Episode # 266 Kip Adams QDMA

September 29, 2016

 

WR 266 | QDMA

Fawn recruitment rates are dropping all across the US. Because of this, it’s important to assess the current harvest structure of bucks across their range, and the current deer knowledge level of hunters. Kip Adams, a certified Wildlife Biologist and the Director of Education and Outreach for QDMA, is leading the efforts towards improving present hunting conditions. His company QDMA is a national nonprofit organization specializing in education and outreach to hunters, landowners and natural resource professionals. They provide quality educational materials and other opportunities like the Deer Steward class. They work with hunters across the country devise more sustainable ways to hunt whitetails and other big game.

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On our show, we’re going to have Kip Adams. Kip is a certified Wildlife Biologist and the Director of Education and Outreach for QDMA. Kip is going to talk about the current harvest structure of bucks across their range, the current deer knowledge level of hunters, and the declining fawn recruitment rates across the US. You’re going to learn a lot. I always do when Kip is on the show.

Listen to the podcast here:

QDMA With Kip Adams

We’re going to connect with Kip Adams. Kip is a certified Wildlife Biologist and QDMA’s Director of Education and Outreach. Kip, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Bruce. I appreciate being here.

Since we last talked, what’s happening over at QDMA these days?

We’re having a good year. Membership continues to grow which is a great sign. That means that the hunters want to continue to learn more about deer, enhancing habitat, and how to be a better hunter. We’ve got some new educational programs, lots of things for youth hunters, and overall life is good.

What things are you focused on personally yourself in the education? People email me all the time or text me and say, “Bruce, can I find out about this, can I find out about that?” I use you as a resource because, bar none, you probably have the best data and the best information in the whitetail world. Share with me what’s going on in education and what type of questions are people asking.

Regarding our educational materials and the newest things that we have, we always put out our Annual Whitetail Report which provides information for hunters and that’s a hunter’s favorite. The newest thing and I’m real excited about this is a hunter book. You can buy a book to really help you do just about anything in the world, build computers, brain surgery, and anything else but there’s not a really good book that really explains hunting and how to get involved, what to do, how to scout and all that. We partnered with Kalkomey, the largest provider of online hunter education classes in the US.300,000 people that sign up for that every year, but about 100,000 of them drop out. Kalkomey said, “The biggest thing that the hunters want is a true book on how to do this, and there’s not a good one available.”

We wrote this book as an eBook, and what they’re going to use it for is an incentive for people to stay in that class. If you graduate from their online hunter class you get that for free. In addition to that, we’re going to sell the book but Primus worked with us to provide all the video components to it. The topics cover everything that a hunter needs to know from how to hunt, where to hunt, public land, private land, how to ask permission, gearing up what you need, how to prepare yourself, how to prepare your bow or firearm, scouting, how to know where to be, tree stands, preparing for the shot, after the shot, processing, mentoring somebody else, there’s a whole gamut. That’s going to come out and I am super excited for it. I got to write a few of the chapters and I got to review all of the book so it is going to be a tremendous resource for hunters whether you’re just starting or you’ve been hunting for decades. I’m looking forward to that getting out and being able to share some more information with folks who seek that kind of stuff.

Where’s that going to be posted for sale? Right on QDMA’s website?

We will. Maybe we’ll have it on a website. I’m not sure exactly where else it’ll be sold. The cool thing about it being an eBook is it’ll certainly be a nominal price. It’d be something that we can continually update, which is something obviously you can’t do when a book is in print. It’ll allow us to continue to provide either new video components and or updated material and updated research. QDMA.com will be the best place to get it. I’m not sure where else they will be available too, but we’ll do everything we can to make it as easy as possible for people to find.

WR 266 | QDMA
QDMA: Rather than measuring a hunt’s success by how big the antlers were, it’s way better to gauge that based on the age of that animal.

Keep us in mind over here at Whitetail Rendezvous. I’d love to help promote that because people do ask questions, they’re thirsty for knowledge and some of our old traditions work well. I’ve been hunting whitetails for 50 years but there are so many changes and if you don’t change up your game, you’re missing out on some of the wonderful aspects of hunting that are available to us today.

I agree and I will certainly keep you posted.

