(upbeat music) Well, it's almost fall in Arkansas, and you know what that means, time for cooler weather, football and deer season.

Hello, my name is Steve Wildman Wilson.

I'm your host here on Naturally Wild.

You know, it's estimated there will be over 400,000 deer hunters headed to the woods this fall in search of the whitetail deer.

And rightfully so, as Arkansas has now an estimated population of around a million.

But it wasn't always that way.

These are definitely the good old days of deer hunting in Arkansas.

My guests on the show tonight are going to tell you why these are the good old days of deer hunting.

Please welcome, if you will, first of all right, here is Jeremy Brown.

He's the program for the Deer management assistance program.

So you don't answer the phone that way, do you?

I do not.

We say DMAP.

DMAP.

That's right.

Deer management assistance program.

DMAP.

You'll hear that a lot tonight.

Also, we got Caleb Miller there.

Caleb, good to see you.

What's your title?

But I'm a private land biologist.

Private land biologist for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.

Well, thank you all for joining me.

We're going to talk about deer all night tonight.

First of all, give me a little background about your, how long have you been with the Game and Fish.

And where are you from?

Well, Wildman, I've been with the Game and Fish for a little over 18 years.

I remember you.

I started off in public lands, working on WMAs, did little supervising, and then I converted over to private lands a while back.

I actually worked as the assistant deer coordinator with Ralph for a long time on the Wildlife Management division, but now me and Caleb both are in the Private Lands Division, and most of our efforts are focused on private lands and stuff like that, helping landowners across the state.

Well, obviously talking about that, what between 80 and 90% of the hunting land in Arkansas is privately owned.

So it makes sense.

Yeah.

That's right.

You know, just land base alone, we know that nearly 90% is privately owned, and we all want to do good and move the needle for management.

And but if we strictly rely on our WMAs and refuges and stuff like that, we could do home runs and be awesome, but we're only impacting ten, 12% of that.

So when you say WMAs, we use a lot of acronyms at the government wildlife management areas.

DMAP will be Deer Management Assistance program.

So you'll hear that, it's pretty common around the Game and Fish.

Caleb, now what do you do?

You're a lands biologist, but what kind of explain what you do every day.

Yep.

So I've been with the agency for three years.

As a private land biologist, we go out and meet landowners, and we basically help them manage for whatever kind of wildlife they're wanting.

So we do a lot of deer management, but we also help people manage for turkey, for quail.

We help manage for songbirds, for butterflies.

It's whatever that landowner wants out on their property.

So we kind of have a, we're well-rounded in all the knowledge when it comes down to it, and just helping out for whatever they're interested in.

Where did you come to Arkansas from?

What were you before you came to the Game and Fish?

I'm originally from Kentucky, so I did my undergraduate and master's in Kentucky in wildlife ecology, and then I worked for Kentucky Fish and Wildlife for about a year as a private lands biologist, and then moved on down to Arkansas.

Did Kentucky have a deer management assistance program, or are we one of the first states?

It was new to me when I moved down here, and it was a very cool thing to see how it operates down here.

Well, rightfully so.

Like I was saying, we got close to a million deer here in Arkansas.

Didn't always be that way.

Let's talk about how we got from where we were.

Give me a little history on the deer in Arkansas, Jeremy.

So, I mean, I'm not old enough to go way back there for personal experiences, but just to give perspective, you know, in 1938, we started to collect and harvest records.

And at that time we had about 208 deer that was harvested during that year.

Where we're at today, you know, year before last, we had over 200,000 deer that was harvested.

Now, last year was a little bit lower, but we had a phenomenal acorn crop that kind of knocked down our numbers a little bit, but we were still at 187,000 plus deer that was harvested.

So that is the difference in night and day from 208 to 180,000+.

And so how we got to there?

Well, obviously back in the days it was through protection.

We had a lot of game laws.

Brought in law enforcement officers set up some regulations.

We also had our wildlife management areas or WMAs, that we established for those protections, but we kind of evolved with those regulations as protecting does.

And that's kind of, we were in a management situation where we were herd growth.

That was our focus.

Quantity.

We were going for numbers.

We needed numbers out there.

So we protected our does, harvested only bucks.

And as that progression grew in numbers, then we become to where we wanted to do herd stabilization, balance our harvest, bucks and does alike.

So you seen some of you older generation may have remembered the doe days that we only had certain days.

