I started doing a little bit of my own research. I would read all the time on different whitetail habits in different studies that have come out. Time after time, it was QDMA that was publishing these studies. I became familiar with QDMA as an organization. I was reading a lot of the stuff that was coming out for them.
When I was in college, I always wanted to be in the outdoor industry but didn’t quite know how to do it besides having a hunting show and being on television. That was not attainable for me. I went ahead and went into the teaching field because I liked sharing knowledge with different people. I ended up moving out to Iowa to continue hunting. While I was out in Iowa, I had a great time out there. I moved back to Pennsylvania to be around my family and my wife’s family. I was at home one day surfing the QDMA website and came across the position opening. It had been a job that I had looked at before but when I got out of college, I was down South by their home office in Georgia. Nothing was up here by me or in Iowa where I wanted to go to. It was not right for me at that time. When I moved back to Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh area, they were looking for a Regional Director out here and I could not get on that interview quick enough. I couldn’t get my resume submitted fast enough for that one. It’s always been a dream job to work with an organization that’s prominent in the industry and knows exactly what they’re talking about and has so much knowledge. They probably have more knowledge stored in archive and filed and I’ll never even be able to read it in my lifetime.
QDMA is 37 or 38 states across the Midwest and a little bit in the West?
Hunting is not about the size of the deer that you shoot. It's about the people and experiences you had while trying to harvest the deer. Share on XYou take right out. We went over a map on a meeting we had that I drew a red line straight up and down through the Western part of Kansas, all the way up into Canada and down to the US border. It said that everybody who is most heavily involved in QDMA is East of that line. It runs up a good horseshoe around North East and goes down to Florida. It’s like a sideways horseshoe through the panhandle over to Alabama and over into the side of Texas. We’re missing a lot of people in the Midwestern states. That is definitely a big focus for us to try to grow and establish a name for ourselves out there in the Midwest. They might know QDMA or Quality Deer Management principles, but we would like to give them a little more information out there, get some more feet on the ground and grassroots introduction.
I’m not familiar with the deer herd of whitetails in New Mexico. I know that in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, there are big deer herds. I know people who hunt there. If you think about whitetail, you began with the Virginia whitetail or Eastern whitetail. I don’t know the scientific name, but they kept migrating or pioneering West and fall in the river drainages. All of a sudden, they’re everywhere.
Whitetail encompasses the largest area across all the game species or the most hunted game species in North America. It drives the hunting industry and is the backbone of the hunting industry.
You’re in Pennsylvania and almost one million people go out for gun season.
We’re under one million and it is a heavily hunted state. In 2015, for the first time ever in Pennsylvania, the majority of our buck harvest was not one and a half-year-old deer. They were older. All years prior to 2015, the buck harvest in Pennsylvania has been predominantly one and a half-year-old bucks. 2015 was the first year that had evened out. It didn’t drop a great deal, but it evened out with older age class bucks being harvested. That was some promising information that came out in the report.
That’s good for everybody. Whatever you want to hunt or put on the ground, go ahead. It’s your hunt and it’s your deer. Let go and let grow. You’re going to have 3.5, 4.5, and 5.5-year-old deer. It’s exciting to see one of those bucks come through the forest.
I’ll take that and run with it a little bit. When I was growing up in Pennsylvania, every deer that I harvested was a 1.5 or 2.5-year-old buck. I would like to think that there were 2.5-year-old bucks and a couple of them might have been one and a half-year-olds. Once I graduated and got off to college, I went to establish myself. The first thing I wanted to do was move out to Iowa because that’s what everyone hears, the land of the giants. That’s where all the big bucks are shot every year. People talk about it all the time and it’s in the media. That is the epitome of whitetail hunting and that’s where I want to be. I ended up moving and living out there for 2.5 years and getting some good season’s put in over there. If it wasn’t for family back here in Pennsylvania, I’d probably still be out there.
Why do you think there are such large bucks in Iowa? The zones below I-80, people get enamored with them. I hunt north of I-80 and did fairly well.
When I looked for jobs out there, I was enamored with that as well. South of I-80, that’s all the school districts I applied in. There was also good hunting North of I-80. You get up North of Des Moines and there are some good bucks that are killed all the time on a consistent basis. Even Northeast Ohio is a giant big buck hotspot for sure. Part of the reason why these deer are getting big is they have good nutrition. They’re eating what everybody feeds their cattle every single day. They’re eating corn and beans for their entire livelihood.
