You must be hunting close to my land. If it wasn't for cameras I'd swear to you there was no deer on this piece of property. This is no lie since bow season has came in I have seen a whopping two deer which were bucks and I shot one. This is a beautiful piece of land but I guess there isn't many deer. I have hunted this place at least once a week since the season has came and just two deer. It blows my mind. I've got another lease about ten minutes down the road and you can see deer all day long there.

If y'all have killed 2 bucks on 400 acres that's pretty good IMO. Are you hunting established houses or stands? Sometimes over pressured deer will pattern us as hunters. Hunt new areas that seem too thick or aren't hunted. Enter and exit at different times. May as well mix it up can't do much worse than already.

We've had a bad year at our lease in heiburger compared to the normal im told. We have seen a few deer but not like I was expecting for the sign that was there all year. I believe next year will be better.

This, if you wanna see deer people need to quit shooting does.

Same here, I’ve been in a stand 49 times and seen 14 deer. Changed clubs this year because of the same reason ( Fayette County to Walker county). Alabama deer hunting sucks

I didn't start this to be a qdma bash or that the hunting in all of the state is terrible; simply observation of how low the population is in some of the areas in the state. Tough to get/keep a kid (or most adults) interested. There is not a reason to point fingers at any one cause. I'd love the thought of just moving on but in reality, that's a ton of work to pull stands and other equipment and just walk away after two-three years of work that you put into a tract...only to have an optimistic new lessee come in with the same expectations we did and be disappointed in two more years. Rinse, recycle, repeat.

If you have stolen cams, you also have additional predators roaming the property at will. Until this problem is eliminated the deer problem will continue.

I live on 96 acres that has never had a doe shot on it but due to surrounding hunters shooting does for way too long the deer population is not even worth hunting anymore. I plant one food plot in the middle with hopes of saving a few with the hope that it will one day be the good hunting it was when I was growing up on it.

I got a new lease in St Clair County this year since it was a closer drive to the house. I haven't seen a single deer on the place. I've got beautiful food plots, cover, water, pretty much anything a deer could ask for.....but no deer. If I keep the place I won't be killing any does for a long time, that is if I ever see one to not kill.

420 acres in Wilcox Co. (not one of the fancy fenced in joints)

...26 sits...
...seen deer 4 times (15% of sits)...
...total of 8 deer seen (6 does and 2 spikes)

This is why we need the state to restrict doe killing. You can't just tell each land owner to manage his herd however he pleases. The whole point of having game laws is because each land owner can't be trusted to manage the herd and still have a flourishing population. And with big tracts of land becoming smaller and smaller with every generation, the need for state or region wide restrictions is becoming even greater. One land owner with 40 acres can just about wipe out a deer herd for a square mile under current doe season laws.

I can’t help but believe y’all would see more deer on public ground.

It's hard for me to believe that someone can go all season in this state without seeing a deer while on stand....Some of yall need to sharpen up on your hunting skills.

We have 50 acres of hardwoods 3 miles deep in the woods of brindlee mtn. Off 231. You gotta drive 3 miles down a dirt road to reach it. Maybe 5 houses on rd. We been running 2 cameras for 2 months on 2 corn feeders and salt blocks. We have hunted the land one time this year and check cams every 2 weeks. Its private, secluded and hidden. We have about 6 does hittin feeders every day. Seen one 4 point one time. Seen one 2 year old 8 point once on cam. 2 bob cats and one coon one time. Owned property for 5 years. Old owner didnt hunt it. Most neighbors dont hunt and they say they only shoot big deer? We are on the east side of 231 and its woods for miles all the way to guntersville. We aint seeing the bucks at all. I think my partner is gonna start blasting does when we do hunt it. If he shoots the does then we have nothing at all. I cant believe we aint seen the 2 bucks but once. I am puttin my efforts into public land and plan on watching our 50 acres to see if it changes. It was a punch in the guts

I have joined clubs that I letteraly went to public land to see deer. There are some properties that have been hunted out so bad they are literally deer deserts these days. Every deer that sticks its head out gets shot at. 3 of the last 4 clubs I joined i saw less then 20 deer at all year. Heck I started hunting public land and was thrilled to see 25-50 deer a year after those clubs.

Has nothing to do with skills. It's all about location. I've been on both sides of the fence. My "skills" haven't changed, but the location has. Granted, I don't get to invest the time in it that I used to.

Turkey_Neck is correct. There are some clubs, large and small that have been totally shot out with the unlimited doe days and coyote boom. There are people on this site that don't believe it, but there really are big pieces of property in Alabama that basically don't have enough deer to justify allowing a hunting season.
I don't think it's people peeing at their stand, four wheelers, or not hunting the wind. The deer just are not there.
I don't know how many years it would take to get the population high enough to justify hunting some of these places, but I can imagine it would be more than a couple of years of nothing being killed.

It is mathematically and emotionally IMPOSSIBLE to allow land owners, club presidents, club boards, timber companies, or farmers dictate what needs to be done on their property. The state opened up a can of worms when they changed the bag limits, and now they have no way to ever fix it without angering thousands of people that want to do it their way. It's a total mess for some people that don't have a place that still has a hunt-able population.

If you dont know the land then bankhead can be a desert. Took me 5 years to learn where to go. I been all over zone a and b to realize there are only a few good spots in there. The forest is my next project. I covered a little bit of forest but have a long way to go. It basically sucks unless you live close by. I have public land close to me thats way better but bankhead is so huge it draws me back. I can kill the fire out of hogs but its too much work getn them out.

No doubt the doe killing has a lot to do with it, I think the coyote population explosion does, too. I am learning how to trap, and am hopeful it will make an improvement. Does anyone know what the estimated percentage is for the number of fawns killed by predators? I sense it's gone up dramatically in the last 10 years as coyotes have become so much more common in Alabama.

biologists and the state fought the "coyotes are killing fawns" idea for many, many years. Anyone who spends time in the woods in JulyAug knows that the yotes kill the snot out of fawns.

I have personally seen two yotes, one of them a huge male, kill every damn fawn on a 500 acre high fence one year, he killed prolly 70% of the fawns the year before by himself. Granted there was not a lot of good fawning cover available but every damn one of them???? I trapped the younger yote and owner shot the big male, Had plenty of fawns the next year. Go figure.