2024 Season Recap:
Our updated newsletter is a year past due. Here is a recap of our 23 & 24 seasons.
Since 2022 to the present, we have made a few changes to keep us moving forward and providing the best hunting experience for our clients possible. We have some new properties, some are close by, and we have a couple that logistically are more challenging. We have leased land in the Oxford and Norwich area in central New York. The deer hunting and turkey hunting is great but lodging, meals, and travel time to get there are more difficult. The number of hunters we could take at one time is limited as well.
On the plus side, we have harvested some nice deer. The quality of our herd is producing some bigger bucks with some 3 – 4 years old with a couple in the 5-year-old class. Trail cameras indicate we did not get them all. The turkey hunting over the past couple of years has been off the charts. Spur length on our toms seems to be increasing, we have taken a lot more birds with 1 ¼” – 1 ½” spurs and last year we had one client harvest a tom that tied the NY state record for spur length of 1 ¾” and fell just short of tying the overall record that included weight and beard length.
I have been in business for 30 years now and have enjoyed the company of many clients; many have been coming for years. I want to thank all you guys for making me look good over the years!!
I also want to remember and honor some clients and guides that are no longer with us:
Fred Gilley, John Neil Sr., Jessie Alger Sr., Joe Skabowski sr, Ed Henderson, & Mike Megazinni.
I will miss you all. You are in my thoughts and are with me on every hunt I am on. Thank you all!
Ed Van Nostrand, President, Quality Adventures, Inc.
2022 Season Recap:
It's time again to review last season's events!
We had a great turkey hunting season last spring and had no problem locating birds. By the end of the season, only one hunter that had a one-on-one guided three-day hunt failed to score. During that trip, we hunted hard, worked birds each day and then had a group of deer mess up our best opportunity on the last day. YOU had to be there!!!
By season's end, we harvested 11 mature Toms for eight hunters - many of them were over 20-pounds, with long beards and hooked spurs. There were a few doubles taken and a few misses as well. We won't mention any names! This fall, we observed large flocks of Turkeys that, coupled with many birds making it through our mild winter, is a good indicator that 2023 will be even better, if that is possible!
I was glad to see good signs of recovery from the Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease (EHD), that affected us several y ears ago. We had a lot of bucks and a good amount of does on our properties. In 2022, 12 bucks and four does were harvested. Several nice bucks were taken during all the open deer seasons, bow, rifle, and muzzleloader. Bucks and does were harvested evenly throughout all the hunts. I would like to thank all my hunters that passed up deer that they may have shot in past seasons. I am already seeing benefits from doing this. We are not back to what the populations were in the past, but it is certainly looking very promising.
To wrap things up, the 2023 Turkey prospects look phenomenal, and our deer numbers are increasing due to several factors. Last season, I reduced the number of hunters I usually take, we have great properties and deer have moved in from out lying parcels, my hunters were more selective, a mild winter kept coyote predation down, and under ideal conditions the does in our area have two and occasionally three fawns. I also put out many more cameras so I can better manage the herd and put hunters on the deer.
I want to thank all my hunters, new and old, for making Quality Adventures a success for the past 30-years. God Bless you all! Looking forward to hunting with you soon.
Ed Van Nostrand, President, Quality Adventures, Inc.