Ask The Biologist

Fired Up

Fired Up

By Bob Humphrey

Will the fire that swept through my property help or hurt the hunting?

QUESTION: We had a fire on the land we hunt in Georgia, near the Alabama border. How will this affect our deer’s lives and behavior?

ANSWER: It’s really difficult to say without more specific information, but I can offer some generalities. Fire is not necessarily a bad thing, although we’re often led to believe it is.

When done properly, a controlled burn can enhance habitat, and prescribed burning is a fairly common practice in the Southeast.

A controlled burn can be used to remove dense underbrush that might be choking out more preferred species. It also burns up accumulated leaf litter and duff that, if it becomes too dense, provides combustible fuel for a wildfire that would be considerably more damaging to the habitat.

Also, everything that burns restores nutrients to the soil. Depending on when the fire happened, it might slow things down a tad this fall, but if the burn wasn’t too severe, the vegetation should come back better than ever next year, and you might have healthier deer than you’ve ever seen.

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