Moon Phase & Elk Kills

[Swede]

Do you keep track of the dates and times of your elk kills? For my last 5 kills, 2 were on a new moon, 2 were on a half moon and 1 was on a full moon. Sometime back I checked and found the distribution was roughly even for over twenty kills I had dated. If you kept track of the dates it would be interesting to see if we can come up with any information that would be meaningful as far as moon phase and elk harvest is concerned. All of those last 5 kills were from a tree stand.

 

[Deertick]

And while we\'re at it, can someone hypothesize a mechanism whereby the moon effects success rates?

 

[cnelk]

Went thru this exercise not long ago...

Our success from 2003 - 2013:
16 harvests were in a moon phase of 50% visibility OR LESS [some were new moon, 1st quarter, etc]
6 harvests were in a moon phase of 90% visibility OR MORE [very near or at full moon]

This was for 10 years - 22 elk with archery gear.

Quick research shows 3-4 days on either side of the full moon date have > 90% or more.
Shall we say 7 days are 90% or more visibility?
And approx 14 days have < 50% visibilty

Category Observed Expected # Expected
1 <50% 16 11 50.000%
2 >90% 6 6 27.273%
3 50-90% 0 5 22.727%

Chi squared equals 7.273 with 2 degrees of freedom.
The two-tailed P value equals 0.0263

According to the analysis we did better than expected when the moon was dark, about what you would expect near a full moon, and less than you\'d expect (zero) when the moon was out but not bright. There\'s some evidence that it\'s better hunting during darker moon, but I wouldn\'t schedule a hunt around it.

 

[otcWill]

I take some notes on kill situations. We\'ve killed quite a few during the full moon or within a few days. This is more than likely random chance. The most statistically significant factor (other than date of kill) has been weather. Our odds soar before/after storms and in overcast weather.

 

[Deertick]

Our odds soar before/after storms and in overcast weather.

(Recording to memory.)