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Traditional "best days"

Ski said:
That is interesting to me because I've always heard old timers claim they kill their biggest bucks on a waning moon. I never put much stock in it because I've personally not noticed a difference. But your consistent average of 20% is telling. As with any "average" there are highs and lows, so it's quite plausible some hunters are actually seeing noticeable correlation between the moon and deer movement, while others like me are seeing zero correlation. I very well may be seeing the bottom factor of the average. Even with a low overall average there has to be a peak, and whoever is experiencing that peak will swear the moon has a huge effect on buck movement.



Agreed. It's the rarest of wind directions for our area, opposite the prevailing west winds. My theory is that it occurs so infrequently, and sporadically shifty when it does, that bucks simply do not have as many safe bedding areas to deal with it. Not as many places to hide. All their best hiding places are for westerly winds, whether it be SW or NW or straight west. Bump a buck out of bed on a west wind & he'll have a hundred other beds he can choose from. Bump him out of an east and his second and third choice options are limited.
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Absolutely. I'm not a scientist and I don't have data, but I love an east wind.
 
Notice how east winds produce the highest buck observation rates.
 

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Ski said:
It's the rarest of wind directions for our area, opposite the prevailing west winds.
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Just ran the numbers. If the wind blew equally from every direction, each direction would account for 12.5% of all hunts. Yet looking at my hunt data, I found East winds to be the least frequent, making up only 4.7% of hunts. The most common was Northwest and 19.6% of hunts and South at 19.1% (most of this data comes from November).
 
BSK said:
Just ran the numbers. If the wind blew equally from every direction, each direction would account for 12.5% of all hunts. Yet looking at my hunt data, I found East winds to be the least frequent, making up only 4.7% of hunts. The most common was Northwest and 19.6% of hunts and South at 19.1% (most of this data comes from November).
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Ha! You're such a deer nerd. It's awesome.

So east wind accounts for just less than one out of twenty hunts. What percentage of mature buck sightings and kills fall on one of those east wind days?
 
Ski said:
Ha! You're such a deer nerd. It's awesome.

So east wind accounts for just less than one out of twenty hunts. What percentage of mature buck sightings and kills fall on one of those east wind days?
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🤣

He most definitely is, but I've been very thankful for it over the years. I've learned so much. I'm just as much a deer nerd, I just don't keep all the numbers and data. I have enough of that crap to deal with at work. There is not a day that goes by I'm not thinking about it and what the deer are during at any specific time
 
Finally got my weather data analyzed. This data is 35 years of hunter observations from one property totaling 9,033.64 hunting hours.

Below are two graphs, antlerless deer (does and fawns) sighting rates and buck sighting rates. Each graph has two lines, one for morning hunts based on the morning low temperature, and afternoon hunts based on the afternoon high temperature. Antlerless sightings are pretty straight-forward with declining rates - both morning and evening - the warmer it gets. The buck sighting rates are a bit odd. Morning rates show a slow decline with increasing low temperature, but afternoon rates show a lull in the 40s and 50s, followed by a significant uptick in sightings into the upper 60s, then a rapid decline after the upper 60s. Not sure why that would be. Both graphs are limited to November, as that is our peak month of data collection. The fact that November is also our rut month may be why buck sighting rates do not track antlerless sighting rates, as bucks are going to want to be moving no matter what.
 

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BSK said:
Finally got my weather data analyzed. This data is 35 years of hunter observations from one property totaling 9,033.64 hunting hours.

Below are two graphs, antlerless deer (does and fawns) sighting rates and buck sighting rates. Each graph has two lines, one for morning hunts based on the morning low temperature, and afternoon hunts based on the afternoon high temperature. Antlerless sightings are pretty straight-forward with declining rates - both morning and evening - the warmer it gets. The buck sighting rates are a bit odd. Morning rates show a slow decline with increasing low temperature, but afternoon rates show a lull in the 40s and 50s, followed by a significant uptick in sightings into the upper 60s, then a rapid decline after the upper 60s. Not sure why that would be. Both graphs are limited to November, as that is our peak month of data collection. The fact that November is also our rut month may be why buck sighting rates do not track antlerless sighting rates, as bucks are going to want to be moving no matter what.
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Very interesting!
 
East winds can mean that a high-pressure system is moving north of you, but most often we get east winds when a big low pressure is sliding through the Deep South.
 
BSK said:
I'm still working on cataloging all my trail-camera data from past years. What I found interesting is how often particular dates are top-notch for older buck movement. I've got 12 years of trail-camera data entered, and I ran an analysis looking for dates each year that produced a lot of older buck pictures on trail-cam. Turns out there are definitely "hot" dates that show up year after year as particularly active for older bucks. Anyone else notice this?
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Dec 4-6!
 

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