Good, they need to do some more cutting, throw some control burns in and while they are at it add a few more food plots. I sure wish they'd do it over in this corner of the state.
That couldn’t be further from the truth. 6-8 year regrown cuts have a TON of food at deer level. They use the edges of those thick cuts very heavily, and bed into thick stuff. I’ve bumped a ton of deer out of beds head high thick that were so briared up I could barely crawl through them. Now you are right that they are thicker than syrup, and not easy to hunt, but that’s what makes them a sanctuary for deer. Turkeys don’t use them once they get too dense, but the first few years while it is greening back up it’s gonna be a turkey magnet.Select cutting and clear cutting are 2 major different things, clear cuts grow back up as a jungle with nothing a deer or turkey can eat in 5 or 6 years then they are fit for nothing the rest of our lifetime.
Dude nobody is cutting all the hardwoods in the ENTIRE wilderness area, in fact the scale of that clear cut on Cohutta WMA is akin to clearing a 1 acre food plot in a 1000 acre hardwood only property. I don’t think anyone would argue the benefits of that. That cut is surrounded by almost endless acres of mature, pristine hardwoods that could very well hold less deer and turkeys than a 20,000 heavily timber managed WMA in middle Ga. You can look at me dumbfounded all you want, go hunt around that cut this fall and next spring and then years to come and you’ll be singing a different tune.I can see me talking a man that owns 200 acres with 40 of it hardwoods, that the clear cut benefits of taking out those 40 acres would be more than leaving that established habitat. He'd look at me like we're looking at Chrislibby
Dude nobody is cutting all the hardwoods in the ENTIRE wilderness area, in fact the scale of that clear cut on Cohutta WMA is akin to clearing a 1 acre food plot in a 1000 acre hardwood only property. I don’t think anyone would argue the benefits of that. That cut is surrounded by almost endless acres of mature, pristine hardwoods that could very well hold less deer and turkeys than a 20,000 heavily timber managed WMA in middle Ga. You can look at me dumbfounded all you want, go hunt around that cut this fall and next spring and then years to come and you’ll be singing a different tune.
Now I don’t think logging every inch of a property down to the ground is a good idea, and honestly I wish they would slow down on some of the logging on my local WMAs, but there is no question that wildlife benifits from any sort of forest management that creates edges, opens the canopy, habitat diversity, and allows new growth down where animals can reach it.