Give me conditions to consider for mature buck movement.

[magicman54494]

My favorite time is the evening of an all day misty type rain. The kinda day where the sky is hanging so low that you swear you can reach up and touch it. For some reason the bucks move a bit earlier on those days.

[BigHills BuckHunter]

My favorite time is the evening of an all day misty type rain. The kinda day where the sky is hanging so low that you swear you can reach up and touch it. For some reason the bucks move a bit earlier on those days.

X2
I love hunting those days.

[JoeRE]

I think phase of the rut has to be considered. Along with temperature, or deviation from normal. Colder days seem to have them on there feet earlier in the afternoon or mid day during the rut, more than a hot day.

This one seems like it could be a challenge. Along the lines of hunting pressure, we'd have to quantify that. I'm thinking maybe we take the output after the fact to look at the phase of the rut. To me, I would look for increased daytime activity showing up and then being able to go back and say Nov. 4-8 had the msot daytime buck sightings between 10 and 2 (or something along those lines).

Deviation from avg temp is a good one.

Rut phase definitely complicates things but it is more important than any other single factor. For the last 7 years I have kept record of on each hunt, besides date, location and time:
1) moon phase
2) moon transit (overhead/underfoot)
3) Temperature
4) Cloud Cover (relates to your lumen idea)
5) Wind Speed
6) wind direction
7) Barometric pressure (rising/falling if change > 0.2" Hg in 2 hours)
8) Leaf drop stage (classified in % and FAR MORE IMPORTANT than many realize in farm country anyway)
9) Current precipitation and recent precip.
10) % of row crops picked in immediate area


I just started analyzing my data from about 120 hunts this year because I needed a lot of it...I found some interesting things which I will be posting about in the near future but one of the biggest things I am finding out is that rut activity makes any other trends very very hard to identify. A hot doe nearby can mean huge movement....a hot doe a ridge over can mean zero movement.