Sunday, September 30, 2012

PA Deer Harvest Map

Harvest moon this weekend.  Opening day or Archery season this weekend.  Sounds like a good time to publish this map.

I wanted to test out Mapbox's integration with Google Charts API.  I had an idea to show this map, except as points and also let the user hover the mouse over a Wildlife Management Unit (WMU) and have a line chart returned of the harvest trends for the past few years.

Here is the result.

To view the map in its native format, click here.

Simple idea here.  Blue are antlered, pink are anterless.  Each point represents a harvest for the 2011/2012 season.

So I found the perfect layer publicly available on PASDA.  I had to make a few modifications on it but no biggie.

Then lay down some ground rules for my Random Point creation.
1. Set the point creation to be for the 2011 - 2012 hunting season.
2. Do not allow a point to be created within 75 yards of any road
3. Do not allow a point to be created in a river/lake

With these rules, I was able to keep most of the points out of large cities and reservoirs (see Philadelphia and Raystown lake for example).

A few hindsights:
1. I need to fix the legend, it is displaying too large in some web browsers.
2. Fix the Tooltip box.  It is creating a scroll bar in Firefox.

Feel free to analyze the map.  Central PA sure is skimpy!

I need ideas on what map to create next.  This map and the grouse map have been great for testing some apps that are work related.

09/29/12

Location: Behind Work
Temp: Morning, low 40's rising to low 60s in afternoon
Wind:  Still
Weather:  Perfect morning, partly cloudy and crisp.  No rain at all.

First day of Archery!

This used to be like Christmas morning for me until I got a dog.  Now I have to sneak out the door and leave him behind.  He cried at 6AM and woke up my wife.  Bad Dog!  Now Christmas morning is the openers of grouse and pheasant season.  We'll compare the opening day of archery now too....hm...okay Christmas morning.

Got in stand right at 6:45, which is 1/2 hour before sunrise.  Right when shooting hours start.  Well, I got skunked.  Nothing but squirrels until 10:30AM.

I went home, cut grass, hunt out, etc.  Got back to the woods around 5:15 and thought I'd get on something.  I got an 8 point on my camera in this exact location and thought he may be strolling by because there are tons of acorns in this area.  In fact I can't believe I didn't get cracked in the head by one, it was basically raining them.

I still saw some cool things.  Had a wood thrush hanging around (I thought maybe he would have been migrating by now?), had a red-tail up above me about an hour before dark, and then had a possum slugging around right below my stand.  Boy was he ugly, his back was all scratched up like something was trying to get him.  Maybe an owl.

Well I called it a night.  At this point I saw a big whopping 0 deer but, who cares, it was such a beautiful day I didn't mind.  As I was leaving in the truck guess what I saw?  Of course, the 8 point hanging with 3 other unidentified deer.  He's on the opposite side of the field from where I was.  I think they bed close to where I set up, but are moving there in a different direction than I had thought.  I'll relocate.

Moon - Flash

Moon - No flash
The 8 point in velvet