Listen to the podcast here:
Bruce: Welcome, everybody to another episode of Whitetail Rendezvous. I’m very excited to have Lindsay Thomas, Jr., Communication Director for QDMA on the line with us today. Lindsay, say hello to our listeners.
Lindsay: Hello and thank you for having me on the podcast, Bruce.
Bruce: You’re welcome. Why don’t we start off, Lindsay, by just sharing how you got to QDMA and then we’ll continue on asking some questions and delve into just what QDMA is doing in the whitetail world.
Lindsay: Okay. I’ve been at QDMA for 11 years now. Originally before that, I worked at a different magazine, Georgia Outdoor News. I’m a native Georgian so I worked there. It’s was just a hunting and fishing magazine here in our state. And then I came to QDMA 11 years ago. I was a journalism major, I’m an outdoor communicator, love hunting and fishing and love being a communicator, but of all my passions, deer hunting and deer management is really my personal passion. So coming here to QDMA and heading up their communications, managing their magazine and website has just really been a great fit for me personally.
Bruce: Thank you for that. Hey, Lindsay, we probably get a lot of listeners say, “How can I get into the communication end of the whitetail business?” What suggestions would you given them?
Lindsay: There’s a lot of opportunities out there today for folks who want to get involved in outdoor communications that were not there a few years back and certainly not when I was getting involved in it 20 years ago. And of course, I’m referring to the internet and social media and podcasts like you’re doing. There’s so many tools and techniques now for someone to basically simply become an outdoor communicator any minute they’re ready, and doing it on their own time, even if you have a full-time job doing something else, until you can break into communications.
But I would say in general, you need to be always working on the craft of what you do, whether it’s writing, whether it’s video, whether it is interviews in a podcast format like you do, be practicing what you do, photography. Whatever it is, keep working on it and keep putting yourself out there. Reach out to established folks who are in the communications business, editors of magazines and websites, contact them and float ideas to them for articles, videos, photography, and try to get your foot in the door and just be persistent, and practice what you’re working on, and try to improve all the time. Because writing, just like anything else, the more you do of it, the better you get at it.
Bruce: My takeaway from what you just shared is be a student of your craft, build a portfolio of content, and then network throughout the industry.
Lindsay: Yeah, that’s a good summary. It sure is.
Bruce: Great. Lindsay, let’s talk about your first whitetail experience.
Lindsay: Very first would be hunting with my Dad as a kid. He took me in the woods at a very young age. Before, of course, I wasn’t actually hunting. I was just tagging along with him. And eventually spun that off into being able to hunt on my own. But still, we hunt together as a family. So whitetail hunting has always been a part of, not only me personally, but my family and things we do together as a family. And I share that with my children. So I came up hunting with my dad. He taught me much of what I know, and my brother as well, about deer hunting, and land management as well. I really can’t remember my very first experience, but it was tagging along with my Dad, climbing into tree stands with him, going along on deer hunts with groups of hunters. So it’s part of my blood, for sure.
Bruce: Thank you for that. Let’s talk about the hunting tradition. You had a great mentor in your father. In your estimation, where is the hunting tradition today?
Lindsay: It’s going strong, there’s no doubt about that. You look across America, and you look at the factors of any tradition like ours, we are well-ingrained in many communities and in the family fiber of America. Certainly there are not many of us in the big picture. When you look at the American population and who hunts, there are only about 5% to 6% of Americans who are hunters.
It sounds like it’s not a lot, but then you go and you look at Americans’ opinions about hunting and you say, “Hey, do you support hunting?” And we enjoy very strong support among the American population. Something in the order of 80% of Americans support hunting when done for the right reasons. When it’s done to put food on the table, when it’s done ethically and legally, when it’s done in a fair chase manner, Americans are thumbs-up on deer hunting and all kinds of hunting. So we’re in a very strong position here.
Certainly many of us are concerned about numbers of deer hunters, numbers of hunters and where that trend is going because it has been on the decline. Lots of effort is being put and many success stories that are out there in terms of getting more hunters involved and recruiting both young and old hunters, and men as well as women into hunting. Women hunters are really a very rapidly growing segment of our group now and that’s good news as well.
So my take on the whole hunting position is we’re in a very strong position. There are certainly threats and challenges out there. This is one thing that QDMA is concerned about and that we spend a lot of our time working on, is addressing the challenges that we see in the future and threats to the hunting tradition. Whitetails are the backbone of hunting in North America.
