We show the moon. We weight it zero.

Four university research programs put GPS collars on deer looking for a moon effect on movement. None of them found one worth planning around.

Penn State's Deer-Forest Study measured about 6 meters per hour more movement on a new moon than a full moon, against a background hourly range of 0 to 2,748 m/hr for the same herd.

Mississippi State's Deer Lab collared 48 bucks and found about 4 yards per hour more movement on the "best" solunar full-moon days — their own summary called most of the apparent changes "reflect zero."

Auburn University's 38 collared bucks tested moon position, the actual mechanism solunar tables are built on: activity fell, from 0.540 to 0.413 during the overhead window and from 0.516 to 0.305 underfoot, near full and new moon — the opposite of the solunar prediction.

Webb et al. found no effect on fine-scale movement at all.

About 83% of surveyed hunters believe the moon affects deer movement — that's most of the people reading this page, and the belief is a reasonable one to hold. It just is not what the collars showed. So The Hunt still shows illumination and moonrise, because planning a dark walk-in or judging your light for a blood trail is genuinely useful. It does not pretend the moon picks the day. Full sourcing and every effect size lives on our moon-and-deer-movement page.

Your county. Not your state.

Baldwin County, Alabama runs its rut late January into February. Calhoun County — same state — runs late November. That's a ten-week spread inside one state, and a statewide "the rut is in November" answer is wrong for one of those two hunters no matter which way you round it.

The Hunt carries the real breeding-date records everywhere an agency publishes them: 43 Alabama counties, 71 in Mississippi, 60 Louisiana parishes, and Texas broken out by ecoregion. Type a ZIP code and it finds the county, not the state average.

It also says where each number came from and how confident it is. A figure a wildlife agency measured directly, and a figure we read off that agency's own published map, are not the same kind of fact — and a reader deserves to know which one they're holding. Where no agency publishes county-level data at all, The Hunt says so plainly and falls back to a labeled regional photoperiod default rather than inventing a precision nobody measured. See our Alabama, Texas, and Ohio rut pages for what that looks like in practice — one state with five measured bands, one with an entire ecoregion honestly marked "no data," and one running an honestly labeled regional default because the state has never published its own study.

The daily read

The Hunt's daily read is built only from drivers the research actually supports, ranked by documented effect size.

Rut stage

The single largest documented driver of deer movement. Mississippi State measured movement nearly double during the rut versus baseline — roughly 219 yards per hour to about 400 yd/hr for the same herd.

Wind — and it runs backward from what hunters expect

Ninety percent of surveyed hunters predict deer move less in wind. Penn State's collar data, covering more than 1,700 deer-days, found the opposite for bucks: movement increased significantly at 16–27 mph, regardless of rain. Does barely responded to wind either way.

Rain

Rain alone can cut buck movement roughly in half. If wind picks up alongside it, wind wins and movement climbs back up.

Your own hunting pressure

South Carolina DNR collared roughly 40 does over three years and logged more than 160,000 locations. Deer did not respond to hunting pressure in the abstract — they avoided the specific stands, food plots, and feeders that had actually been hunted, shifting to nocturnal movement even under light pressure. It's the largest lever in the literature, and the one only the hunter holding the stand can measure.

The daily read reports a word — elevated, typical, or reduced — relative to a hunter's own season on that spot, never a percentage. No dataset anywhere supports telling someone they have a 73% chance of movement today; a number like that is a guess wearing a lab coat.

Thermals: the fifteen minutes that ruin a sit

Warm air runs up a slope through the day; cool air runs back down it in the evening. In the fifteen to forty-five minutes where that switch happens, air swirls instead of running a clean direction, and scent goes everywhere at once. The Hunt marks that window on the day's timeline and says, plainly, don't move through it. This is physics, not folklore — and it is a case where hunters who watched the same ridge for decades had the pattern right long before anyone wrote down the equation.

What The Hunt doesn't do

It doesn't map property lines — onX already does that well, and there is no reason to compete with it. It doesn't print a movement percentage, for the reason above. And where the underlying research doesn't exist — elk movement against weather, for instance — it says so directly rather than borrowing a whitetail number and presenting it as measured.

FAQ

What is The Hunt?

A free field-planning tool from Sparrow Expeditions. It reads a ZIP code, finds the reader's county-level rut timing where an agency has published one, and builds a daily movement read from documented drivers — rut stage, wind, rain, and the reader's own hunting-pressure history — instead of a moon phase or an invented percentage. Every figure is tagged measured, inherited, confirmed, or contested.

Does moon phase affect deer movement?

Barely. Penn State's GPS-collared does showed about a 6 meter-per-hour difference between new and full moon, against an hourly range of 0 to 2,748 m/hr for the same herd — the researchers called it insignificant. Mississippi State's 48 collared bucks moved about 4 yards per hour more on peak solunar full-moon days, with no meaningful bedding-time change.

Are solunar tables accurate for deer hunting?

The study that tested the actual mechanism — moon overhead or underfoot — found activity fell during those windows instead of rising. Auburn's 38 collared bucks showed activity probability dropping from 0.540 to 0.413 (overhead) and 0.516 to 0.305 (underfoot) near full and new moon, the opposite of the solunar prediction.

Do deer move in high wind?

Yes. Across more than 1,700 deer-days, Penn State found bucks significantly increased movement at 16–27 mph wind regardless of rain, even though 90% of hunters surveyed predicted the opposite. Does showed little response either way.

What actually predicts deer movement?

In rough order of documented effect size: the rut (movement nearly doubling, roughly 219 to 400 yd/hr), localized hunting pressure (South Carolina DNR's ~40 collared does and 160,000+ locations showed deer avoiding specific hunted stands, even under light pressure), wind speed, and rain — with moon phase trailing well behind all of them.

Why does The Hunt use county-level rut timing instead of a statewide date?

Because the gap inside a single state can be wider than the gap between states — Baldwin County, Alabama peaks in late January/February; Calhoun County, same state, peaks in late November. The Hunt carries agency-published county and parish data where it exists (Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas by ecoregion) and a clearly labeled regional default everywhere else.

Does The Hunt give a percentage chance of deer movement?

No. It reports elevated, typical, or reduced, relative to a hunter's own season on that specific spot. No published research supports a precise probability, so The Hunt doesn't manufacture one.

Sources

• Penn State Deer-Forest Study — "Does the Moon Affect Deer Movement?"
• Mississippi State Deer Lab — moon phase, moon position, and hunter survey findings
• Auburn University / SEAFWA Journal 2016 — "Movement with the Moon"
• Penn State Deer-Forest Study — wind, barometric pressure, and cold-front movement analyses
• South Carolina DNR — hunting pressure and localized avoidance study