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Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Whitetail Rendezvous, This is Bruce Hutcheon your host. We are privileged and hear the word privileged – to have Kip Adams. He’s a certified Wildlife biologist and QDMA’s Director of Education and Outreach. Kip, welcome to the show.
Kip Adams: Thank you, Bruce. I’m glad to be here.
Bruce Hutcheon: Let’s just jump right into a warm-up conversation, and you were sharing about QDMA, you were sharing about NDA, and let’s just talk about the mission and the vision of QDMA and roll that into why the NDA got started.
Kip Adams: Okay. Well, QDMA is a national, non-profit wildlife conservation organization that specializes in education and outreach to hunters and to landowners and to natural resource professionals. We’re very privileged to have access to the latest research with deer and the latest management techniques, and we have put that in a format that hunters can use, and that’s what really benefits our deer herds and our habitats: being able to get good information into the hands of people that can really use it and make a difference, so that’s why I enjoy working with QDMA and I enjoy what we can provide, and be a tremendous help and service to hunters and landowners.
Bruce Hutcheon: Now, how was QDMA the focal point or the genesis of the National Deer Alliance?
Kip Adams: Well, with QDMA, basically, everything we do falls into one of five programs, and of we call it our REACH program, and that’s an acronym that stands for Research, Educate, Advocate, Certify, and Hunt, and so all the things that we do fits one of those. The advocacy end of it is very important because it is amazing, the number of bad legislative bills and bad management programs that are going on today negatively impacting the future opportunities we have. So at QDMA, we spend a tremendous amount of time writing letters that support good bills and opposing bad bills, but the reality of it is you can add up all the deer hunters in North America, less than 1% of them belong to a national deer organization, whether it’s QDMA, Whitetails Unlimited, Mule Deer Foundation, whatever, just a fraction that belong, so we started looking at that and say “What can we do more than anything else to help hunters?”, and one of the things is to really provide a voice for hunters, create this large advocacy group where hunters’ concerns can be heard, and there’s no other time where we’ve had more competing interests for deer and deer management.
Historically, deer hunters were one of the only stakeholders with state wildlife agencies. And that’s not true today! There are so many other stakeholders that don’t necessarily see hunting as a good thing. Competing with us are wildlife agencies need hunters more than ever. Our hunters need to be good partners with their agencies more than ever, and the NDA is the perfect way to make that happen and provide this large voice for deer hunters, because our agencies, more than ever, get handcuffed in the legislatures. There’s lots of very important things that they aren’t even allowed to comment on or provide information on. I’ve been a wildlife biologist for 20 years now, and never in my career has science meant less than it does today. There was a time when science really carried the day with regard to programs or bills that were in place, and that is not true at all today. So agencies need hunters and this large voice speaking in a good way hunting more than ever, and that’s why we created the NDA, to provide that voice.
Bruce Hutcheon: You just said something that I hope our listeners heard. You said – and please correct me – that scientific evidence, data, trends are not as important today as they have been in the past? Did I hear that right?
Kip Adams: Unfortunately, you did hear that right. I can’t tell you how many times myself or one of our other biologists or even our executive director at QDMA has stood in front of a legislature giving the science or the facts about a certain issue and heard legislators say “I am so sick of hearing from biologists! I don’t care what they say. I don’t want to hear from another biologist,” which is just wrong, because they want something what the science is telling them is wrong and . . . So yeah, science carries less weight today certainly than any point during my 20-year career.
Bruce Hutcheon: That troubles me, and I hope listeners hear what Kip just said, because without wise management – and wise management obviously involves habitat – and obviously out here in the West, we’re taking away the South Station slope, so again, that’s habitat – balanced herds – who better to understand that than a wildlife biologist? And here we’re speaking with a gentlemen who’s been 20, 30 years in the business, and he’s dedicated himself to be a steward of the animals in the wild, and yet our politicians don’t seem to want to listen. Why do you think that is, Kip?
Kip Adams: I think part of it is there’s just so much money in some of the competing industries that there’s a lot of funds obviously that get funneled through legislators and legislative halls to get certain bills passed and certain bills squashed, and just more so than the past, money rules more than science, and unfortunately, state wildlife agencies, they are the professionals trained to manage these species, and increasingly, they are not even allowed to comment on certain issues. We get [inaudible 00:08:36] QDMA staff gets called in to a number of states each year, asked to testify in front of the legislature on a certain issue, because the state wildlife agency is not allowed.
The governor or the legislators put a gag order on them, so they can’t even talk to the constituents in their own state of whether a certain issue is good or not that relates specifically to wildlife, and that’s a major problem. I’m glad to be able to go and do that and stand up for the resource, but the fact of the matter is that state wildlife agencies ought to be able to do that, and in many cases they can, but it’s increasingly common now where our state folks cannot. So if the hunters in a certain state cannot rely on their professional wildlife folks to be able to command these wildlife in a scientific manner and to provide the correct information to stakeholders, that’s a big problem; that’s a really big problem.
Bruce Hutcheon: And how does myself and my hunting crew in Wisconsin and Iowa and here in Colorado, how do we impact that? In your professional opinion, what’s the best thing that we can do, as hunters that want to have the resource for my grand kids? What do we need to do?
Kip Adams: Thee’s two things. One is to certainly stand up for that resource and join a national deer group, so if we talk specifically about deer, I’d say two things: one, they should join QDMA such that they then get the information and we provide the information that they need to understand what is good or what is bad; and then also join the National Deer Alliance, or NDA, will be the advocacy group for those deer. So QDMA provides the information and then NDA carries that just because NDA is a free membership. The numbers can [inaudible 00:10:28] so because of that, numbers mean everything, so we can say “Hey, we have 50,000 QDMA members or 60,000 members” and a legislator will say “How many do you have in my state?” Maybe we have 5 or 8,000 members in your state. However, we easily can have 20, 30, 40, 50, 100,000 NDA members in the state.
There’s 16 million deer hunters in the United States. If we had just a fraction of them belong to deer organizations, we would have enough numbers so, when you talk to a legislator, where that can truly make an impact. And in a lot of cases, it’s not that many members would have to call a legislator or write a letter or send an email, but the fact that there’s just so few deer hunters that belong to a group like that today, that’s what really hurts us, so as we have more – numbers mean everything to our politicians so more deer hunters belonging with a unified voice can make a huge difference.
Bruce Hutcheon: I just want to say something. I was elected two years ago to the State of Colorado Parks and Wildlife as a Southeast region delegate by my peers, other hunters and fishermen, and I have a small seat at the table. I’m an older gentleman, and I just decided that I was gonna spend some of my time, some of my day listening and then speaking up when you’re sitting at the table. Everybody on this call, every single listener can take that initiative, get involved with their state agency. Kip, you have all the information for all the state agencies throughout the country, is that correct?
Kip Adams: That is correct, and the whitetail report that you referenced at the beginning of this, the last page of that has every state wildlife agencies and every provincial wildlife agencies, “Deer project leader”, their name and email address and phone number, so folks can get a hold of their deer guy very easily.
Bruce Hutcheon: And just give us a shout-out again for the QDMA URL website.
Kip Adams: It is qdma.com, and then within that, you can just easily navigate to the whitetail report. Every year, we publish a whitetail report each January that includes all of the harvest data from the year before and all of the current and the top things going on in the deer world, so those are all free downloads. You can go to qdma.com and grab that and see how their state or province matches up or compares to others, and in the very last page of that is the Deer Project Leader contact information that we just mentioned.
Bruce Hutcheon: Now, I believe, in reading the report, that you have 34 or 37 states that you’re targeting as whitetail areas. Is that correct? Or am I incorrect on that number?