Photo by Curt Helmick

It is an exciting time to be a deer hunter in the Talladega and Shoal Creek Ranger Districts of the Talladega National Forest. New large-scale habitat management work is underway in the areas.

While the management work is primarily aimed at restoring wild quail populations and the red cockaded woodpecker, it is also lending a helping hand to the area's deer herd.

The management techniques being used include thinning existing pine stands and burning them off to produce more succulent vegetation at ground level. The work started in the northern portion of Shoal Creek Ranger District and has now spread to the more southern Talladega District.

"The changes that are being made will improve the vegetation in the future for both deer and small game," said Gene Carver, area manager for the Hollins Wildlife Management Area in the Talladega Ranger District. "I call it putting food in the grocery store."

The areas being thinned will look rough for a couple of years, but they will hold real value for wildlife in the long term.

"We're managing for early successional species in the forest," explained Jeff Gardner, a biologist in the Shoal Creek District. "We're burning more often to encourage new growth. It produces a lot of vegetation that deer like to browse on."

The habitat work is going on throughout the national forest, but it is more intensive in the two WMAs that are part of the forest. Those are Choccolocco in the Shoal Creek District and Hollins in the Talladega District.

Randy Liles, the longtime manager of the Choccolocco WMA, is very excited about what's happening.

"The Forest Service has experimented with both dormant condition burns and growing season burns," he said. "The best results have been in the areas that have received the growing condition burns. You just wouldn't believe how much it has improved the habitat."

Part of the habitat work is restoring longleaf pine forests in areas that once held the trees but were later converted to loblolly. That means timber harvests are going along with the controlled burns.

The areas where timber harvests, burns and hardwood drainages meet are creating classic "edge" habitat for the whitetails.

"I would encourage hunters to check out these areas where the work is taking place," Liles noted. "These are areas that will have deer food year 'round. In a good acorn year, the deer are still going to be in the hardwood drains, but these areas where the management activities are taking place are very good places to start looking for deer."

The Shoal Creek and Talladega Ranger Districts cover some 220,000 acres in Calhoun, Cleburne, Talladega and Clay counties in northeast Alabama. The WMAs inside the forest have set dates for deer gun hunting, but they allow archery hunting continuously from Oct. 15 to Jan. 31.

The portion of the national forest outside the WMAs is open to hunting five days a week. It is closed to hunting on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, except around major holidays.

"The terrain ranges from rolling hills to very steep," Gardner said. "We're at the southern end of the Appalachians. The area includes Mt. Cheaha, the highest point in Alabama, and Dugger Mountain, the second highest. So we have some steep ground."

There are two distinct rut dates inside the national forest. In the northern portion around Choccolocco, restocking was done with deer from North Carolina, and they generally rut in November.

In the southern portion around Hollins, restocked deer came from other parts of Alabama, and the rut is more traditional, occurring in January.

Gardner's recommendation for first-time deer hunters in the area is to get away from the roads and try to find deer sign deeper in the woods to hunt around.

The blocks of land where habitat management work is underway are good places to start.