LITTLE ROCK — Deer clubs throughout The Natural State will have more resources to improve their deer herds than ever before thanks to a new agreement struck between the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and the National Deer Association.
Thanks to the new partnership, five biologists will be hired by the NDA, but will aid the AGFC’s new Private Lands Habitat Division by working one-on-one with deer clubs enrolled in the AGFC’s Deer Management Assistance Program throughout the state.
We’ve been looking at a way to revitalize DMAP for a while,” Jeremy Brown, the AGFC’s newly appointed statewide DMAP coordinator who has worked for seven years as the assistant deer program coordinator, said. “A few years back, Ralph Meeker, our deer program coordinator, and I, surveyed all of our participating clubs and performed a bit of an audit on ourselves. We wanted to know how we could improve the program and what sorts of things our clubs wanted to make their deer hunting experience even better. The biggest limiting factor in making those things happen was manpower.”
Brown explained that until this partnership, managing the Deer Management Assistance Program was one of many duties placed on the agency’s private lands biologists.
“Our PLBs are great biologists and really knowledgeable, but they were being pulled in so many directions, they never could devote themselves to DMAP to really be able to make meaningful changes,” Brown said. “I’m not slighting anyone, there just aren’t enough hours in a day for them to cover all the bases these folks had been tasked with. So when Director Booth created the new Private Lands Habitat Division and wanted to increase capacity, I knew now was the time to really think about adding capacity, whether through our staff or partnerships with other agencies.”
Although Brown still hopes to bring on additional DMAP biologists within the AGFC’s ranks, he says working with the NDA was a no-brainer.