Sorry, I missed your post. Yes, I do live in the Birmingham area. You will probably recall my complaints about the soil.
All city and county recreation parks will allow detecting. I have never had a problem. I check the websites for the cities and counties and have not seen anything against it. We have a large active club for the size of our city with 20-30 members strong and have been detecting since the 80s. Most public areas have been detected heavily, but I still find some silver occasionally.
The State Park website stays that state law requires a detectorist to get permission from that park's ranger in charge. Oak Mountain State Park to the south of Birmingham will tell you this if you call. I asked the head ranger once, she told me to stay on the beach on the lake. I now detect where I want to but have not found anything more than clad. The water guys find jewelry there.
The State Civil War parks Tannehill and Brierfield SP are off limits and boast a $500 fine. I have not tried historic Birmingham parks like Sloss Furnace, Red Mountain Mining park, Arlington Mansion, or Vulcan Iron Statue park, I am assuming that they are off limits.
The soil is bad to worse. The soil around Red Mountain on the southern edge of the inner city limits, is pretty bad and has iron slag cinders in it. This represents where I have found most of my silver coins. I just find them shallow. I use my 8x6 SEF coil most of the time. Once every few months it may occur to me that a site was clean enough to use the pro coil. The soil is a little better in the Suburbs, but these areas were primarily built after 1960, especially the affluent suburbs to the south. It is possible to find the old cores of the newer areas... The better coinshooting areas are in the bad areas of town. The club has broken in the police and authorities and sidewalk strip hunting as well as park and school hunting is fine, with exception of the occasional picky homeowner, at least in the Birmingham city limits. Some of the schools in bad areas have locked gates. Basically the city limits of Birmingham are the worst parts of the metropolitan area, and decaying rapidly, with the middle class and wealthy mostly moving further and further into the suburbs, but all of the charming architectecture and most silver coins reside there.
I have found around 50 silver coins in two years. It is a struggle. There should be some great civil war sites, I just don't know where.
If you need somewhere to hunt, I have some ideas, let me know...