I remember that two days after Thanksgiving when I started hunting there.

Right.

We only had, we only had a one week season in November for everything.

No, for bucks only.

And then we had two days, doe days, when I was hunting.

It was two days after Thanksgiving.

Then we had one week of buck only in December.

That was back in the 60s.

And think about today.

So that was a very restricted season back then because we were trying to grow the population.

And now we got a buck hunt that last week of August.

And it goes, our archery season, once it starts, it goes all the way to February 28th.

Yeah.

So we have a large, large liberal season because now we're not, in certain parts of the state, we kind of have too many deer that we're in in that herd reduction phase, because we kind of got too many mouths to feed.

You went from quantity to quality.

That's right.

You know, looking back, I remember dad, my dad died at 95.

And of course, he grew up deer hunting.

And he tells me stories when they would go back there in the 40s and 50s hunting, and if somebody found a deer track, they'd go back to camp and get all the members.

Everybody go look at the track.

It's just hard to believe that we've come that far to where we got almost a million deer.

We have, and I'm not too old, but I remember in the 80s, I'm from northeast Arkansas.

Oh yeah, the Delta.

And we didn't have a big deer population in the 80s back then.

I remember reading the newspaper and seeing deer tracks in the newspaper and telling dad, I want to go, where's this deer at?

I want to go see a deer.

Wow.

And now we got deer depredation issues where farmers thinks these deer are nuisance.

So we've come a long way over time.

It's really a great comeback story.

for Arkansas's biology and wildlife and conservation.

That's what it's all about.

A conservation is a wise use of your resources, and it's amazing that you can take close to 200,000 deer out of a herd every year, and it's replenished the next year.

That's just, it's crazy.

Well, and honestly, that high productivity is is the progression of how we, how well we manage our habitat in the state.

You know, we used to be we still are a heavily forested state, but the proper habitat quality, we've increased that over time, making our deer herd more productive.

Our hunters, you know, we're we're at a phase now where we're trying to recruit more hunters, just just to keep the balance of the number of mouths were feeding to the amount of groceries we have on the ground.

Well, I've heard you guys say lots of times that the hunters, every time they pull that trigger, you're a wildlife manager.

We got to have them because if we didn't, think about it, we're taking 200,000 out of a herd and they're replenished.

If you missed a year or two, it'd be like some of these urban hunts we're having.

You're exactly right, Wildman, the hunter themselves is the best management tool we got.

Whether it's shooting the rifle or thumping string on a bow.

Every time they do that, it's a management decision.

Or throwing a spear.

Or spear, got spear.

But every one of those opportunities is a management opportunity to to help us balance and make our herd more productive and more healthy or grow bigger bucks.

I mean, nobody, I haven't run into too many people that don't want to shoot a big buck.

They want a lot of big bucks.

Talk about the balance there.

I think, you know, we did such, you guys did such a good job, the Game and Fish did, of educating that hunter back in the day of don't kill a doe because you're taking roughly, what, does a doe usually have twins on the average now?

If everything's normal in Arkansas and all things given that we don't have no drastic circumstances, we should be having twins.

Okay, so think about that.

You said don't kill a doe because you're killing three deer.

This is back when you're managing for quantity of deer.

And I think we did such a great job of doing that.

I remember my dad, he had trouble killing his first deer.

It's hard to believe you had enough deer.

So now it's changed, I think.

What's your optimum goal there?

Just to get a balance, 50/50, does to bucks every year?

The simplest way of putting it, yeah, we just want balance.

You go read a textbook.

We try to target 1 to 1, buck to doe ratios.

Now with us here at the Game and Fish, we have harvest.

We have droughts, we have floods, we have gnat outbreaks and some of the parts.

So we actually try to manage, to compensate for some of those additive mortalities.

And now, you know, with CWD and EHD, even even being a big hit on taking deer out, we actually most likely are going to manage at a 2 to 1 doe to buck ratio or 3 to 1 even, in some cases, if we know that there's some stress loads there that that we can't account for.

You'd rather miss on the, I guess, on that end rather than harvest too many.

What that does is it allows our herd to bounce back and we can absorb some of that when we have a drought like we had this summer, or when we have a gnat outbreak like we did in 2018.

We were able to absorb that by the way we manage and come right back into.

And those are things you really have no have, have no control over, the droughts and things.

Don't know when they're coming.