Let’s get into the current harvest structure of bucks across their range. How many states have whitetails in them?

Just about every state in the US does. Certainly everybody east of the Rocky Mountains does. Once you get west of the Rocky Mountains, mule deer and elk are more processed I guess than whitetail. Just about every state does. You get into the real desert country and there are places where you don’t have them, but almost everybody does. I guess from a hunter end, if from the Rocky Mountains east, there are 37 states that incorporates most of the deer’s range. About 97% of the whitetails live east of the Rocky Mountains. I imagine it’s pretty closer with hunters because about 97% of the hunters in the US also live east of the Rocky Mountains. Deer and hunters overlap pretty well.

Let’s talk about the age structure of the bucks that are being harvested today.

This is one of the neatest trends that are going on right now across the whitetails range. It’s something that hunters should be super proud of. The data that we presented in our 2016 Whitetail Report, we always look at state by state harvest with regard to numbers of bucks and does, age structure, and that harvest actually was from the 2014 season. The reason for that is there are a few states right now that don’t have all of the data analyzed from this past deer season.

The most recent season where everything is complete, analyzed, and able to look at showed that in that year for the first time in the history of deer management in the US, hunters killed more bucks that were at least three and a half years old than they were just one and a half, which is absolutely amazing. 33% of all the bucks we killed, all the antler bucks, those are the one or older. Only 33% of them were just one and a half years old, 34% were three or older, three, four, five, six or seven years old. That had never happened before. We’ve always killed more yearling bucks than anything else so that number has been trending downward for the last couple of decades. In 2014, 2015 hunting season it actually crossed and that’s absolutely amazing. There are great opportunities for hunters and kudos for hunters, they’re the ones that really drove that and made that happen. Now they’re getting to reap the benefits of it.

One thing I think about years ago just some miserable weather and I was able to hunt in a number of states and everybody was crying in their beers they will because they weren’t seeing the bucks. The next year on our farm where I hunt in Wisconsin, we killed a 160 and 135 and a 140-ish mature deer. I’m shifting from Boone and Crockett to Pope and Young scores to mature deer. In my mind, a mature deer is four and a half years old. Is that a point to see a mature deer or would you say three and a half?

Three and a half. They still had growing the do after that. They’ve achieved almost maximum body size. At three and a half, their antlers are somewhere between 50%, 75% full grown. Many hunters in the United States today are targeting that three and a half year old buck with some weight and other would like to see them get one more year at four and a half. A four and a half year old can certainly be structurally mature. A little bit have grown more of their antlers, but by four and a half their antlers are almost going to be as big as they are later. I applaud you though for hunting that from a maturity level rather than an amateur level. You’re seeing an increased number of hunters do that.

One of the ways we can get ourselves in trouble is by focusing too much attention just on the antlers. Rather than measuring a hunt’s success by how big the antlers were, it’s way better to gauge that based on the age of that animal. If you shoot a buck that is three, four, five, six or whatever, it doesn’t matter what the antlers are. We like big antlers, but if you harvest that deer by age and you harvesting an older animal like that, you should be proud of yourself regardless of how big or small those antlers are.

Why do you think this trend has crossed the line from shooting brown and down, “It’s got horns. It’s legal. I’m going to shoot it too. Let’s see what we got on our land and then let’s see if we can hunt.”

There are 23 different states in the US that have antler restrictions for some part of the state designed to protect those one-and-a-half-year-old bucks. In those states there’s a lot of yearling bucks that make it to their second birthday and then they obviously become harder to shoot then. I think an even bigger reason is that you have this trend of today’s hunter being so much more knowledgeable on the benefits of protecting young bucks and appreciative of the opportunity to hunt bucks that are two years old, three years old or four or older. There’s a lot of voluntary pass on those younger deer. Even in the states that have antler restrictions and protect younglings, a lot of those hunters don’t even shoot two-year-old bucks even though they’re legal. They let them get a little older.

