I don't care what your I.Q. level is, how much money a year you make, or how often you go hunting. Here's a basic truth: You don't know as much about deer as your average professional deer biologist does. Whatever your profession -- insurance agent, independent contractor, auto mechanic, farmer, barber, banker -- you wouldn't expect a professional wildlife biologist to know as much about your business as you do. So why is it so many hunters think they know as much about deer management as the professional wildlife biologist?

You don't, I promise you, and neither do I. The wildlife biologist has spent his entire educational path and his entire professional life learning everything he can about the white-tailed deer, and he keeps up with new developments on a daily basis. Doctors and lawyers -- and freelance outdoor writers -- just don't know as much about critter management as the professional wildlifer. That's all there is to it. Sorry if it offends you.

Fortunately, we don't have to know as much about wildlife management as the professionals do in order to manage our lands wisely for deer and other wildlife. Almost every state wildlife agency has a program or series of programs through which individual landowners or land managers can use the expertise and knowledge of professional wildlife biologists to improve wildlife habitat on private land. Here are a few of the programs available in Arkansas:

DEER MANAGEMENT ASSISTANCE PROGRAM (DMAP)
This is the flagship of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission's three levels of private land deer management programs, and the one that provides the most potential for selective improvement of an area's deer herd.

A DMAP brochure distributed by the AGFC lists the following primary benefits of the program: professional review and advice regarding the status of your resident deer population; an assessment of the quality and limitations of your deer habitat; recommendations regarding improvements to the habitat; development of deer management objectives and strategies to meet these objectives; management information for a variety of species on the property; and annual reports and recommendations.

The AGFC prefers to work with landowners or land managers who can enroll at least 1,000 acres in the DMAP program. But the agency occasionally works with managers of smaller tracts, particularly if the tract joins land controlled by other DMAP participants.

"This is a technical assistance program, and it's designed to help landowners and hunting clubs improve the health of their resident deer herd," explained Ted Zawislak, a private-lands biologist for the AGFC in the eastern Ozarks. "Since it's a voluntary program, the landowners or clubs are under no obligation to accept or implement the advice we provide them with."

It's a simple, straightforward process. The landowners or club members provide the labor and legwork to collect biological data on the deer harvested on the DMAP-enrolled land, and AGFC biologists compile the data and use it to make management and harvest recommendations to help the landowners reach whatever objectives they're trying to reach.

The landowners or club members weigh each deer harvested on the property, record antler size and any notable or unusual characteristics, and pull a jawbone from each deer using a boomerang-shaped extractor. After each hunt, each member or guest fills out an observation form that lists how many deer and other types of wildlife were seen during the hunt. After the season, Zawislak and his fellow private-lands biologists (there are twelve of them around the state) collect all the data from the DMAP participants in their regions, age the deer jawbones and analyze the data for each parcel of land.