Simple plans for serious hunters

Most of a DuckCast score is weather: what the air is about to do, and what that usually does to birds. The radar check is the one input that measures the birds themselves.

We decode raw NEXRAD Level II radar volumes from the National Weather Service and read what was actually in the air over your region after sunset last night: how much bird mass lifted off, which way it tracked, and how fast it flew under its own power once the wind at flight altitude is subtracted out. Bugs drift with the wind. Birds fly through it.

Hunter reports are the other set of real eyes on the birds, and they carry 12% of every score, but they depend on somebody having been out there. The radar watches every night, across the whole region, whether anyone hunted or not. One honest limit, and we say it in the app too: radar sees every bird in the air, not just ducks.

Read it as proof that a migration happened, not as a duck count.

Two reasons. Privacy first: exact hunting locations are never collected or shown, every report is generalized to the region level, so nobody burns your spot. Biology second: migrating flocks ride weather systems that span whole counties. A regional score tells you when birds are moving through your area. Finding the X is still your job.

It keeps running. The freeze line tracks all winter, and the radar still reads the sky every night, which is how a real movement in the dead of summer turns up at all. What changes is the scores, and they stay honest rather than manufactured: outside the migration window there is no migration, so the number is low and the app says why.

Two things we want and have not built yet are season recaps for your saved regions, and a model trained on past seasons to sharpen the next one. Today's engine is a published set of weights, tuned by hand. We would rather tell you that now than have you find out in February.

No, never. Hunter reports exist for one purpose: improving the regional forecasts for the people who file them. We do not sell reports, contact info, or location data, and exact locations are never collected in the first place.

Yes, for the states DuckCast covers. The live map colors every one of the 90 regions across North Dakota, Arkansas, Missouri, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas by its current migration score, rebuilt through the day from live weather, the freeze line across the country upstream, crop progress and hunter reports.

Each morning the radar check marks whether birds actually moved over a region after dark, so it is a forecast map with a nightly observation laid on top rather than a map of sightings. It covers ten states today, not the whole country, and it says so instead of painting states it does not model.

Every covered state has its own page listing the regions DuckCast scores, and every region has a page describing what the forecast watches there. The report itself is the live score: a 0 to 10 number per region, the eight factors behind it, and last night's radar read. Hunter reports filed in the app are generalized to the region and feed the same number.

Your state wildlife agency publishes the official regulations and, in most states, in-season survey counts; DuckCast links to the agency from every state page and never stands in for it.

Yes. DuckCast is a duck hunting app for iPhone and the web that forecasts the migration for ten states, region by region, and checks itself against NEXRAD radar every night. It is not a land-ownership or public-land map and it does not sell gear or book guides. The web version is free to start with no account.

The iPhone app is on the App Store for iOS 17 or later, and Pro adds the live radar check, live crop data, the live freeze line and reading other hunters' reports.