South Carolina Whitetail - hunt club confirms 89% of deer taken within Outdoor Phd time zone charts - After convincing myself, through my own observations and experiences, that my moon position charts worked, I decided to see if I could verify the effectiveness of this system by comparing other hunters experiences with the moon charting diagrams for the dates, and locations of their deer kills.

A friend of mine who is a member of a South Carolina hunting club had pretty detailed records of dates and tag times from October, 1990 through December, 2003. During this time, this hunt club has documented 157 kills.

I got pretty excited when I received this information and began keying dates and times and zip codes into the Outdoor Phd website. The instant gratification of hitting the submit button and seeing the charts appear on the screen was terrific. I really got excited when recorded kill after kill coincided with the predicted times on the website charts.  After I had done several dozen of these evaluations, a programming buddy of mine volunteered to write a program routine to evaluate all of them for me and print out the percentage of kills that had occurred during times that the moon charting program predicted that deer should be moving. To my great satisfaction, 89 percent of the recorded kills occurred during times that the moon charts predicted that deer should have been moving.  This was a very high percentage of correlation, but I wanted to go further in my verification.

I asked my friend if he knew of any times when hunters jumped deer in their bedding areas while they were walking to or from their stands or were just walking around still hunting. He responded that with the number of hunters in the club, there were some times that this happened and would cause deer to be moving when they would otherwise not have been. He also pointed out that there had been some instances of a stray dog or coyote spooking deer from their bedding areas while hunt club members were present. He stated that he had, in fact, killed a coyote while deer hunting.   I asked him if he felt that over the 14 year period that the deer kill records spanned, if he thought some deer might have been killed as a result of this unnatural movement of deer. He said that although he was not present during every hunt, he felt that some deer had probably been killed as a result of this circumstance. He further stated that he could not estimate with any degree of confidence how many times this might have occurred.

The 11 percent that fell outside the moon chart predicted times remain a statistical reality that I cannot definitely explain; but I will take an 89 percent confirmed correlation any time I am heading for my tree stand.