See below and attached for a PDF with a little more data including actual predicted dates. It is in four groups by counties that are roughly Game Zones.
What's different from previous years is that I'm using the whitetail records to define the calendar curve instead of just deer kill by me and the family. I went back only to the year 2000 because game zones, seasons and laws have changed so much since the early years and going to 2000 still left enough data to create a clean curve. This, I think, makes the blue predictions better but it also makes the red "by calendar" graph a little more clunky.
I'm still using our deer to create the moon curve for several reasons. I'm trying to predict when mature whitetail bucks are vulnerable of their own accord. There are a lot of deer in the record book that I'm sure were killed over corn, hit by cars, shot in front of dogs, etc. I really want to weed those deer out on the moon curve.
The charts have all of Oconee, Pickens and Greenville counties in Game Zone 1, when in actuality, GZ1 is only portions of those counties. The record books only record whole counties so I didn't have a choice. I feel certain that the early October hump in the first chart is driven by deer in those counties that are were mostly in the Game Zone 2 portion of those counties.
The attached pdf has a ranking for the best 15 days for each grouping.
I'll update as needed but don't intend to do any more with this for a while.
Bookmarks