These deer have everything at their disposal. Another thing they have on the deer side is not one million hunters like we have out here in Pennsylvania. I’m not sure the exact number of hunters out in Iowa, but from personal experience living there, the archery hunters, there weren’t many of them in the region that I was living in. The gun hunters went out for a short season in the first gun season there, they would go out and hunt hard that weekend. In essence, it’s a long weekend. Second season gun hunters would come out after that. It’d be a little bit less of the numbers on that. There are no more guns in the woods for the rest of the year. You only had a two-week period of gun hunters. Those are late muzzleloader, but that’s a different type of hunting that’s out there. It’s not predominant. Most everybody going out for gun season. That’s when the most people are out in the woods. There are fewer hunters out there in Iowa. It allows deer to get by year after year and grow to that age class. They’re supporting bigger bodies and a bit larger antler and reaching their maximum and genetic potential.
Why don’t you share a couple of thoughts or tips for people that are wanting to hunt mature bucks?
When I was first starting to focus on mature deer, I didn’t know much. I definitely go over to QDMA’s website and there’s plenty of information over there. I’ve adopted the new techniques. If any of you haven’t read about it or seen the talk in-depth explanation, go ahead and look that talk up by Ryan because he presented down at the QDMA Convention down in Louisiana. That was one of the better talks that I had seen or heard in my entire life. I always thought thermals were for elk hunters. I always thought it was out in the Western in the mountains. The big typography rolling around, but it affects it all over the country to a certain degree. Looking back, that’s why a lot of the big mature deer that I was hunting didn’t show up when I thought they should show up. They would show up on the other side of the field instead of where they’d been coming out every single night next to my treestand.
You think about a young man your age with a bright future. What do you think is the future of the whitetail deer?
The future of the whitetail deer is a little bit uncertain with the CWD talks that are going around, which is the biggest threat to it in this current day and age. Kip Adams was out giving a presentation on Chronic Wasting Disease in Michigan and he had a lot to say out there. If you want to get in-depth in nitty-gritty stuff, Lindsay Thomas and Kip Adams both have good information on the future of whitetail deer and where they’re going to go. They’re knowledgeable biologists. They do a great job with that and they know more than I’ll ever be able to comprehend.
You’ve got a few years to learn something. That’s for sure. When we look at QDMA, I can remember early on, Kip, Hank and Lindsay Thomas were on the show and they all shared a little bit different perspective. You shared some about the scientific. You did the study and you wanted to go to work on. Share some other thoughts you have about QDMA and why people should consider becoming a member.
QDMA is definitely a great and strong organization. As far as nonprofits go, we earned a four-star, which only the top 25% of nonprofits do that. The way you earn that is being transparent. We’re letting people know where your funding goes and also putting it towards actual research. We’re implementing it and not just wasting it all on corporate deals and people going on vacations that some nonprofits have had the reputation of having. QDMA does not, they put 97% of all the funding towards biology research, habitat development, enhancing the habitat on public land, trying to get access to it and voting in hunters favors for different bills that politicians are trying to pass. Buying a license every year isn’t enough to conserve hunting heritage and to protect our public lands and things like that. QDMA is putting the money that you donate to them and putting it towards things like that and developing. The biologists are studying all the different aspects of the deer and how do you make that better.
Let’s talk about the Deer Steward program where people can go and spend the weekend with some bright and shiny people in the industry. I know Bill Winke, people were up near his place.
You can take Deer Steward online and it’ll give you the basics of everything you need to know about whitetail from aging deer on the hook, a lot of the basic principles of Quality Deer Management, how to effectively manage your property and enhance the environment and habitat. It’s a how-to beginner’s crash course on developing and managing your deer herd. I’m currently enrolled in the Deer Steward 1 course. I haven’t gone through them before. Deer Steward 2 involves an actual piece like going to Bill’s land. The Heartland Bowhunter guys had people out to their land. Deer Steward 2 classes go out to farms, put their feet on the ground and get to see how things work a little bit more in-depth, but it’s a great learning tool. It’s $200 if you’re not a member of QDMA to enter Deer Steward 1. It’s $175 if you are a member of QDMA and you want to take that class. It’s through the University of Clemson. It’s a good class to get enrolled in. It’s a solid base knowledge under you.
It’s amazing to have hunting stories to tell about. Share on XCan I get some college credits for it?
I’m not sure about that.
I know some people that have gone through Deer Steward 1 and Deer Steward 2. If you’re a deer hunter, membership in QDMA is $25.
Membership with QDMA might be $30 but I haven’t been on that quite yet.
When you take the Deer Steward 1, you get $25 off. The more you’re knowledgeable about the critter, the animal or the deer you’re hunting, the better hunter you are. Hunting is great but it’s the overall view how can I make my local neighborhood and my local community a better place for all deer hunters. That’s where QDMA is different than anybody else because they are building community of deer hunters who give a rip about the whitetail deer.
