A QDM program is great but isnt going to work unless all neighboring properties are on the same page. You need to get the clubs presidents together and find a happy medium. This may be difficult to do. But I wish you luck.

700 acres in the location and shape of your tract is not enough land to have a successful trophy buck management program. A deer can walk across a half mile in just a few minutes, sounds like ya'll have a lot of bedding area, but that doesn't mean the deer will stay on that area. You might as well adopt the hunting rules of the contiguous tracts, but I would think they would rather ya'll keep on passing on the bucks......Most clubs/members of clubs don't last but a few years. You are usually just passing on deer for someone else.

I always get a kick out of the guys talking about their acreage and how big it is. 700 acres is barely 1 square mile. When you get say 9 square miles (6300 acres) then you can maybe start talking QDM control.

Good luck finding that amount of ground!

I kind like the "you shoot it, you mount it". If a guy is having to pay $350 on top of club dues to shoot an "illegal" buck according to club rules, he will definitely think twice.

I understand your frustration but as a previous poster stated, you knew the rules before you joined. IMO if all the adjoining leases would get together, maybe you could come up with a happy medium.

In the lease I'm in(1,500 acres), we have an unwritten rule that a buck should have atleast 4 points. We considered making stricter rules but neighboring leases would not agree or they change hands every couple years. All our guys have been hunting a while so everyone is pretty picky now. I have seen more decent bucks the last 3 years than ever before.

One lease that I have considered joining in the past has what they call an "earn a buck" rule. The first buck you kill can be anything, however you then must kill a doe in order to take more bucks. After that first buck, they have minimum requirements for bucks.

FACT IS, the orig. poster said out of the 5 bucks HE let pass, 3 of them were shot by 1 neighboring club and that does NOT count what happened to the other 2 bucks and if they met their demise on the other club's properties! For the other 2 bucks, it's out of the skillet and into the fire. LOL!

Here you could be culling lesser bucks, keeping track of the doe populations, making sure the herd has proper nutrition, planting crops and foresting for optimum habitat BUT all that don't mean a hill of beans if the bucks are getting smoked by neighboring clubs. LOL!

iSnipe

me too!:lolabove: I hunt on a 48,000 acre lease and it is considered 'small' compared to the other leases in the area. Sounds like your club needs to drop their standards unless you want to keep growing the other hunting clubs more bucks:lmao:

$350 who is mounting your deer? A good mount here is $500+.
as to the issue at hand with QDM is to offer incentives within the clubs. Unfortuantly you can only do what is within your club and sometimes that is even impossible to do LOL. We did a thing where as is if you shot a deer over 120" your dues would be reduced in the club. To be honest allot of hunters have no idea how to judge a deers age. I had guys say "he must be a 4 year old" when in fact the deer was only 2.

Nothing wrong with having a selective group when hunting...If the neighbors are taking your rejects hopefully they are atleast tagging and putting their guns away once they are filled.

This is an ongoing issue on a few properties me and my buddies hunt. Lots of deer but smaller bucks we are trying to grow. I havent taken a buck off the property in years, but they definatly are growing even with the neighbors banging away at them.

Our one 330 acre property that maybe 10 of us hunt we have done numerous doe kills trying to thin the doe numbers down and have put enough food on the property to where we feel a deer really has no need to roam too too far, and there are far more does than bucks so its not like they have to travel for miles to breed or compete. We wont shoot uner 4 on a side and there are no antler restrictions for the county. For the most part a lot of the deer stay on the property and we see a few of them grow..

However if i see a 13 year old kid harvest his first buck...I dont care if its a scrub 6 or a nice 8 the smile and excitement is priceless. They arent to a point yet where they want to manage deer and grow trophies they are just happy getting a few kills under their belts....

We are seeing nicer deer by just letting them walk, but the same thing happens every year...We get a few nice bucks taken and a few other guys kill the 3 year old 8pts...If you're ok not shooting a buck every year your golden...Those guys cant be killing everything you let walk...

Just to let you know, all the local taxidermists charge $300 to $350 in my area of southern VA.