David Rainer: Loving the Outdoors, and Writing About it

By: Jim Hannaford

Are you fortunate enough to have a job you love so much that you never want to stop doing it? David Rainer does. His situation brings to mind the old joke about wondering what professional golfers do on vacation.

A lifelong sportsman, David has spent most of his professional life writing about what he loves, which is hunting, fishing, and other outdoor recreation. For the last three decades, he’s been doing it in our gorgeous corner of the world. Since 2006, after many years with newspapers, he is now employed as the in-house writer for the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.

In what certainly seems like a dream job, he works from his home in Silverhill and gets to venture out frequently to indulge in his work-related passions. He knows he’s got it pretty good, so he keeps at it even though he’s a bit past the typical retirement age. 

“It goes back to what my wife, Robbie, said. When I mentioned retirement at some point, she asked me, “What will you do if you retire, hunt and fish? I said, “Yeah,” and she said, ‘Well, you can do that now and get paid for it.’”

It’s hard to argue with such logic, so he continues to spread the word on the tremendous wealth of opportunities Alabama has to offer when it comes to enjoying the outdoors. And he does it in ways that are detailed and informative while also being entertaining. Whether he’s writing about a rebound in the flounder population, a wild game cook-off, or major expansions and renovations at state parks, he is sure to spotlight the human element.

“I’m kind of a hybrid, an outdoor writer-slash-public relations manager,” he says. “I write a weekly column and some of the press releases and I also help the commissioner with some of the things he’s writing. My weekly column is published online at OutdoorAlabama.com on Thursdays and I send it out to 160-something media outlets, and they’re free to run it as long as we get attribution. On Fridays, I send it out to over 30,000 subscribers.”

Locally, one of David’s favorite places to showcase the state’s rich natural bounty is just up the road from his home office. The 5 Rivers Delta Resource Center is a 1,327-acre park toward the eastern end of the Causeway that could easily be called one of Baldwin County’s shiniest jewels. The rustic, lodge-like visitors center and meeting rooms are quite impressive, and so is the small theater that shows a film called “America’s Amazon.” 

Outside those walls is where the real beauty lies.

“There’s such a diversity of flora and fauna that it’s almost unbelievable,” David says while giving a quick tour. “It’s one of few areas that has this much estuarine habitat. All of these rivers come together and form this humongous delta and eventually empty into Mobile Bay, providing a great spawning and rearing habitat for an abundance of different species.”  

For the record, the five rivers that give the resource center its name are the Blakeley, the Tensaw, the Apalachee, the Mobile, and the Spanish. Almost sounding like Bubba Gump itemizing a smorgasbord of shrimp dishes, David rattles off a few more waterways that contribute to the unique convergence. “There are others, too,” he says, “like the Raft River and Chuckfee Bay and John’s Bay—and the Middle River as well.”

He can easily describe the peculiarities of fishing those waters because it’s something he’s done far too many times to recount. Before going to work for the conservation department, he was the outdoors editor for the Mobile Press-Register for 14 years. This was toward the end of what you might say was the golden age of print journalism. He looks back with some wonder at the fact that the newspaper provided him with his own 21-foot bay boat to use freely as he saw fit.

Even novice anglers know of the abundant black bass in these waters, but that’s just part of the picture. The brackish nature of the Delta—its mixture of fresh water and salt water—adds to the excitement.

“The bass are here most of the time, and you can catch some if you work the tides right and find those ambush points where the bass are hanging out,” he says. “But in the fall, there’s a saltwater wedge that moves up, and that brings in speckled trout, redfish, and flounder. There was a quarter-mile stretch on the Raft River that had grass beds, and I can’t tell you how many speckled trout I caught off that one quarter-mile stretch.”

The other half of David’s job takes place on land, of course. Solid hunting grounds await just onshore from this teeming estuary.

“You’ve got so much wildlife in the Delta, too,” he says. “You can go whitetail deer hunting, squirrel hunting, rabbit hunting,  wild pig hunting—and waterfowl hunting if it gets cold enough.”

For his own favorite kind of hunting, he prefers to head farther upland toward the center of Alabama’s Black Belt region. He pinpoints Wilcox County as the best place in Alabama to try for a trophy gobbler.

“There are a lot of turkeys up there, but there are a lot of turkey hunters up there too,” he says, “so you’ve got to be at the top of your game to fool one of those birds. We turkey hunters tend to talk about the ones we didn’t kill as much as the ones we did kill. We remember the ones who outsmarted us.”

He got his love for hunting and fishing at an early age from his father in Mississippi (first in the town of Union and then Okolona). He doesn’t see an end to his passion for the outdoors, though it almost happened 11 months ago. Besides being a supportive and loving spouse, his lovely wife Robbie may have saved his life. An operating room nurse for 42 years, she spotted some worrying symptoms that led quickly to bypass surgery. 

Because he works from home, he can also balance his responsibilities so that he’s able to enjoy lots of time with her as well as their two grown daughters, Ashley and Allyson, and their young grandson, Ollie. 

“I’ve been blessed, there’s no doubt about it,” David says. “You can’t get a better gig than covering the outdoors in Alabama for the last 32 years.”