Now, certainly there are plenty of people and other things you can hunt and people that pursue those animals. Whether it is wild turkeys, elk, small game, water fowl, you name it, there’s a lot to do, but whitetails are the foundation of all of that. Whether you’re looking at the economic impact and the support for the hunting industry, whether you’re looking at simply sheer numbers of hunters and what they pursue, the whitetail, the entire North American hunting tradition rides on the back of the whitetail. And without whitetail deer, we would not have hunting industry as we know it today and the North American hunting tradition. So it’s important that the whitetail be protected, first and foremost, above all other species as the cornerstone of everything we do, and it’s important that we not take whitetail for granted.
Certainly we’ve got threats on the horizon like chronic wasting disease, in some areas overharvest of whitetail deer, and certainly, ironically, in some areas, too many whitetail deer, particularly in urban and suburban areas where hunting has faded away from the fringe and it’s tougher for agencies to manage deer in those areas. So we’ve got a mix of different threats out there, loss of hunting access, hunter recruitment, as I mentioned before, there are certainly challenges to our tradition today that a lot of folks and a lot of good people are working on that, from the grassroots level to the national level, and some great coalitions being built to address these challenges.
And I feel good about where hunting is. I feel good about where we’re going. Despite those challenges and threats, I feel like hunters are coming together as a team and working on those. And certainly we’ve got an extremely strong foundation when you look at support among the general public, when you look at the deep roots that hunting has in American communities, I feel like we’re in a very good place.
Bruce: Thank you for that. Talk for a minute about what QDMA is doing to attract youth into the hunting community.
Lindsay: Well, we founded our Rack Pack program a few years back, that’s what we call our youth program. We’ve always been involved in youth participation and trying to get kids involved in hunting, but we’ve also believed that hunter recruitment, when you look at young kids, is more than just taking a kid and taking them to the woods and sitting in a deer stand for the afternoon. It’s more than just that. There has to be a mentoring process. There has to be a commitment to get those kids outdoors for all kinds of activities.
Let’s be honest, for a serious deer hunter, going and sitting in a deer stand for a couple of hours and maybe not seeing a deer sometimes, maybe sometimes it being cold, maybe you being uncomfortable, sometimes that’s not necessarily the most fun event for a young kid to get involved. And I know when I was young and coming up with my dad, dad took me out, we did a lot of stuff. We squirrel hunted, we fished, we hiked in the woods. We went out and got involved. It was more than just, here, sit still and be quiet and we’ll look for a deer.
So there’s a broader process to getting kids involved. It’s got to be fun, there’s got to be some activities and action involved. Kids enjoy shooting at the rifle range. Kids enjoy hunting small game, activities where you can move around and be active and learn and get involved. And those, we feel, build lifelong commitments to hunting, lifelong interests in hunting. And that’s what our Rack Pack program has been built around is fun and action and learning education about deer, education about wildlife and habitat, and getting involved, and getting out there, and getting your hands in the dirt, planting food plots, planting trees, managing habitat and improving it for wildlife.
All of these things play into getting kids engaged, getting them interested, and keeping them involved in hunting over the long haul. And that is what our Rack Pack program is being built around. We implement that in many ways, both at the national level through events that we do, but also primarily through our grassroots network with our volunteer branches. We call our groups “branches,” other groups, like the Turkey Federation and Duck Unlimited, call their groups “chapters.” Ours are known as “branches.”
And our branches go out in their grassroots area and hold youth events, among other things. They have youth hunts. Right now, in the spring, we’ve got a lot of what are called shed rallies or shed hunts, going on out there. Antler scramblers, or some of what our groups call them, where they get kids involved and have a big antler shed hunt. And kids just really eat that up. So our grassroots guys are really working hard out there right now, getting kids engaged in our Rack Pack program and doing what we can to get kids involved with a lifelong commitment to hunting.
Bruce: Thank you for sharing that information. Let’s spin it back around to whitetail hunting. If you can share with our listeners one of your aha! moments from the last couple of years where you’re trying really hard to figure something out about whitetail hunting, then all of a sudden, the light bulb went on. Can you share a couple of those with us?
Lindsay: Yeah. Naturally for me, and given my passions about hunting, of course, it has to do with deer management, and particularly the quality of management philosophy whereby hunters are trying to improve their deer hunting, make their deer hunting more fun and more engaging by improving the deer population where they hunt. Doing that, of course, is what I’m passionate about. It’s what QDMA was founded for, is to educate hunters on how to make that possible.