The biggest reason for the shift is a cultural shift in hunters wanting the opportunity to hunt older deer and understanding the benefits if they don’t shoot all of those one and a half year old bucks. I’m talking about benefits to the deer herd and certainly benefits to the hunters. That’s where the real improvement has been made. Agencies are doing a better job encouraging hunters to do that and showing them the benefits. Places like QDMA and other organizations, yourself, and lots of educators out there are providing information to show hunters the benefits of protecting yearling bucks. Today’s hunter is far more knowledgeable on that. You see that age structure of bucks increasing and then we get that deer that’s a little bit older. We get to photograph bucks that are older, which obviously as you’re aware, provides more vocalization during the hunting season. We see more rub activity, more rubs, more scrapes, all that fun stuff that as hunters we love to see. It’s a good time to be hunting whitetails.

A guy shared with me, he said, “It’s all about recruitment of age class.” I knew what he was talking about because we talked about that in the Rocky Mountains with our elk, our deer, and all our species out here. To our audience, you’re recruiting from one age class, one and a half, then he’s two and a half and the odds of him living get better and better the older they get. Kip, your thoughts on that?

As long as you protect the majority of those young ones, you end up with a well-managed buck population Share on X.

They certainly do. Lots of research show that basically if we don’t kill them during the deer season or hit them with our trucks, there are going to be a lot of them next year. We lose some of those to disease and natural causes, but for the most part they have high survival rates outside of the hunting season. A two–year-old buck is a lot harder to shoot than a yearling. In many cases, a buck that’s lived at three years old is even more difficult than a two year old. Part of it is not necessarily that they get a lot smarter as they get older, but the ones that get older got older because of their movement patterns and they probably were a little more wary anyway as younger deer.

It’s not that as a deer goes from two to three to four to five that their behavior changes or the movement pattern differs a lot. We know this because there’s so many GPS radio collars studies that have gone on over the past five or six years, those deer that tend to be a little more secretive or don’t travel quite as far as those younger animals end up living to be a little older. Obviously, they’re way harder to kill once we start putting pressure on them. It’s interesting some of the studies that we see now with what GPS collars allow us to see. No question, older bucks are much more difficult than those yearling deer to kill.

We’re getting older bucks; I’m going to stay with the farm that I’ve been so graciously been able to hunt for so many years. We’re noticing that the bigger deer, its behavior and travel patterns change, and the range get smaller. The nieces and nephews are seeing younger deer because they don’t put in the time in their hunting in Wisconsin in the nine-day gun season. How do we balance the herd now if we’re reaching a good upper age class, but the younger age class is the only one we’re seeing?

Fortunately there is enough mortality of those bucks there to keep it pretty balanced. That’s usually not a problem to keep a balanced age structure like that. They are a lot harder to kill when they’re older but there’s enough other things that will take the toll, whether it be the rut and people just tend to see them more or cars, disease, etc. It’s good to have those deer moving into older age classes. For the most part you don’t have to worry about ending up with too many of them in those older age classes.

That’s a problem a lot of people would like to have but in reality that generally is not a problem. The problem comes that if you shoot too many of the younger ones, then you don’t end up with any of the older ones left. I would continue trying to protect the majority of those younger ones where you are. I’d certainly let the youth hunters, the new guys and gals take whatever they wanted, whether that was a one year old or anything else. As long as you protect the majority of those young ones, you end up with a well-managed buck population.

What about the food plots and feeding? Is there something that an older buck, four and a half years or older, likes better than the younger deer? Is it just that they’re more secretive of how they feed?

A lot of times those deer, we can watch them during the summer. You think, “They’re out in the field and they’re so visible.” Then they know the deer season’s here because they’ve disappeared. It’s not so much that they know it’s deer season, but they are reacting to human pressure. We’re not bothering them for most of the summer but what happens as soon as hunting season starts or just before when we’re in the woods, were hanging the stands, we’re scouting or checking or moving cameras, all of a sudden those bucks realize there’s a lot more human activity here than there was last month or the last couple of months. That’s what they’re reacting to. They’re avoiding all of that additional presence in the woods or in and around those fields where they were feeding. In most cases it’s not necessarily that they’re more secretive by nature, they react much more quickly to the pressure that hunters apply than those younger deer do.

I’m thinking of some of the stands we have and some are better during specific months during the season, like an early season stand. We’re seeing a lot of does and every once in a while we’ll see a mature buck and then other stands, we see more mature bucks than does or yearling bucks. Why is that?

