Methodology

How the hunting-day score works

What goes into each score, where the numbers come from, how we rank public land, and what we deliberately don’t claim.

The score, in plain English

Every page computes a 0–100 score for one question: given today’s conditions, how likely are deer to move in daylight here? It starts from a neutral midpoint and rises or falls with each factor below. A prime day lands in the 80s; a tough one sits under 35. This is a read on conditions, not a legal go-ahead. The season and CWD rules sit right beside it on the page. The weights behind the score are our own model, so what follows is what moves it, not the point values.

Roughly in order of how much they matter:

Rut phase. The dominant seasonal driver, set by the date and the tract’s latitude. The chase phase, in early-to-mid November across the corn belt, is the best week of the year for daylight buck movement. Pre-rut, peak breeding, post-rut, and the December second rut each carry their own weight.
Cold front. A sharp drop in temperature ahead of a front is about the strongest daytime-movement trigger there is. We read it from today’s high against tomorrow’s.
Barometric pressure. Deer feed and move ahead of a falling barometer. Unlike fish, they also move well behind a front, in the cold, clear, high-pressure air, so a rising barometer isn’t penalized.
Temperature. Deer move most when it’s cool. Well above a species’ comfort range they bed in shade and feed after dark.
Wind speed. A steady breeze covers a hunter’s sound and keeps deer on their feet. Heavy wind shuts daytime movement down, and dead calm leaves them edgy.
Precipitation and snow. Light drizzle barely slows deer and quiets your walk in. Heavy rain and thunderstorms bed them down, and lightning is a treestand no-go. Accumulating snow concentrates deer on food and makes tracking easy. We read forecast snowfall from the NWS gridpoint.
Sky cover. Gray, low-light days hold deer on their feet later into the morning and pull them out earlier in the evening.
Solunar window. A small tie-breaker, and only when a feeding period overlaps legal shooting light. The note below explains why we keep it small.
NWS alert. An active weather alert is a safety-first penalty and a nudge to check it before you head out.

Wind direction is shown for scent planning but not scored. Without knowing your stand and the bedding area, we can’t tell you whether the wind is right. Only you can.

Legal season and CWD: shown, never guessed

The score is about conditions. The law is separate, and we keep it that way. Each page shows whether a weapon season is open today, the bag limit and antler rule, and whether the ground falls inside a CWD Disease Surveillance Area with its baiting and carcass-movement rules. A wrong season date is a poaching liability, not a rounding error, so where we haven’t verified a rule against the agency we say so rather than assert a false open or closed. Always confirm the current rules with your state before you hunt.

How public land is ranked

On a given day, weather and rut are close to uniform across a state, so what separates one tract from another is the ground itself. The ranking blends three things: the tract’s own conditions score, the county’s deer-harvest density as a herd-quality proxy from the state’s annual report, and the tract’s habitat and size. Habitat comes from the dominant land cover sampled across the tract, including the food-to-cover edge deer favor; size stands in for hunting pressure, since bigger ground holds more deer away from roads. Missing data falls back to neutral. Nothing is invented to fill a gap.

Why we don’t lead with solunar tables

Most hunting apps put solunar “major” and “minor” feeding windows front and center. We keep them small on purpose. The specific claim, that deer feed predictably when the moon is overhead or underfoot, has weak empirical support. Photoperiod, fronts, and temperature swings drive daylight movement far more reliably. So solunar is only a light tie-breaker here, and only when it lines up with legal light. We would rather show a few well-grounded signals than a confident-looking table the evidence doesn’t back.

Data sources

All free, all public. The data sources page lists every one in full. In short: the National Weather Service supplies the forecast and alerts, USGS and the federal land-cover program describe the terrain and habitat, the US Census provides county area, and each state’s wildlife agency is the authority for seasons, limits, CWD zones, and harvest.

Limitations

Weather is snapped to the nearest prerendered point. The site is static and rebuilt on a schedule. Check an arbitrary coordinate and you get the forecast for the nearest covered point, not a live pull at your exact tree.
Habitat is land cover, not a stand-level read. It tells us the dominant cover of a tract. That’s good for ranking ground and no substitute for scouting a funnel or a bedding area.
Weather is synoptic, not micro-terrain. We don’t model valley thermals or the exact wind at your stand. That’s local knowledge, and we’d rather say so than pretend otherwise.
Regulations are verified periodically, not in real time. Every rule carries a source and a verification date. The ground truth is always the state agency.