Moon Phase & Harvest Patterns
Effort-adjusted kill rates across 2,212,952 records and 11 hunting seasons. Raw kill counts are normalized for day-of-week hunting pressure bias before comparing phases — Saturday hunters account for roughly 3× more kills than mid-week hunters regardless of moon phase.
Normalization Methodology
Raw kills on a Full Moon Tuesday are not comparable to raw kills on a Full Moon Saturday. To control for this, each calendar date is assigned an effort unit weight derived from the actual DOW kill distribution in the dataset. Saturday = 1.0 (maximum effort). Kill rate = total kills ÷ sum of effort units for all dates in that phase.
This isolates the moon's influence from the weekend effect, giving a like-for-like comparison across phases.
Day-of-Week Effort Weights
These weights are derived empirically from the harvest data itself — no external hunter participation surveys needed.
Effort-Adjusted Kill Rate by Phase
Effort units account for DOW composition of each phase window. "Kills per unit" is not a raw count — it reflects how many kills occurred relative to how much hunting pressure existed on those days.
Dark · Quarter · Bright Summary
Phase Rate Charts
Buckets 0–10% and 90–100% are dark and bright extremes. Note: 60–70% bucket shows the lowest rate — the "shoulder" of the gibbous phase.
Primary Rut Window · Nov 1–20
Full Moon drives the highest total kills in the rut window (+14.3% above mean) — but the composition shifts heavily toward does. Waxing Crescent produces the highest normalized buck rate during rut, which may reflect daytime movement patterns during low-light building phases.
Weapon Type × Moon Phase
Phase × Year Heatmap
Table showing normalized kills per effort-unit by moon phase and season year.
Year-to-year variation is substantial — some of this reflects regulation changes, weather, and how many prime November weekends coincided with peak rut. The moon signal is real but modest relative to these other factors.
How to Read This Moon Page
Focus on normalized rates, not raw kill totals. This page adjusts for day-of-week hunting pressure so phases are compared more fairly.
Phase pills: positive values are above the overall average; negative values are below it.
Phase bar chart: compare each phase to the mean line to see relative strength.
Rut chart: stacked buck + doe bars show composition and total together.
Heatmap: compare phases within the same year first, because each year uses its own color scale.
If Full Moon is +10% vs mean, it means kills per effort-unit were 10% above page-wide average.
If Waxing Gibbous is above Waning Gibbous, activity appears stronger before full moon than after.
If one year looks very dark in heatmap, that indicates high relative performance inside that year, not automatically highest across all years.
Effort unit: weighted hunting opportunity based on observed day-of-week pressure.
Normalized kills per unit: kills divided by effort units.
Pct vs mean: percent above or below the overall average rate.
Rut window: Nov 1–20 subset used for buck/doe behavior focus.
Correlation is not causation: moon phase association does not prove direct biological cause by itself.
Regulations, weather, and hunter turnout can influence year-level patterns.
Differences are often modest, so treat small gaps as directional signals.