You’re spot on there. QDMA, throughout their first 30 years, had a mission of trying to get the information out to people on how to grow bigger deer and how to manage bigger deer. For the most part, they have accomplished that goal and everyone has the information out there. We’re still going to continue to push that information out. We’re also trying to get more in touch with the roots of hunting and that’s one of the new initiatives that we have going on. It’s not all about the size of the deer that you shoot, it’s more of you need to not forget and remember the people and the experiences that you had while you’re trying to harvest that deer. Maybe the relationships you formed and possibly taking youth out to mentor them or even an adult that has never been out to hunt before. Going out to mentor them in the woods, knowing people and forming relationships is what brings hunters together and has this all on the same page. Not everybody’s going to have a chance to hunt a 150-inch deer every year, but they can be out in the woods, they can be hunting and they can be forming memories that are going to last a lifetime.
To underscore that, I’ll be hunting with the same guy that I hunted with in 1966. That’s 51 years of hunting and we’re both alive. That’s a flat-out miracle. That’s how long the hunting relationship can be. I went to college with him and all that. We’ve been doing the same thing and hunting the same farm. That’s the other thing. The farm has been in the family for that long.
That’s amazing to have something like that and a story to tell about that. I’m sure I would love to see some of the sights that you saw from the treestands on that farm over those 51 years and the things that you got to share.
We’ve taken them all down, but we’ve built wooden stands. How do you build a wooden stand? You get some plywood and you get some to 2x4s. You get a saw and some big nails, 3 or 5 penny nails. You pound them into this tree and expect them to be there for the next ten years. You and I both know that trees grow. They were death traps. I know some of them, you get up and it’s frosted or iced over and you almost slip off the wooden steps and stuff. It’s crazy and there’s no safety harness.
I definitely haven’t experienced those ones. I shot my first buck and my first doe out of wooden treestands. On one of the wooden treestands, when I was young, I had slipped and fallen when I was coming up halfway up the tree. There were no safety lines back then that you’re attached from the ground all the way up. Luckily, I wasn’t all the way up at the top of the tree when I did slip off on one of those frosty 2x4s. It was nailed into the side. I definitely have those memories to share with you.
That’s what it’s all about. We’re telling campfire stories. Corey and I were talking about that. There’s a buck that came out of Iowa, had great brow tines and I shot him. Was he a 150-inch buck? No, but it was pretty that it’s going to be on my wall forever. That’s a story we shared 51 years hunting the same farm. To me, it’s priceless. There’s so much backfill on that, sitting around, playing cards, having a beer or whatever. That’s part of the traditional Wisconsin nine-day gun season. That is a tradition everybody lived, whether they do it three days or whatever. They get together, they look forward to it and it brings families together.
It’s definitely something a lot of people look forward to. I did every year, going up to a deer camp and you’d come back in after your morning hunt and sit around the fire. Someone would be cooking up back straps from the deer they got the day before. They’d be sitting there cooking up and passing out some summer sausage they made from their archery deer and telling stories about hunting and where they had been that year and years past. As a young kid, I remember sitting there and listening to all the adults talk. I could not believe some of the stories that some of them had. A lot of them were exaggerated but that’s how you get to know people’s personalities. You get to know a little bit about everyone and you share those long weekends where you’re at the deer camp reminiscing over years passed and what’s your going there now.
That’s what Corey and I wanted to share in this episode. We share about QDMA, his role out there in Region 2 and the whitetail tradition. If you want to give some shout outs, you can have it.
I want to give a shout out to my wife. She’s the one who has followed me out to Iowa to hunt deer, come back with me to Pennsylvania and let me take this job with QDMA. I get to travel around the country and talk to people about deer. She’s supportive in that and I’m glad that I get to hunt with her every day in the hunt season and go out with her as much as I can.
I want to thank Corey Slater from QDMA for being a guest. Give us some insight of what QDMA is all about. If somebody wants to join QDMA, what do they need to do?
You can hop right over to our website, QDMA.com and up in the top right-hand corner, there’s a join me tab. It’s one of the simplest organizations I’ve ever been a part of. How to join, you just click that and it’ll ask you for some credit card information. You’ll get your quality of whitetail issues mailed out directly to your house. There’s also information there on which area of the country you live in. It’ll give you a Regional Director like myself. They can hook you up with a local branch in your area to get you actively involved with QDMA and different organizations, fundraising opportunities and things like that in your area.
Corey Slater, thank you for being a guest on Whitetail Rendezvous. I’m sure thousands of followers across North America are going to pick up some nuggets here and find out a little bit more about QDMA.
Thanks, Bruce.
IMPORTANT LINKS:
- Quality Deer Management Association
- Kip Adams – past episode
- Lindsay Thomas – past episode
- Midwest Whitetail
- [email protected]
- Hank – past episode