And I would go back a few years to 2004, really. I grew up in southeast Georgia, that’s where my family owned land. It’s a farm, and my dad farmed, it’s where I grew up. And it’s where we now hunt, my brother, sister, and father, and I hunt there and my kids and all of our family hunt there. But it’s in coastal Georgia, it’s not too far from the ocean. Very sandy soils, very, what most people would call, low quality habitat. Certainly not the soils and not the forage that you see in the Midwest or even better parts of Georgia.
So there are lots of people that would tell you that you’re not ever going to have great deer hunting there in an area like that, you’re not even going to be able to improve the deer population, you ought to go somewhere else. And I’ve never believed that and certainly have proven it incorrect and learned that that’s not true.
And in 2004 is really when it came together for us at the farm. For a number of years there, we’ve got 500 acres, and for a number of years, we had been protecting yearling bucks, that’s one-and-a-half-year-old bucks, not shooting them, taking a few does, improving the habitat. Nothing on grand scale, we just had a couple of acres of food plots, we planted trees, fruit trees and mast trees. But mostly we managed to make sure there was plenty of natural forage out there year-round. And not many people around us were participating with us. Yearling bucks were getting shot all around us and so we had plenty of challenges.
But 2004 was the year that I killed a buck on the farm that ended up, at the time, being number two in the county. He grossed 149 inches, netted 139 inches and at 139, in the records kept by Georgia here in our state, he was number two in the county. I think he’s still number four in that county where I killed him. And that buck really served as a great example to our neighbors and to ourselves that, you know what? No matter where you’re located, no matter what kind of dirt you stand on, no matter what kind of challenges you think you face on the land around you, you can make your deer hunting better, and you can improve what you’re seeing out there.
Now, I don’t want to say that it’s all about killing the top deer in the county, that’s not what QDMA is about. Because the bigger picture for us, in addition to killing this deer and others like this deer that have followed, because we’ve killed other mature buck since then, the bigger picture is that underlying all that was our hunting had become fantastic, where before we didn’t see many rubs and scrapes.
Now, we were seeing those because we had built our buck age structure by protecting yearling bucks. Where before we rarely, if ever, saw a buck chase a doe in the woods, rarely, if ever, heard bucks fighting or saw bucks fighting each other, very rarely found shed antlers in the woods.
And another thing, we would never bother with rut calls or rattling antlers or tools like that, techniques like that because it didn’t work. But those things were all beginning to happen at about the same time and in 2004, all of a sudden, we realized that hunting was completely different on the farm. You could blow a rut call at the right time of year and bucks would respond. You would sit in the woods and see bucks of multiple ages whenever you hunted. You could see chasing and fighting. You could find scrapes and rubs throughout the property where before they were difficult to find. Bucks’ body weights were bigger, doe body weights were bigger, deer were healthier.
And again, yeah, compared to the Midwest, no, we didn’t have that kind of hunting, but we had better than what we had before where we were. And that really was the aha! moment for me in telling other hunters about QDMA is that it’s not about producing the most antler inches, or trophy buck, or anything like that, or trying to be what somebody has in another state. It’s about improving what you have and making your hunting better where you stand and measuring it by a local yardstick, measuring that success locally. Doing that, anybody can produce better deer hunting where they stand and that’s what we’ve done in an area where many people say, “You can’t do that.” Well, we’ve proved that wrong.
So that’s been the biggest lesson for me and it’s really my mission for what I do here at QDMA is getting the word out for other deer hunters who may have a place to hunt, maybe even if it’s public land, or whatever, in an area where they say, “You know, we can’t have good deer hunting here because…” and you get all kinds of excuses and we could list them.
But the bottom line is, none of them are valid. You can get out there and reach out to your neighbors, and work on the habitat, and protect yearling bucks. You don’t have to protect them all, but protect most of them. Get those bucks into two-and-a-half and three-and-a-half-year-old age classes, and over time, your deer hunting is going to get a heck of a lot better. And I don’t care where you’re located, that’s true.
Bruce: Thank you so much for that. Many of our listeners do have issues with neighbors that shoot whatever deer is legal. Just share how a listener could improve that situation with their land owners.
Lindsay: It’s a simple thing, Bruce, and that is, simply get to know your neighbors. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard, and I used to say it myself, but how many times I’ve heard people say, “We can’t do QDM because our neighbor shoots everything that moves.” And if you end up meeting the neighbor or talking to the neighbor and ask them about QDM, do you know what they say?
They say the same thing, “We can’t do QDM because our neighbor shoots everything that moves.” And come to find out, in most of the cases, these folks have never even met each other, never even talked, don’t even have each other’s phone number. And that’s the first step, is get to know your neighbor. Take a proactive stance, go out there and find out who hunts on, who owns the land around you, and reach out to them. Stop by and say hello. Have a barbecue and invite them over. “Hey, just want to get to know you.”
