Finding Success While Hunting Public Property

Central Alabama

Mulberry Fork Wildlife Management Area

Hunting public management are in Alabama is very challenging. Most of the hunting property in the state is personally owned and leased. Majority of hunters can’t afford to pay the high fees of a hunting lease and resort to hunting publicly managed properties. Most public management areas are severely over hunted and lack the proper management to grow trophy animals. Mulberry Fork Wildlife Management Area is an exception because it has a unique strategy for managing its deer population on its 35,000 acres. The state only permits bow hunting on this property with the exception of a few days where gun hunting is allowed. These gun hunts attract hunters from all over the state to try their luck on a low pressure, public hunting property. I have had decent success during one of these gun hunts and here is the story.  

November 25, 2011

We had an entire hunting party in the woods this morning. Jonathan, one of his family members, Jake, and I all went on the November 25th gun hunt this morning. I took Jake to one of my favorite hunting spots on the management area called one shot. I shot a 98 pound button buck at 7:00 AM. My 270 caliber Winchester Ballistic Silvertip did its work on the animal and he did not take another step after the shot rang through the woods. Jake was hunting close to me so I went and guided him for the rest of the morning. I was able to put him on a doe walking through a hardwood bottom shortly after killed my deer. He managed to make a great shot on one of the branches but not the deer.

Jonathan's girlfriend, now wife, let us bring her dad and brother along with us for the hunt. No one saw any deer except Jake and myself. We took my deer back to Whitney's house and processed it for the meat. The hunt continued that afternoon at a different part of the management area. This marks one of the best days that I have had hunting on the Mulberry Fork property. Jonathan and I split up on the same hunting spot and Jonathan was able to kill a big, cow-horn spike right before dark. It is a rare day to shoot a double on public property but we were able to pull it off. The success we had today was due to a combination of preparation and opportunity. We spent countless hours scouting this property, finding the best hunting spots and mapping the deer activity. We also spent countless hours in the deer stand waiting for shot opportunities on these deer.

Commitment to the Outdoors

Tuskegee, Alabama

Every outdoorsman that takes on the adventure of college enjoys the challenge of finding time to stay outdoors. For me, this was a very hard challenge. There were limited ways to fish and even less public property to hunt. Towards the end of my college years, I found the time to check out the local public hunting property at the Tuskegee National Forest. Here are a few of my stories from the Tuskegee National Forest. I was not able to take a deer or turkey on the property but I had several encounters with both.

November 6, 2011

After an unsuccessful start to my bow season back home I decided to begin hunting at the Tuskegee National Forest. The conception of any hunting strategy for an unfamiliar property begins with scouting and studying. While I was scouting the new property I was able to find a couple of fresh deer scrapes.

November 10, 2011

I decided to go back to the creek bottom where I found the fresh scrape a few days earlier. I got in the woods around 3:15 PM and the deer trail that I was hunting was so heavily used that it smelled of deer. The leaves were still wet from a rainstorm the night before and provided ideal conditions for a ground stalk. I moved east, up the creek bottom and spotted three doe. One of the deer spotted me and quickly ran through the leaf litter making no noise. I stood there motionless watching the remaining deer quickly work into the thick underbrush and out of sight. 

November 11, 2011

I went back to the creek bottom at the national forest this afternoon after school. I backtracked the doe that I saw yesterday which led me to an area of the national forest that I had not yet explored. I found an area where there was high grass creating a boundary between a swamp and a strip of hardwoods. This swamp was heavily traveled and I thought I could easily spot deer moving out of the swamp and into the strip of hardwoods at this location. I found a nice 60 yard shooting lane and began my hunt. At 5:00 PM it was too dark for a shot but I had a deer working in on me through the high grass. My ScentLok clothing allowed the deer to get within 30 yards when I had to leave. I stood up and the deer ran then stopped and looked back. I took one more step, the deer blew once and bounced out of hearing distance.

November 17, 2011

I went down to what became my favorite creek bottom this afternoon. We had a pretty bad storm yesterday afternoon and it brought colder weather with it. I thought with the falling temperature that the deer would move. I was wrong. The large temperature change brought high winds with it. The wind was swirling in the bottom all afternoon. I was fortunate to have it blowing in my face most of the time. Unfortunately, the high winds had the deer in the their beds all afternoon. I was able to spot a flock of turkeys on my hike out.

Hunting public land can be challenging and requires a commitment to the outdoors in order to become successful. 

Quality Deer Management

Sylvan Springs, Alabama

I had the privilege of managing a small hunting property back in 2009. It was a small property near highway 269 which is close the home where I was raised. This property was owned by a local land owner, R. B. Stevens, and an old family relationship granted my best friend and myself the opportunity to manage the property. We started managing the property by scouting, photographing the deer herd and building food plots. This small, 40 acre plot of land was under tremendous hunting pressure as you can see from the aerial photo. There were four neighboring food plots that were all within a half mile of our land.

October 1, 2011

Jonathan, and I planted two fields to attract deer to our land. We decided to plant one of the fields this year with BioLogic's Full Draw. The purpose of the Full Draw product was to attract deer from the nearby over-hunted lease property. The Full Draw product is a blend of New Zealand brassicas, clover, wheat and special grains. This seed blend is designed to attract deer in the early season and provide nourishment for deer in the late winter months. We thought if we could establish an early season pattern that it would pay off with deer activity all season.

The small, concealed food plots along with the attractiveness of the Full Draw brought deer to our property throughout deer season. We had consistent sightings of several doe, a big 6 and a mature 4-point. The second picture summarizes what would eventually be the reason that we quit managing the property. This deer herd showed very little movement during the day and our food plots turned out to be the perfect spot for the majority of their late night activity. We used several different trail cameras over the years and we were never able to beat the affordability and performance of the Stealth Cam. 

Both the big 6 and the mature 4-point made it through the 2009-2010 season and we were able to track some of the antler development into the next season. One observation that we made in the 2009-2010 season was that the deer activity slowed down when the food plots became overgrown. 

In 2011, we were not able to get any good pictures of the bucks we saw in previous years. We observed that the bucks preferred the back field due to the cover it provided. The front field provided less cover and we were only able to get pictures of the more trusting doe herd. I compiled all of the pictures that we collected from the Stealth Cam and analyzed the deer activity. We found that 77% of our deer activity was occurring at night. This was due to the tremendous hunting pressure that was on this deer population. Of the 47 camera events, we were only able to capture 1 picture of a buck during daytime hours. This shows the importance of quality deer management and what hunting pressure can do to your deer activity. We stopped managing the property after the 2011 season.