So your your program is to contact private landowners and, and folks, when we say private land, I know a lot of people think of private landowners, of which we do, but it also includes the timber companies.

And these deer leases.

People lease land from a deer companies and other things like that.

So those are still private lands.

So that's who you guys can help manage on their property whatever they want.

Let's go to private lands biologist, I know deer we're going to be talking about, but other things you get people calling you wanting you to manage and come out and give them advice on?

Yeah.

For for us it's mainly about looking at the habitat on the ground.

We get, we get a little bit into the the deer ratios, the buck to doe ratios.

But we also have a whole set of DMAP, deer management program biologists that come out and really fine tune those those deer numbers.

So what we're looking at is getting Forbes and flowers on the ground to bring in insects, to create food for animals, and trying to basically balance a well-tuned system that's going to help all your wildlife, including your deer.

Now, you guys have taught me a word when I worked at Game and Fish, biodiversity.

There you go.

Thank you.

But it basically means when you plant something for deer, everything else enjoys it as well.

It's not just for specifically deer or turkey or quail or whatever.

You get many requests for bringing back the Bobwhite quail?

I get a lot of requests for bringing back the Bobwhite quail, especially I'm here in Central Arkansas and it is, there's a lot of people wanting them.

Yeah, it's well, I know when I used to go speak to a club or organization, you see the older generation that used to quail hunt, tears come back.

The these are not the good old days of quail hunting either, are they?

No.

But of course, if you have good habitat for quail, I mean, that's typically good habitat for just about every other wildlife.

So it's a good habitat for your deer.

It's a good habitat for your turkey.

It's just about every game species will benefit from good quail habitat.

All right.

Give me a step by step.

How does it work if somebody is interested just watching tonight and wants to get their private lands into more wildlife, whether it be deer, whatever, what do they do first?

Well, most people can find us, they can go to the AGFC website and they can go to the Private Lands page and figure out which biologist covers their county.

So we've got 13 biologists.

Most of us cover anywhere from 3 to 7 counties.

So they'll they'll find that person, they'll find their contact information, give us a call, and then we'll schedule a time to come out and meet with that landowner.

And basically when I meet with a landowner, the first thing I try to do is figure out what exactly they're wanting for their property.

You know, are they are they a big deer hunter?

Do they just want a turkey hunt?

What's their goals?

And then we look at what what's there, what's going on on their property?

So we we take a walk around their property or ride around their property and see what they already have.

And then we work to figure out, okay, what can I do to enhance my property, to put more habitat on the ground, to better it for whichever wildlife I'm wanting to come out there.

And then we create a management plan.

We work with them on that.

We do some hands on assistance if they need hands on assistance, and then we also help them get into cost share programs, which there's a few programs to help fund them doing management activities on their property, because at the end of the day, you know, it takes it takes money to manage your property.

Every landowner, if they're going to do something on their property, there's money behind it and there's certain there's certain cost shares, programs that can help fund them, them doing those management practices.

Federal assistance?

Both federal and state.

Yeah.

What are some things like when you go and landowner and he says, I want more deer.

And you look at the habitat.

What are some things you might suggest that you see quite often here in Arkansas that they need to do?

Yeah.

Well, what Jeremy said, we have a lot of really dense forest, hardwoods in Arkansas, especially here in central Arkansas, up in the Ozarks, everything else.

It didn't used to be that way.

If you look at old historical accounts, when people were first settling, they were taking their wagons and just making their way through the woods.

And you're not fitting a wagon through the woods now.

You can't do that anymore.

So one of the first things we do normally is do a tree thinning or a timber stand improvement.

So we go in there, we take out all the trees that aren't beneficial to wildlife, and the main things we're leaving behind are like oak trees to drop acorns for the deer, hickories to drop, hickory nuts for your deer, your squirrels, all that.

Then the next thing we do is we try to push people to start using prescribed fire on their property.

That's a huge push in Arkansas.

We've got prescribed burn associations.

We've got a lot of ways to help people put fire on their property to burn that leaf litter off so that sunlight can hit the bare soil.

And now all of a sudden, you're going to have all this plant regrowth coming back up, and all that plant regrowth is packed full of nutrients for deer to eat.

It's bringing in insects for your turkeys to eat and producing seeds for your turkey and your quail to eat.

Question right here.

A lot of people think they have to plant stuff for this, but you're talking about just natural native grasses.

