Photo by Dan Bogue

By Anthony Campbell

If you want to be a highly effective deer hunter in Alabama, you've got to learn to be flexible. That's the word from Bill Gray, a biologist for the Division of Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries, who, along with biologist Chris Cook, literally wrote the book on hunting and managing whitetails in the Cotton State.

A traveling hunter in Alabama can find himself hunting mountains, flatlands, swamps, oak forests, pine plantations, cutovers and even vast CRP grasslands in the central-western portion of the state. And that can happen over a single season.

Depending on the portion of the season and the part of the state where you are hunting, the deer can be in feeding mode, pre-rut, rut, post-rut or pure survival mode. To be successful, you need to quickly adapt to changing conditions, especially in regard to what the deer are feeding on. It is also necessary to stay in the action throughout the season, even during the dreaded December lull.

But we hunters can be a hardheaded bunch - slow to learn our lessons, especially when it comes to sitting on greenfields.

"Sometimes we fail to recognize when there's a year with abundant hardwood mast and we keep on hunting on greenfields," Gray said. "I'm guilty of doing it too. We hunt where we want the deer to be rather than where they actually are."

Alabama is blessed with one of the most abundant whitetail populations in the nation. But just because there are deer everywhere still doesn't mean the critters are easy to hunt. Gray noted that even does can get pretty wary after they've been hunted a bit.

Still, there are plenty of days in Alabama's long season and plenty of deer out there to keep the game interesting. Across the state, Gray said, deer numbers are highly variable as you go from one property to another.

"There are places in Jackson County, in the extreme northern part of the state, that have as many deer as anything you're going to find in South Alabama," he said. "Limestone County is thought to be a low- to moderate-density deer area, but I have friends who hunt a particular farm there that just has an unbelievable number of deer, and their success rate is very high."

Traveling to the northwestern corner of the state, he said, Lauderdale and Colbert County boast very good deer populations.

In the central part of the state, you're not going to find a lot of deer around population centers like Montgomery. But most of the more rural areas are covered up with whitetails.

"Habitat is a limiting factor in the northern part of the state, where you've got someone living on every 40 acres," Gray explained. "You don't have that in places like Bullock, Russell, Macon and Barbour, where you can drive four or five miles and not see a house."

In south-central and southwest Alabama, practically every place has deer.

"It goes almost without saying that places like Demopolis, Wilcox, Sumter and Dallas have a well-known tradition of having large numbers of deer," the noted. "Sweeping to the east, Lee County and Auburn are just eat up with deer. Russell, Bullock and Macon County are as good as you can find, and they've got high quality deer to boot."

The extreme southeastern corner of the state, around Dothan and Houston County, doesn't have as many deer as other places, Gray added. There are big agricultural operations in this region, which means cover is the missing ingredient in the habitat mix.

"But once you go east to the Chattahoochee River, there are as many deer as you find anywhere in the state," he said.

Thirty years ago, Alabama hunters went to two places to find deer - southwest Alabama and the state's wildlife management areas.

"Those were the places where a fellow thought he had his best chance of taking a deer," the biologist offered. "The deer expansion has now gone into all four corners of the state. For example, people in places like Etowah, Cherokee and Marshall County can find decent deer hunting opportunities within a few miles of home. That's not to suggest they've got the numbers of deer that a place like Clarke County has, but they do have some opportunities to deer hunt close to home."

The bright spot in places that don't have lots of deer is that those areas tend to produce better quality deer, Gray also advised.

Despite some localized overpopulations of deer, Alabama's deer herd remains in great shape. About 600 deer were tested for chronic wasting disease last year, and the state so far remains free of the disease.

For many property owners around the state, deer management has become a year-round pursuit, The planting of food plots, the use of supplemental feeders in the off-season, and management strategies aimed at thinning does and protecting young bucks are producing some of the highest quality deer the state has ever seen.

"We have a tremendous resource to enjoy," Gray agreed.

Alabama's bow season typically starts Oct. 15 and the gun season the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Both seasons end Jan. 31. A new wrinkle last season was the addition of a three-day muzzleloader season immediately before the start of the regular gun season.

Conservation Commissioner Barnett Lawley said he got a lot of positive feedback from hunters who enjoyed that segment of the season last year, even though the weather was kind of warm during the inaugural special muzzleloader season.

For people who do not have private land to hunt, the state's WMAs offer thousands of acres of public hunting for the price of a $16 WMA license. Each WMA generally holds four or five gun hunts during the fall and winter, but they are open all season long to archers.

Assistant chief of wildlife David Hayden said the WMAs get decent utilization, but there is still room for more hunters to enjoy the areas.

That being said, here are some of the better counties and WMAs for deer hunting in each section of the state this year.

In the northwest corner, which is made up of Lauderdale, Limestone, Madison, Colbert, Franklin, Lawrence, Morgan, Cullman, Winston, Marion, Lamar, Fayette and Walker counties, practically every county has some good hunting.