And don’t make it about QDM. Don’t reach out to your friends and neighbors and say, “Hey, I want you to start protecting yearling bucks.” It’s not about that at first. Just make it about getting to know each other and saying, “Hey, I’m a hunter, you’re a hunter, we probably ought to know each other. I’d like to at least have your phone number. If a deer ever, you know, I shoot a deer and it runs across the property line, I’d like to know how to get ahold of you. And vice versa.” “Hey, I’ve got food plot equipment, I’d be happy to help you plant food plots. And I heard you got a tractor, maybe we could share sometime.” So it’s about that, it’s about getting to know each other.
And what you find, when you do that, when you simply meet the neighbor, you will find that the majority of them are interested in the same goals you are – protecting yearling bucks and having some more older bucks out there, having better deer hunting. They just never, like you, maybe never took that step because they felt discouraged, or they felt they knew that everybody around them didn’t agree with them. And what you come to find is, most do. Does everybody? No. You’re not going to find that 100% of the deer hunters around you want to protect yearling bucks or want to join you in taking the right number of does or improving habitat. But that’s ok.
What we’re learning is that when someone goes out there, particularly folks on small acreage, and they get to know the hunters around them, and let’s say you reach out to 10 or 15 or 20 different neighboring hunters, and let’s say half or more of them are just like you, they’re like-minded, and they say, “Yeah, you know what? I’m with you, I agree. I think we ought to protect more yearling bucks. I think we ought to work on the habitat. I think we can cooperate together. Let’s do that.”
And what you find is you can make a difference in everybody’s hunting around there, even if you don’t get 100% participation from the people around you. Yes, there will still be that hunter who says, “Look, thanks but I’m not interested. I’m just trying to put meat on the table. If it’s legal, I’m going to shoot it.” And you know what? You have to just tip y our hat to that fellow and say, “Great. More power to you,” because as long as they’re hunting legally and ethically and taking deer that make them happy, there’s nothing you can do about that. They have the right to do that. And, like I say, the tip of the hat to those folks, carry on.
But the thing to remember is that, they, one day, can still change their mind. And you ought to give them that opportunity. Don’t write those folks off. Don’t be unfriendly to them. Keep the communication channels open. Continue to talk with them. If you have an annual cookout where you invite all the neighbors over just to get to share pictures and antlers and talk about hunting, keep inviting them. Keep that channel open and what you will find, and it’s been shown time and time again, is that those folks often come around anyway.
What till happen is, they’ll begin to see better deer. Or if you share trail camera photos with them and you say, “Hey, I wanted you to see the pictures of this nice buck we’re seeing in the area, you may see him.” And you keep that communication channel open and if they see things improve, they’ll say, “You know what? Maybe I ought to contribute to this effort. Maybe I ought to start protecting yearling bucks as well because it seems to be working.”
And so you’ve got to keep the communication positive. You’ve got to do, as we say, lead by example. Don’t pressure people. Don’t try to get aggressive with folks, let them take that at their own pace, and lead by example, and just go on and get the folks that can participate with you to do so, and the other folks will follow eventually.
And the other thing that I always say about this, when you’re reaching out to your neighbors and you’re trying to get cooperation is try to encourage them to take their next step, not your next step. And what I mean by that is, if they say, “You’ve been doing QDM for a while, you killed a two-and-a-half-year-old buck so you’ve moved up, now you’re trying to kill a three-and-a-half-year, maybe you’ve killed a three-and-a-half, now you’ve moved up and what you’re doing is trying to get bucks even to four or even five before you hunt those deer and kill those deer.”
So don’t make your neighbor, who is back at the starting point, jump immediately up there with you. Don’t tell your neighbor they ought to be waiting for a buck to be 4 or 5 , when really, they’ve never killed a two-and-a-half-year-old. Give that neighbor, give those friends, give those young hunters, whoever it is that you’re working with, give them the same opportunity to take a stair step approach like you did. Encourage them, if they’ve never killed a two-and-a-half-year-old, encourage them to do that first.
Tell them, “Look, here’s how you identify a yearling buck. Think about letting that deer go and trying to kill your first two-and-a-half-year-old.” And then when they kill that two-and-a-half-year-old buck, congratulate them, celebrate with them and encourage them to take the next step after that.