You guys have told me when I deer hunted down south, I was wanting to do a food plot like everybody else does during the fall, and you said you'd probably save money and be more productive if you'd just fertilize what you have down there and make some, thin it out, not clear cut, but thin it out.

Let the sunlight.

So that makes sense.

Yeah, it's most of Arkansas has a huge natural seed bank.

So if you can just if you can just let those plants come back up, I mean, you can have anywhere from 50 to 300 different species of plants growing up.

And instead of making yourself a little acre, five acre food plot, by doing these management practices, you're turning your whole property into a food plot, and you're putting you're putting food all over your place.

Jeremy, do most people want more deer or bigger deer or both?

I think it's a mixture.

Historically, more deer was the theme, and I think when practices got popular, that's bigger deer.

A quality deer management association.

Yeah, yeah.

Real good with the acronym.

Yeah.

We turned to quality.

But yet we still, DMAP's got 765 clubs in it.

We cover just shy 1.5 million acres today.

Wow.

And we still got those clubs that just wants a brown deer out there.

They want to go enjoy it.

I wish we had more of the deer camps, and I feel like that's more of a lost art.

But but the practices we use today tends to side towards quality, and the only way we're going to get to higher quality is one you have to manage the deer density to balance it with the habitat.

But also when Caleb was talking about these things with habitat, most everybody has habitat.

Yeah.

But it may not be good.

So we need to take the poor quality habitat and turn it into high quality habitat to take the deer quality to the next level.

When you talk about deer quality or healthy deer, you're not just talking about big antlers.

Talk about that a little bit.

Everybody says, I want big antlers, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a healthy deer.

That's right.

I mean, the Outdoor Channel kind of makes everybody thinks large numbers of antlers and inches, but but high quality habitat will produce a good, productive deer herd.

So when you got your does producing twins and triplets, that is a healthy herd.

Highly productive, good quality stuff's going on right there.

And it helps fight off diseases.

When you have a balance of good habitat with the right number of mouths you're feeding that and alone takes care of a lot of our disease and health concerns amongst the deer herd themselves.

So as we mentioned earlier, we got pockets of the state that has over abundance of deer.

That is part of our concern is we got so many, we are now starting to have a growing disease concern or a health concern because we see productivity drop.

You know, when you go to a deer camp and obviously you need more deer camps, if you're a deer camp member, you want to get involved in this, we'll leave some things at the end of the show where you know how you can contact them, but it's a lot of work.

It's not just you say, hey, go out there and kill two deer for every acre you have you need to pull jaw bones.

It's all about data.

The age classes, talk about that.

Reproductive rates.

Yeah.

So one is we're balancing bucks to does, for deer anyway.

Males to females.

You need an inventory of what they have already.

So that means we need to know how many is out there and which category of each.

But also the age structure.

We can't always have just young ones.

You're never going to get to your high quality deer.

Yeah.

But what we need is a balanced a structure from fawns all the way up to mature deer at five and a half, six and a half years of age.

And when you have that balance in your bucks and your does, you can overcome a lot of obstacles that Mother Nature throws at you.

And it's cheaper on that pocketbook.

You don't have to plant and supplement with things like that, because the balance itself will take care of it.

Yeah, and when you talk about bucks, y'all have always told me a good trophy buck needs really three things to become a trophy.

One's good bloodline.

Good DNA.

Yep.

Age.

Yep.

And nutrition.

And that's pretty simple.

But that's true.

But it takes work getting there.

That's right.

Okay.

Go ahead.

Well, it's just not as easy as it sounds a lot of times.

You would be amazed at how many people's eyes get this big when we say we need you to shoot 50 does.

Well, I can't shoot them all.

We're not asking you to kill them all.

But you got to have the right amount.

Somebody needs to.

Yeah, yeah.

And that comes, that comes the same when they're putting that good habitat on the ground and they're getting all that food on their property now then, then we got to tell them, all right, well now you got to come in here and start shooting more deer.

Yeah.

Because now you're deer are eating a whole lot more.

And instead of having a single fawn, now they're having their twins and their triplets.

So all of a sudden your deer population takes off because you're doing a good job, and then you're going to have to come back in and manage that herd harder than you were before.

When you say manage the herd to, I guess that means selective harvest at times.

In other words, you get to a point where your your bucks are getting bigger, younger, and you have to decide which one you're going to let them walk and get some more age so the older, healthier deer will breed with the good does, takes good does too though.

