Wildlife in North Central Alabama

We live on a lake and see Canada geese before we even start walking. I grew up here and never saw these birds until I moved back, six months ago. Same with blue herons. The Gulf Coast, where I lived for eleven years, is heavily populated with blue herons, but they've only recently decided to live here.

We often see hawks here. They are magnificent in the air. We always stop and watch when we see one.

We hear owls more than we see them, because they tend to come out when the sun is going down. We have one just across the street in the swamp. Occasionally, we see him sitting on a tree branch during the daytime.

I hate snakes. I am ashamed to admit it, but I once killed them when I saw them, poisonous or not. Killing snakes is a part of growing up in the South, before people were ecologically educated. One would logically think that growing up around them would lessen the fear, but I have found that to be just the opposite. My wife Kathy, for example, who was born and raised in Michigan will walk around a copperhead, while I will take another trail. Last fall, one huge copperhead was lying across the trail that we were on, minding his own business. Our border collie puppy jumped over him twice. I was almost certain that Daisy was going to pick it up and play with it, thinking it was a toy. Luckily she didn't. Kathy tried to ease it off the trail with a stick, but all it did was coil up in strike position. Her stick was about 3 feet long. I might have tried to move it with a 10 foot pole. Anyway, I didn't have the urge to kill it like I once would have.

Other poisonous snakes that we have here are water moccasins and rattlesnakes. Coral snakes also live in Alabama. I have lived in Alabama for decades and have never seen one. I have read where they are rare and and on the "threatened" list.

We see literally herds of whitetail dear. Sometimes all that we see are their whitetails bobbing through the woods. Our dog Daisy chases them, but I don't think that she really wants to catch one.

A couple months ago while we were walking a trail, we heard noise in woods that are normally pretty quiet. The sound was so loud and out of place that it took us awhile to figure out that it was dogs on the trail of something. It sounded more like grinding machinery. The next week we were walking a creek and found a dead deer where we heard the noise coming from. The deer couldn't clear the creek before dogs brought it down. A few weeks later I was walking down the creek and nothing was left of the deer - not even bones. So it goes. That's the reason why never finding bones is no evidence that Sasquatch doesn't exist - not that I believe he does.

The whitetail deer population in Alabama is roughly two million. That is roughly one deer for every two people. In the early 1800's there were almost no deer in Alabama. As late as the early 1900's, news of a deer sighting would have quickly spread around town and a newspaper reporter would have interviewed the person who claimed to have seen it.

As recently as the 1970's a hunter bagging a deer was a big deal. Now it has to be a trophy deer to be a big deal. Hunters kill 450,000 deer per year in Alabama, and the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources says that's not enough. It wants one third of the population killed each year for correct balance.

Turkeys are another success story in this part of Alabama. Back in the 1960's and 1970's, I never saw turkeys here. Now we see them all the time. In the early 1930's, wild turkeys were on the verge of extinction in the United States. Now there are a half million in Alabama alone; hunters kill about 60,000 of them each year.

I have never seen a wild hog in this part of Alabama. Yet, they are supposed to be everywhere, especially swamps that are common here. Wild hogs are not native to Alabama. The first feral pigs in continental North America escaped from the expedition of Hernando de Soto in 1539-42. In Alabama's pioneer history, farmers would allow their hogs to roam free and use their dogs to round them up. It is illegal, but hunters sometimes trap them and release them on property they like to hunt. The Department of Conservation wants 80% of the wild hogs in Alabama dead each year. They are that good at reproducing and surviving in Alabama.

Other wildlife that we spot are rabbits, opposums, raccoons, gray squirrels, fox squirrels, coyotes and foxes.

The lakes and streams are full of beaver. We use beaver dams to walk across creeks, and we fish over beaver dens.

We have bobcats, but they are very elusive and they roam at night. We are more likely to find a dead one that couldn't get across the road fast enough, than spot a live one.