It probably has something to do with how the stands or the area that they’re in. Maybe it’s a good movement pattern or a funnel or something, it maybe food source related. If you’re seeing older deer there, it’s probably a good place as they’re traveling to get either from bedding to food or searching for does. I bet you there’s at least some component of the stands you have there that it’s easier for you to enter and exit those stands without those deer knowing it. Most people, once they’re in a stand can sit still enough to not be spooking deer.

Most hunting stands get ruined when people are entering them and they’re spooking deer while they’re going there. In my personal opinion and more importantly, when they get out of the stand and leave, they’re either spooking deer while they’re getting down or as they’re leaving. There’s nothing that will ruin a stand more than you’re spooking deer from it. It may be that the stands that you tend to see older bucks out of, they’re either the way you have them positioned or something where the wind patterns, terrain or how you’re able to access and leave them that you scare deer or allowed deer to know that you were there. There are way less echoes which then they tend to be a little better for seeing those older deer.

We all have favorite stands. We all have productive stands. You just brought up a key point and lessons learned to everybody. The easier you can get into and out of your stand with the least scent, noise, whatever, the more successful that stand’s going to be. I find that so truthful. I was hunting Buffalo County in a river bottom stand. It’s a wonderful stand but I can hunt in it one or two days and I’d have to be so careful walking out at night because I would bump deer.

I’d hear them snort and I go, “I can’t come back here tomorrow,” and I’d have to rest that stand. It was a great stand if you slip in and slip out. I’ve thought about taking a canoe and come in from completely different area and I could take a canoe probably ten yards from my stand. Next time I have to stand I’m thinking I’m going to do that because that’s the only way I could get in and get out without messing up the whole 40-acre river bottom where my stand was.

That’s where a lot of the hunting knowledge today is being directed. It’s not so much at safety and hanging a stand or where deer move, but it’s gone to another level now and putting the stand up such that you can get there and get out without alerting deer. I will absolutely hang a stand in an area that I think is not quite as good as another area but in my mind I know I can get in and out safely without spooking deer. You can talk to some of the better deer hunters in the United States, Bill Winke, Dan Perez, Whitetail Properties, those guys and that’s the mindset that they have.

We had a Deer Steward class that we taught last month and Bill Winke took all of our students to a field trip on his place and spent half a day with him talking about his stand setups and his thought process. Bill Winke is obviously an extremely successful hunter. Anybody who watches his Midwest Whitetail  show knows that. He really impressed upon our students. His thought process was all about getting in and getting out without being detected. It’s pretty cool to see some of the more successful hunters, that’s the mindset they have. I think it’s great then that we take that, share it with all the hunters, and help them.

WR 266 | QDMA
QDMA: There’s nothing that will ruin a stand more than you’re spooking deer from it.

Five or ten years ago you’d plant a food plot and hang a stand on the edge of it because you know deer were coming, and you realize, “The first time I hunted I saw a bunch, second time I saw a few, and by the third time I didn’t see any.” Now that same hunter is hunting a hundred yards off that food plot, catching those deer going to it and leaving it in such a manner that he spooks very few. He may not see all of the deer that are in the plot, but he or she are seeing deer on every sit or almost every sit which then allows that stand to just be way more productive throughout the course of the season, not just once or twice.

A 100 yards off of a food plot, I call it the staging area. That connects to a transition zone, which connects back to their bedding area or their security cover. How many times we have our favorite stand, it’s been sitting in that same corner because every year without fail, sooner or later you’re going to see a mature buck come through there. It’s a matter of being in there. What I found out with that thought process is that the days I was hunting were the right days to see the deer. That’s what it meant to me. The moon phase, the wind, everything, how quiet it was to get in and out, and then all of a sudden he’d show up or I’d see him at a distance, but he was coming through. Your thoughts on that?

There’s absolutely the need to pay attention to those other factors, especially the wind. In my mind, there is nothing that’s impacting our movement more than that. There’s a fair amount of research to support that and certainly a lifetime of hunting experience that will support the importance of the wind with where deer moving, and when. Firstly, you have to have a place that deer knows or at least thinks that it’s safe to travel through. It hasn’t been spooked from a certain stand which gives you an opportunity for him to be in the area.