"Marion is excellent, but so too are Lamar, Fayette, Franklin and Colbert," said DWFF biologist Ron Eakes, who works that corner of the state.

Good public grounds to hunt in this region include Lauderdale and Freedom Hills WMA, Eakes added.

If you want room to roam and the chance to kill a monster buck, the Black Warrior WMA and Bankhead National Forest, in which it is located, together offer 180,000 acres of deer-rich property. That makes it one of the largest public hunting tracts in the entire state.

The northeast corner of the state is made up of Jackson, Marshall, DeKalb, Cherokee, Etowah, Blount, St. Clair, Calhoun, Cleburne, Randolph, Clay and Talladega counties.

"There's no doubt that Randolph, Clay, Calhoun and Talladega are the best counties for deer numbers in this part of the state," biologist Keith McCutcheon said.

Choccolocco WMA ranks as one of the top WMAs in the state year in and year out in terms of the number of deer killed. McCutcheon picks it as the best public hunting land in the northeastern part of the state for deer numbers.

"We probably don't have as many deer here now as there were in the past," McCutcheon cautioned. "But that's deliberate. We've done some work to control our doe numbers, and the ratio is a lot better than it was at one time. The habitat is in very good shape."

The central-western portion of the state comprises Pickens, Sumter, Greene, Marengo, Tuscaloosa, Hale, Jefferson, Bibb, Perry, Shelby, Dallas and Chilton counties. This area of the state has long been a deer hunting hotspot.

"It's hard to narrow down which counties are the best," said Chris Cook, a DWFF biologist who works in the region. "Greene and Dallas have good deer numbers and also good quality deer. Tuscaloosa County has a lot of deer too."

Cook likes Demopolis WMA as a place that has good numbers of deer on public land. Hunters are encouraged to bring a boat to hunt the WMA, since much of it is accessible only by water.

East-central Alabama is another region that boasts outstanding hunting. The counties in this region consist of Coosa, Tallapoosa, Chambers, Autauga, Elmore, Macon, Lee, Russell, Bullock, Montgomery and Lowndes.

"This whole area is just a great place to deer hunt," Rick Claybrook, the DWFF wildlife biologist who supervises the region, pointed out. "I always have a hard time picking the areas that have the most deer. There are deer everywhere."

He likes Bullock, Macon and Lowndes as counties that have both abundant deer and good quality bucks.

Lowndes WMA, which is in his district, is relatively small in comparison to other WMAs in the state, but he likes it for deer numbers too. It is on the Alabama River and is squarely in the Black Belt region.

Lowndes began a strategy of quality deer management last season. To be legally harvested, a buck must have 3 points on at least one side of its rack.

"It's still too early to tell what we're going to be able to do in terms of management and what kind of bucks we're going to be able to produce," Claybrook said. "Good quality soil is something we've got working in our favor at Lowndes."

Biologist Chuck Sharp noted that this part of the state had good numbers of deer when most other places had no deer at all.

"Back in the 1940s and 1950s, the deer in the Alabama River bottoms and what is now the Tenn-Tom Waterway were the deer that were used to stock other places in the state."

Sharp went on to say that it's hard to narrow down a particular county where deer numbers are higher because all the counties are good. There are a lot of pine plantations and timber operations in the area, and the hunting can be tough because of the thick cover.

If you press Sharp to pick a public tract for high numbers of deer, he chooses the Upper Delta WMA. It's a swampy area of bottomland hardwoods. In dry years, a third of the area can be accessed by vehicle, but most hunters prefer to use boats.

"If it is flood stage, you better take a GPS and a compass with you, because you can get off the beaten track and get turned around," Sharp cautioned.

Hunters looking to access private land had better be a member of a club, because most properties are tied up in leases in this area, Sharp also pointed out.

The southeastern corner of the state, comprising the counties of Butler, Covington, Crenshaw, Pike, Coffee, Geneva, Barbour, Dale, Henry and Houston, has a strong deer population, according to DWFF biologist Kenneth Johnson.

It is in the zone where either-sex hunting is allowed for the full season. Even though hunters are shooting a lot of does in this region, there is more work to be done, Johnson explained.

It's hard to pick one county that has more deer than another in this region. But Johnson opts for Covington, Butler, Crenshaw, Barbour, Henry and Pike.

"We've got three wildlife management areas in our area, and all three are good," Johnson stated. "They are Barbour, Covington and Blue Spring. They've all got a lot of deer."

The habitat on each WMA is a little different from the others. Barbour has a good amount of hardwoods and rolling hills. Blue Spring and Covington are in pine timber, but of different types.

"Blue Spring is longleaf pine," Johnson said. "It's a beautiful area."

No matter what part of the Cotton State they enjoy most, there's no doubt that Alabama's deer hunters are truly blessed. We have long seasons, liberal limits and a thriving herd of animals.