About 11 or 12 years ago my father, Greg Stratton and a small group of friends started leasing property to hunt from a local landowner. Those men had an idea to start an antler restriction as part of club rules. It was a simple rule, NO SPIKES!!! Now I know its not much of a restriction, but the buck was able to live another season........ish. I'll explain the "ish" in a moment. Now it took a coup
le of years to take notice, but the club members started seeing bigger deer. The club harvested some nice bucks as well. 8's and 9's, and I even harvested a nice 10 pt. in 2011 when I joined the club myself. There were some issues though. This is where the "ish" comes in. we as a club agreed not to shoot spikes. The problem is, that not all of the adjoining properties followed the rules we had in our club. So even though we had our rule, we could pass on a spike and watch him walk towards the property boundary. Within 15-20 minutes sometimes there would be a gun shot in that direction on the other property. They weren't wrong for doing so. Their club hadn't set up and restrictions. But by New York State law, it was a legal buck. So not always did our efforts prevail. After this past deer seasons conclusion, my father and Tim Marbot talked of what could done in the area as far as deer management goes. Tim knew of a QDM Co-op that was started in the area this past deer season. So Tim got a hold of one of the Co-op members to see if they could educate landowners in our area to about QDM. We had an initial meeting in March, 2014. We got enough of a draw to where we thought this could happen. Time for the next step. The next step was to go door to door asking landowners if this was something they were interested in doing. My father and Tim asked if I would head up the effort, which I accepted. It was very time consuming for 3 men with very busy schedules to go door to door. We managed to make it work in our free time. Each door was explaining the QDM process over again. we started seeing good results. We had another meeting in June to drive the point to landowners even further. By the middle of June we had landowners equaling 3100 acres interested in the QDM. By the end of July we had 6800 acres. On August 12th we showed to the final meeting with about 9600 acres and landowners involved.