Next, the wind has to be in such a way that if you are in that stand and he’s coming by, you’re not spooking him before he gets there, which is important. Then it’s just knowing all the other environmental variables that are playing into that. Is it on a feeding route? Is he headed into a bedding area? Is he headed to an area to chase does? The more that we can understand about why dear want to move, when, and for what reason, it allows us to put ourselves in better situations to cross paths with them and to be with an either rifle or a bow range.

We’ve been talking about the current deer knowledge level of hunters. Both Kip and I would agree that it’s increasing exponentially because of the social media platform, YouTube, and programs such as QDMA. Just give a shout out to the audience how they can get in touch with QDMA and how they can find out about the courses that Bill Winke was part of. Share some of that information with us.

We’re a national nonprofit organization that specializes in education and outreach to hunters, landowners, and natural resource professionals. They can reach us at QDMA.com. That’s the easiest way. The website is full of educational materials and other opportunities like the Deer Steward class we just talked about. QDMA.com is a nice and easy one to remember, an easy way to get a hold of us. We work with hunters across the country every day. I’m glad that got to work with more.

Give the promo for your Deer Steward program. Why do people take it? What are they going to learn? Anything else you’d like to add?

The Deer Steward program has surpassed our wildest dreams with regards to how much people would enjoy it and the number of people that want to come to it. There are two levels of it. The first level is a weekend class that people can come to learn about the four cornerstones of QDM. We cover the herd management end, how to improve habitat, hunter management, heart monitoring, and all the latest research on deer. It was designed to teach you more about the animal, how to be a better hunter and how to improve habitat for them. We have hunters, landowners, state and federal wildlife agencies, stand folks. It is an intense deer class over the course of a weekend that we teach a few times each year in different regions throughout the United States. We’ve been doing it for ten years now and there are 1,500 people that have come to these classes, which is pretty neat.

The fun thing from the students’ end is we limit each class to 30 to 40 people, so there’s a lot of interaction time for them between the other students and instructors. There are typically three to five QDMA biologists as well as a couple of college professors, the likes of Dr. Karl Miller, one of the most famous deer researchers in the country, Dr. Craig Harper from the University of Tennessee, the top habitat person in the country .It’s some QDMA staff and other experts that do the teaching. The cool thing is we’re all hunters as well. We look at this and teach it from a hunting end, not just from a book end. People come; they get to learn from these folks. If they decide, “I want to take level two,” level two is even more fun because it’s the application of what you learned in level one.

Level one is all indoors, level two is mostly outside in the field, hands in the dirt. We’re looking at no tier drills, we’re calibrating cedars, were talking about how to plant, analyzing camera data, measuring fetuses to determine when that doe was conceived, aging jawbones, making deer harvest recommendations, all the fun stuff that we do with this, looking at maps, selecting stand sites. It’s the most intensive deer course that we can take, there’s not even a college course that is that specific on deer taught anywhere in the country. That’s why it’s been so popular and why people continue to come to it. We also have an online version of it for folks that can’t make it in person which has also been extremely popular. We filmed one of the in-person classes so they can watch that but it’s a neat testament to see how much hunger hunters have right now to make themselves more knowledgeable and better wildlife stewards. That’s a pretty good sign for the future of deer hunting.

Let’s talk about the declining fawn recruitment rates across the United States. How do you think it’s measured, why you think it’s happening, and how can we reverse it?

This is a big issue today and it has been over the past decade. What it is most states will measure the fawn recruitment rate. What that means is it’s the number of fawns that are alive at the beginning of hunting season. We talk about that as fawns per doe. We know that many does will have twins in the spring but that doesn’t mean that both of those fawns will be alive in the fall. It’s the number of fawns per doe in the fall, the opening day of deer season. It’s a good measure of how productive that deer herd is. What it directly relates to for hunters is, “How many deer can we shoot this fall? In really productive deer herds, that means there will be more bucks available for harvest, more deer available to see, and more does available for harvest. When you have less productive deer herds, that means that as hunters, we can’t shoot as many without driving deer herds down.