And that’s how you ought to pursue QDM, it’s how anybody would do it. Because if you jump out there and you say, “Well, I’ve never killed anything over the one-and-a-half, but I’m going to wait for a five-and-a-half-year-old,” that’s a tough hurdle you’re setting for yourself. And all of us want to enjoy our deer seasons. All of us want to kill a deer and have a great time out there. And if you make it tough on yourself to have any success, it’s very easy to get frustrated. If you put that on other people, again, it’s very easy for them to get frustrated. So keep it realistic, put your neighbors in a position of easy success, and keep them happy and engaged, and they will be up there with you gradually and enjoying QDM success just like you are.
Bruce: Anyone listening to what we just heard shared can, as we say in the Western part of the country, mend fences with their neighbors. The key and the critical thing is just go meet your neighbors.
Lindsay: Yes!
Bruce: And you’ll be amazed what will happen. And it might take time, and Lindsay spoke to that point emphatically, it may take time but it’s a priceless investment in personal relationships and then growing your herd. Lindsay, we’re about ready to wrap up. Why don’t you take a few minutes and share the mission of QDMA, we’ve been hearing it all through the interview, but speak out to that. Tell us how people can get in touch with your branches throughout the country, and your website, your Twitter account, anything you want to share on social network, and basically give us a 30,000-foot overview of what QDMA is doing throughout the country.
Lindsay: Well, Bruce, our mission is ensuring the future of whitetail deer, wildlife habitat, and our hunting heritage. That kind of sums it up. Certainly given our history, what we believe is that there’s a proper way to manage deer herds so that hunters can have better hunting, more enjoyable hunting, and get more fun and enjoyment out of their deer hunting.
We certainly believe there’s a biologically sound way to manage deer. We believe that deer populations ought to be in balance with their habitat, not over-populated so that they’re damaging the habitat or nutritionally handicapped, and certainly not under the carrying capacity of the land. We don’t think that there should be fewer deer out there than the habitat can carry. We think deer ought to be at the optimal density for deer hunting satisfaction and herd health. So we’ve always encouraged deer hunters, when it is necessary, to take does, to take the right number of does, and to not shoot does when it’s not necessary.
The other part of that, as I’ve said many times, is protecting yearling bucks. We believe that healthy deer herds include bucks and does of all ages out there. And a roughly balanced numbers of bucks and does. Under traditional deer management in years past when does were sacred, nobody ever took does, and everybody shot the first buck that came along, what you had was populations that were balanced in favor of does, there were too many, many does out there and very few bucks, and what bucks were out there were young deer.
So we believe, again, going back to enjoying seeing scrapes and rubs and buck behaviors and rut activity, all that comes from a balanced deer population. It comes when you’ve got roughly equal numbers of bucks and does out there and when you’ve got bucks of all ages. That’s the whole point of this. So that’s what we encourage deer hunters to do and we teach them to do that.
And then beyond that, it’s important to us that whitetails be preserved for the future and managed correctly for following generations of hunters. So we spend a lot of our time advocating for the preservation of whitetails and whitetail hunting, addressing the threats that we see out there, dealing with policy at the federal and state level, working on ensuring that there is wise deer management legislation in the policy realm, and that we also fight bad ideas in the policy world. So we’re very much engaged in hunter recruitment, hunter access, wise deer policy, wise deer management, and educating hunters about how to have better deer habitat and better deer hunting.
You can find out about all of that at our main portal which is QDMA.com. It’s pretty simple. QDMA.com. And at our website, you can learn more about deer. You can find the nearest QDMA branch near you and get involved with local volunteers and members. You can start a branch if there’s not one near you. You can find out about our events, our national convention, there’s just a whole ton of learning you can do at QDMA.com. You can also find out about how to get in touch with us on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram. We are all plugged in there as well.
So we would love to have you stop by QDMA.com and learn more about us and get plugged in and become a member and begin receiving our magazine. Our magazine is Quality Whitetails. It’s really the only magazine out there that focuses totally on managing deer and deer habitat to enjoy better deer hunting. So QDMA.com is where to get started.
Bruce: Lindsay, thank you so much for being a part of the Whitetail Rendezvous community. Our mission parallels exactly what you’re doing. We’re passionate about whitetails. We’re passionate about continuing the tradition of hunting. And we’re passionate about youth and getting them involved. Those three things are the future of hunting and it’s people like you, Lindsay, and your organization, QDMA, that are having a huge impact in those goals. So on behalf of the Whitetail Rendezvous community, I want to thank you for being on the show, and wishing you a fantastic day. Thank you so much, Lindsay.
Lindsay: Bruce, thank you so much for having me. Best of luck with the show.