It just occurred to me in thinking of this is Dr. Dave Samuel’s column in Bowhunter Magazine “Know Whitetails” has been well regarded for years too. He is easily accessible via email and responds readily to questions AND he typically summarizes the latest and greatest from this Study Group every year. I believe NAW does this as well.
I didnt list Penn State and Cornell but when I mentioned the schools up north those are the 2 I was thinking of for sure. Definitely agree with Grant Woods as well. Kinda still got a burr under my saddle re: NDA and the crap they pulled when it was still QDMA. Closing the forums they way they did and wiping out decades worth of whitetail management knowledge should have gotten those in charge a full on beat down or at least some jail time. Thankfully at least most of Paul Knox's stuff was saved in other places but there were volumes of regionally specific land and critter management info that just got scattered in the wind.
I did not realize this at all. So what is the "backstory" about the QDMA and NDA merger etc.? If you go on their site there is a lot of information but I didn't realize it was less overall than what was provided in the past!!!
That list is longer than I care to try to type out but I will give you a couple of examples. One is that if a mature tom is taken out during the breeding season that it takes weeks for the remaining males to establish breeding dominance thus breeding success is going to go down. Another would be nesting date. The claim is that turkeys in the southeastern US all hit peak nesting in mid-April, like the 17th or 19th or something. There are lots of other topics or issues where what they state as gospel flys so blantantly in the face of any logic for folks that have observed, studied and hunted turkeys for more than 5 minutes, it is absurd.
QDMA used to have a forum and deleted it. They were getting sponsorships and some of the sponsors didn't like forum members pointing out things about their companies that weren't liked or could be done without their products. A lot of other things went on as well like forum members not agreeing with certain stances by the QDMA on subjects. The forum members thought the QDMA was being pressured by agencies and sponsors in the wrong direction. So, QDMA deleted the forums. Years of info were lost. It would be almost like if this site had articles written and sponsors, but then pressure from those made saddlehunter.com delete these forums. You can see how it would leave a bad taste in one's mouth.
Before NDA was a thing QDMA had an active forum. Folks from all over the country shared their tips, best practices, things that worked and things that didnt work in their particular areas of the country as it related to habitat management. Soil health, trees, shrubs, NWS grasses, food plots, prescribed fire or any thing else you could think of was covered. It was a place where you read about and/or see the real world application of different techniques and tactics as folks implemented different things around the country. Anyway, they made a post announcing that on a date that seems like was only a few weeks out at the time, that they were pulling the plug on the forums and shutting it down. Some stuff got saved because folks set in to copying it to other platforms but an absurd amount of habitat knowledge just got zapped because they refused to save any parts of the forums.
This ^^^ was the politics involved in how it played out and paired with their actions why I will never support that organization again.
Money, money, money..... the bane of us all.
Dr. Mike Chamberlain is defiantly the man in the know on wild turkeys. I may disagree with some of his ideas on judging age of turkey by spur length, but he is very knowledgeable and worth checking out.