What we do at QDMA is we monitor this on a state by state basis across the US and we’ve been doing this for fifteen years now. What we found was back then, the average adult doe recruited almost one fawn. There was just below one, which is a very high recruitment rate. We’re pumping lots of fawns into the system. If you fast forward to today, that has dropped all the way down to just over half a fawn per doe. It’s 0.58 fawns per doe. What that means is it takes a lot more does to recruit that number of fawns today than they did in the past. The things that impact that are there are more predators today than ever before, bears, bobcats and coyotes. There are bears in some places and mountain lions, but bears and coyotes are the biggest.

There are more of them. We have lower density deer herds in a lot of places, but by design, deer herds were too abundant and agencies have reduced them. You have fewer does and fewer fawns are surviving. What that means is the average deer herd today is not nearly as productive as it was in the past. If you end up with things like a bad drought, a bad disease year or something like that, those deer herds don’t rebound nearly as quickly. As hunters, we can’t shoot nearly as many deer in the fall without reducing deer herds below what the acceptable levels are. If you’re in an area where there’s too many deer and you can’t slow them down, having fewer fawns is a good thing, I guess.

For the average hunter, we don't want our deer herds to be less healthy or less productive. Share on X

For the average hunter, we don’t want our deer herds to be less healthy or less productive. We want to make sure they’re very productive and very healthy. The recruitment rate is a very important thing to monitor because then the number of deer that we harvest in the fall gets adjusted because of it. That essentially has been falling off the table for the last fifteen years, big steep declines in almost every state. It’s clearly one of the biggest issues that the deer managers are watching today and something QDMA monitors very closely across the whitetails range.

I got a friend in upper Wisconsin that’s got a wolf carrying a fawn right through his food plot. I think of that and there’s always been predation but with the increasing bears and coyotes, how big of an impact do you think predation is having on the recruitment rate?

In some areas, I think minimal impact. In other areas, tremendous impact, particularly in the Southeastern US where coyotes are pretty new phenomenon. There’s lots of research out there that shows fawn recruitment rates in the 0.2 range, so five does to recruit one fawn, that’s incredible. In the North and in much of the Midwest, we’ve had coyotes for a long time. Our deer seemed to be dealing with them a little better. In most of the areas that have had coyotes and bears for a long time, they’re holding their own with regard to predation. Is predation a concern? Absolutely. It’s certainly something that’s taken fawns but I don’t think it’s nearly as big of an issue as it is. In most of the Southeastern US where coyotes are absolutely hammering a lot of those fawns, they’re making it very difficult for those managers to balance their numbers.

Kip, we’re at the time of the show. The show goes so fast when I have guests like you on, so thank you for that. Share a couple of shout outs to whomever.

I’d certainly like to thank all the deer hunters out there, first of all for being hunters, for being good ambassadors for this thing that we love, and for managing our deer and other wildlife populations. They’re the ones that drive all systems; they’re the ones that pay for all that conservation. Everybody in the United States that appreciates any type of wildlife and wild places ought to thank the hunters because we’re the ones that pay for it.

One more time, how do people get a hold of QDMA?

Folks can get us website that’s QDMA.com. If they don’t want to do that and they want to call, we have an easy number. It’s 800-209-DEER. It’s easy to remember if you’re a deer hunter.

Kip Adams, thank you so much for sharing some of your time in helping to educate the audience of Whitetail Rendezvous.

Thank you, Bruce. It was great talking to you. You have a great day and good luck everybody. Hunt this fall.

Make sure you tune in to the next episode of Whitetail Rendezvous. We’re going to head down to Texas and we’re going to meet up with Matt Moore. Matt is the Founder, Owner and Producer of Closing The Distance TV. Matt’s going to talk about Moment Of Truth segment of the show, deer management and ethical shot placement. Matt’s got some really good insight so you don’t want to miss this one.

A special friend, Paige Darden of MyTopo, says before you head into the woods, visit MyTopo.com to design of waterproof map centered on the area you plan the hunt. Overlay public boundaries such as wildlife management areas, private land owner parcel data, and owner’s names. MyTopo prints and ships within 24 hours for quick delivery to your mailbox. Find out who owns all the land around your favorite hunting spots. It’s a great service I used often and I highly recommend it to you.

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