Deer Move Less by Day on Sunday Than Friday: An Alabama Collar Study

In an Alabama GPS collar study, deer behaved the same on weekends as on weekdays until the researchers split Friday, Saturday and Sunday apart. Once they did, daylight movement fell 17 percent from Friday to Sunday and stayed depressed until Wednesday, while nighttime movement did not change. This guide covers what the study measured, what Pennsylvania's aerial hunter counts add for states that close Sunday, and a scheduling rule you can test on your own ground.

Kevyn Wiskirchen and colleagues at Auburn fitted adult deer with GPS collars on four Alabama areas, two private and two public wildlife management areas, and scored their behavior against the day of the week (Wiskirchen et al. 2022). The collars logged one location per hour through the 2014 to 2015 and 2015 to 2016 hunting seasons. Of 38 collared deer, 32 (16 males and 16 females) made it into the analysis, and 20 of those contributed data in both seasons. The published text reports one pooled result across all four areas, so the deer numbers below are not a public-land-only curve.

The study window matters. The authors started each season's window on the youth-season opener in mid-November and ended it when fewer than 5 percent of a year's conceptions would fall inside it, because breeding activity has masked deer responses to hunters in earlier work. That left 23 to 58 days per area (mean 42.75). These deer were hunted before the rut, and a rut-timed week could behave differently.

Hunter effort came from daily permits on the public areas and from hunter records on the private ones. On public areas it averaged 0.56 hunters per square kilometer per day on weekends and dropped 66 percent, to 0.19, on weekdays. Saturday was the peak at 0.72. On private land effort averaged 0.009 hunter-hours per hectare per day on weekends and 0.001 on weekdays, an 83 percent drop, with Saturday at 0.013. The authors call these minimum figures because some records were missing, and they describe the pressure as lower than in the earlier studies they compare against.

When the authors compared Friday through Sunday as one block against Monday through Thursday, the block did nothing: the weekend term explained none of the daytime models (P of 0.216 or higher). Splitting the days changed the answer. Daytime movement rate, net displacement (how far a deer got from its first daylight location of the day) and the probability of activity (an hour counted as active if the deer moved at least about 49 meters) did not change from Thursday to Friday or from Friday to Saturday.

Measured against Friday, Sunday was down 17 percent, 31 percent and 24 percent on those three measures. All three then climbed back, and the authors write that daytime behavior did not return to pre-weekend levels until Wednesday. Nothing comparable showed up after dark: nighttime movement, displacement and activity did not vary by day of the week (P above 0.122).

Saturday carried the most hunters on both land types, yet daylight movement that day matched Thursday and Friday. The authors called the missing immediate response surprising. Their reading is that individual deer probably reacted to encounters as they happened, in ways an hourly fix could not see, and that by the third day the accumulated encounters may have shown up across the population. They also suggest that about three days of exposure may have taught deer to treat daylight as riskier than darkness, which would explain why daytime movement stayed low on Monday and Tuesday even though hunting effort had dropped.

The deer did not make up the lost daylight at night. They favored night over day all week, and the day-of-week term for that preference was not informative (P = 0.138), so the Sunday dip looks like less daytime movement, not relocated movement.

Age and sex showed up too. Across the whole window, mature males (3.5 years and older) moved 15 percent less than immature males in daylight (interval 0 to 33) and were 50 percent less likely than mature females to be active by day. After dark the order flipped: mature males were 56 percent more likely to be active than immature males and moved 42 percent more, and the authors describe them as more mobile at night than any other group in the sample.

The Alabama weekend has a Sunday in it. A Pennsylvania State University and Pennsylvania Game Commission team flew hunter counts over two study areas on and around state forests in 2005 to 2007, and its 2008 report says deer hunting on Sunday was not permitted in Pennsylvania (Keenan, Rosenberry and Wallingford, 2008). Rules change, so check your own state's current regulations before you plan around either calendar.

Their counts show a front-loaded crowd. The report puts density at 0.5 to 1 hunter per square kilometer over the first three days of the rifle season, then generally under 0.1 except on Saturdays. In 2006 on Sproul public land the peak was opening Monday morning at 1.1, and every day from Wednesday afternoon to the end of the season stayed under 0.4. Tuscarora public land climbed through its first three flights (0.9, 1.1 and 1.2) before dropping under 0.3 in week two.

A thin crowd is still a clustered one. On a 45,907-hectare Pennsylvania public tract, deer hunters were nearly three times less likely to hunt an area for every additional 500 meters from a forest road, and 1.5 times less likely for every 5 degrees of added slope; 87 percent hunted within half a kilometer of a road (Diefenbach et al. 2005). Our effort-not-distance guide covers the map side of that.

Mississippi State's extension bulletin on a private-land buck study says hunting effort is most intense during the rut and on holidays and weekends, and it recommends spreading hunter days more evenly through the week so deer face less risk over time (MSU Extension P3927). A 2023 paper from the same Mississippi State group suggests hunters moderate their effort across time to reduce the deer response (Henderson et al. 2023).

The evidence is thin in the ways that matter. It rests on 32 deer, two seasons and one state. Hourly fixes probably missed brief flights early in the weekend, the authors say. Pressure was low and measured as a floor. The window closed before breeding. And the study measured deer movement, not what hunters saw or shot, so a 17 percent drop in movement rate cannot be converted into a 17 percent drop in sightings.

Pennsylvania's counts describe hunters, not deer. The deer-side test in this guide is the Alabama one, and the two data sets came from different states and different seasons.

This is our reading of the studies, not a result any of them reports.

A same-day movement rating cannot see a lag like this one, and it is one of the inputs our guide to movement scores says a single number leaves out. For how crowded public ground gets before you pick a day at all, read How Crowded Is That Public Land?. Illinois is the only one of the twelve states FDR tracks that publishes a site-by-site effort record, and there the busiest 10 percent of public sites absorb roughly half of all hunter-trips in a year.

See what Scout maps.