How our scores hold up
We want you to be able to check our work. This page explains what the 0–100 deer movement score is built from, how often it changes, what we record, and what we are still collecting. We are not publishing a hit rate yet, because we do not have enough logged hunts to back one up honestly. When we do, the results will go here.
Where things stand today
The score is a planning tool. It rates how weather and the time of season line up for daylight deer movement where you hunt. It is not a count of deer, and it does not promise a sighting or a harvest.
We have not yet compared enough scores against real sits to publish a result. Rather than post a number we can't stand behind, we are showing you how the score works and how we are collecting the data to test it.
What the score uses
Every score is built from six inputs for your location:
- Temperature change, including cold snaps and drops from the day before
- How the weather is trending over the last few hours, around fronts and unsettled days
- Wind speed and direction
- Moon phase
- Time of season, from early season through the rut and late season
- Rain, storms and cloud cover
How to read the number
- Excellent: 88–100
- Good: 65–87
- Fair: 42–64. Often still worth a sit when your wind and stand are right.
- Poor: 0–41
How often it updates
Scores come from live weather data. A weather reading is reused for up to 30 minutes, then fetched again the next time someone checks that spot. If the weather service is briefly unavailable, a page may show a score saved earlier the same day instead of going blank. We never make up weather to fill a gap.
How we log readings
About once an hour, we record a current weather reading for each of the 8 states we cover. Those stored readings let the score compare today with yesterday and with a few hours ago, even when nobody has loaded the page. Readings are kept for 8 days and contain no personal information.
When a hunter plans a sit on a saved stand with the pre-sit planner, we store the score as it stood before the sit, along with the weather it was based on. That saved score can't be changed afterward, so it can be checked fairly against what the hunter saw.
What we are collecting next
- Planned sits with the score locked in before the hunt starts
- What hunters saw on those sits, including sits where they saw nothing
- Sits that were planned but never logged, so missing hunts are counted as missing and not as zero-deer days
- A plain comparison against a simple season-and-time-of-day baseline, so we can tell whether the weather inputs add anything
Our promise on numbers
We won't publish a hit rate until it comes from logged hunts and uses the scores that were locked in ahead of time. If the score doesn't hold up, we will say so here and change it.
More on the score: How the movement score works.