Photo by Kenny Bahr.

Conditions could be shaping up for this to be one of the best falls in years for Cotton State deer hunting.

A late freeze in early April that affected much of Alabama was expected to lead to at least a partial mast failure. Drought conditions also gripped much of the state during the early-summer months.

Those factors could make food scarce in the deer woods this fall, and that generally leads to more deer movement and better hunter success. "It's tough on the deer, and carrying them through the winter," said Chris Cook, the state's leading deer biologist, "but it helps the hunters."

Deer movement also relies at least partially on getting some good cold weather to make the animals stir. "We saw how critical weather is for deer movement last season," Cook noted. "We had cold weather early and late in the season, and the hunting was very good. But we had warm weather in the middle. I talked to several processors, and they saw very few deer brought in during the warm spell. Our deer hunting is more dependent on good cold weather than most people think."

Deer continue to thrive in every corner of the Cotton State nowadays, with folks on the outskirts of Birmingham reporting bucks scraping and rubbing in the woods behind their homes. The overall deer harvest seemed to be up somewhat last year, not least in the state's network of wildlife management areas, and opportunities to harvest deer of either sex continue to abound throughout the state.

The slowing of deer movement by the state's hot weather notwithstanding, Alabama's hunters still have it much better than do their brethren in many other states. Consider the many states that have only one or two weeks of gun hunting and maybe a month or six weeks of bow season: Alabama has three and a half months of deer hunting if you combine the archery and gun seasons.

"It should be another pretty good year," Cook offered. "If the lack of food plays out like it's shaping up, it could be a super year. But we need hunting weather with daytime temperatures at least down in the 50s."

The general health of the herd continues to be good. Biologists continue to test about 800 deer carcasses a year from all around the state for chronic wasting disease, and it has yet to show up in Alabama.

The number of hunters using the public WMA system was up slightly last year; Cook, who believes this to be just normal fluctuation, speculated that favorable weather on days of gun hunts, especially on opening day and Thanksgiving weekend, brought more hunters to the woods.

The state also brought a new WMA on line last year: Perdido River WMA, near the coast. A few of the extra man-days of hunting were expended there, Cook said.

Generally speaking, the portion of Alabama from Birmingham south harbors the most deer -- but that's not one of those hard-and-fast rules. Cook noted that several of the top deer-producing WMAs are actually in the northern half of the state.

The either-sex seasons are set to be expanded in some of the north-central counties this year. Some places will go to a full season of either-sex hunts. "There's no shortage of deer from one end of the state to the other," Cook asserted.

The WMAs continue to be worthy places for plying the art of Cotton State deer hunting, in part because the pressure on the WMAs has tapered off significantly as more private lands now provide opportunities. "Someone may say, 'Well, 500 people showed up for that opening day hunt on the WMA,'" Cook said. "But they have to remember that the size of the property they're talking about may be 45,000 acres. That's less of a hunter density than most private clubs have."

If you're planning on becoming a WMA hunter, Cook advises you to touch base with the area biologist for the tract you plan to hunt. Specific questions to ask: When does the rut occur at the area? And what are usually the best hunting dates?

"Opening day and the Thanksgiving weekend are really good times to be hunting on a lot of these WMAs," Cook said. "A few like Oakmulgee have a December rut, and really good hunts in December. A lot of others such as Barbour and Lowndes have excellent hunting in January. It pays to find out when the best hunting is."

If you're willing to put in some time and effort, you can tap into some great hunting all across the state by making useof the WMAs.

That said, let's look at some of the different areas of the state, public and private, that tend to yield the most whitetails.

NORTH
The territory overseen by Ron Eakes, the state's district biologist in the northwestern corner of the state, includes Lauderdale, Limestone, Madison, Colbert, Franklin, Lawrence, Morgan, Cullman, Winston, Marion, Lamar, Fayette and Walker counties. This district offers outstanding prospects for public land deer hunting, with some 170,000-plus acres of WMAs and national forests available for hunting.

According to Eakes, the largest deer populations can be found in the southernmost counties of the district: Lamar, Fayette and Marion. "Those counties are also producing some excellent-quality deer," he said. "But our hunters have got to keep up the pressure on the antlerless deer to keep that from changing."