I have started recording stuff on my phone. Time, direction, wind, ect. Can't say I have enough data to prove anything. But something to do.
I have enough observational data over the 31 years that I've lived here. Light to moderate rain has
no adverse effect on deer movement, in fact, it may actually help increase movement. I've spent literally thousands of hours over those years watching deer out my windows and, for my deer in my region, minimal deer sightings was never something that I could correspond to rain.
I just checked my rain gauge. We got almost 3 inches of rain yesterday and at times it was heavy rain. It was also pretty windy, too. At times the rain was falling at a 45 degree angle...almost blowing sideways, and our area isn't known for the constant wind conditions that deer are used to in a place like Kansas, either. Even in those very miserable conditions, deer were coming and going in my plots pretty much all day long.
No doubt,
zero doubt, that rain does not have an adverse effect on deer movement. Do the math...31 years of observation from my home puts me at about 10,000 days of watching deer out my windows. I do it almost every day for an hour or more. I know I'm in the 20,000 hour range of watching critters out my doors, and we've had plenty of deer and turkeys during that whole time. It's a rare day that I don't see at least a few deer, and some days it's as high as 50. I've easily had 80,000 deer sightings from the house over those 31 years...I'm positive that's not an exaggeration.
They move in the rain. Now, is this a regional behavior? We
do have tremendous hunting pressure here. Have these deer been conditioned to realize they encounter far fewer hunters when it's raining? I don't know about that aspect of it but I do know they move in the rain.