Yeah, it does, but it's really dependent upon the goal of the landowner.

If the goal is truly to have mature, high quality, large antlered bucks, then yes, we've got to let those deer grow older.

So it takes patience.

And it also takes the fact that it's work to shoot the doe numbers down.

You need to reduce doe numbers and then back off your bucks.

But but if the goal is to simply have a good, healthy deer herd and want to see deer when you go out and enjoy, and it's not necessarily a boon and Crockett score that you're looking for, well, then you're looking for just simple balance.

Every time you shoot a doe, make sure you shoot a buck.

Every time you shoot a buck, make sure you shoot a doe and balance out.

Most deer hunters I talked to want both.

They want a lot of big bucks.

They want a lot of deer and they want them to be really big.

And it's hard to make those types of things.

Hey, what's a minimum number of acres before somebody enters this?

I know when y'all came to our camp many, many years ago, it was a thousand acres minimum.

We didn't have that many or 5000 acres, and we only had like a thousand.

We couldn't do it ourselves.

But they said if we can get the clubs around us to do it, we go in together and do it.

What's the minimum number of acres?

So now we're looking at a minimum of 500 acres to be in DMAPs 1, 2 or 3.

If you can't get your 500 acres with one landowner, we form co-ops.

We try to talk to the neighbors, join them together as one club, but pull their acres together to get them over the 500 mark.

And we're just trying to make a landscape level impact here.

And so a 40 acres here and a 40 acres there, Caleb, probably attest to you, we can do good things on 40 acres.

But when you're trying to manage a herd, that deer don't stay on 40 acres.

Yeah.

You know, they cover miles upon miles.

So we really got to we need the landscape level impact on that.

But we do got an aspect of DMAP in the program, we call it 1A that there is no acreage requirement as long as you meet certain criteria, whether your deer are so thick that it's like crop depredation or a public safety concern of that nature, or kind of a specialty hunt, you don't, we don't require acres.

You just need to get rid of deer.

Just need to get rid of some deer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, you deal a lot with the landowners out there.

When you go to them, there's paperwork to be filled out.

You fill out an application, talk about the application to get involved in this.

So the application that any application that we have landowners fill out for as just as a private lands biologist is if they want those cost share opportunities.

But for us to come out and look at your property, I mean, it's just a phone call or an email and we we don't really have any stipulations for acres.

I mean, I'll go out and I'll look at somebody who owns one acre, I'll go look at somebody who owns thousands of acres.

And that's because we're all based off somebody's goals.

So, you know, if they've only got four acres, but they've got a certain goal that they want for that property, you know, I tell them we're not managing a deer herd on four acres, that's for sure.

But we can probably make something happen to help them out.

So you cover seven counties yourself?

7 or 8 counties?

I only cover five counties.

But still, how do you do that?

I can imagine you're just overwhelmed.

A waiting list that long to come to my yard or my camp.

We have to schedule people out, out aways sometimes.

It comes in, it comes in waves.

When deer season comes up, I start getting calls.

People start thinking about deer hunting, turkey season the same way.

And we tag team a lot.

If he's getting a lot of calls that's deer oriented, he turns that over to the DMAP biologist and we'll share that.

But you don't need to wait till the season to start.

You got to start years before, right?

Yeah.

That's right.

You don't you don't see results right away.

Takes a while to happen.

If you're thinking about joining DMAP right now, we need to get you on the online application.

Tell them how to do it.

We're going to put that on the screen, the application, we're about out of time here.

But yeah they can join now and you'll get back with them.

For Deer Management Assistance Program, we got an online application.

You can find that at our website at agfc.com.

But you complete that and submit it.

It'll come to us in a database.

It'll go right to your county and your biologist.

They'll probably reach out to you and look for things like, do you meet the acreage requirement or anything like that.

And so we will approve it and get you in road and probably schedule a site visit.

So just go to the website, get that online application submitted now because deer season is upon us.

Deer Management assistance program, DMAP for short there, and the website is agfc.com.

Thanks guys for joining me, I appreciate it.

Good information.

Thank you.

Good luck to you this deer season.

You too.

And we'll be here next week.

Same time right here on another Naturally Wild.

This program was made possible by Arkansas Hunters Feeding the Hungry, East Harding Construction Company, David's Burgers, Greenway Equipment, Arkansas Farm Bureau, and the Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas.

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