How we verify

01 — The rule everything else follows from

Hunting regulations are enforced law. A wrong date here can cost somebody a fine or a licence, which is why guessing is not a shortcut we allow ourselves — an empty field is honest, an invented one is not.

02 — What counts as a source

In descending order of authority:

• The agency's own regulations — the annual hunting digest, the commission's adopted proclamation, or the codified rule itself. This is what we read.
• The agency's own web pages — season tables and licence portals published by the same agency.
• Secondary references such as eRegulations are used only as a cross-check on something that looks wrong. They are never the source a page is built from.

Each page links to the document it was built from, so you can repeat the check yourself. That link is part of the product, not a courtesy.

03 — What “Last verified” means

It means a person opened the agency's document on that date and confirmed the figures on the page against it. It is not the date the page was generated, and not the date a script ran.

It is also, deliberately, the limit of the claim. It says nothing about what the agency did the following week. The most recent verification across the season pages was 2026-09-07; each page shows its own.

04 — When sources disagree

It happens more often than you would expect: a table in a digest contradicts the commission's adopted order, or a season poster and a regulations PDF print different dates. Our procedure:

• the legally adopted instrument wins over a summary or a poster;
• a second, independently formatted document from the same agency is pulled to break the tie;
• where the conflict cannot be resolved, we publish neither figure and note that the agency should be consulted directly.

This has already changed what we published. A waterfowl table whose columns misaligned in one document would have assigned mergansers the goose season's dates; a second agency document showed the real ones before that page ever went live. That check is routine, not exceptional.

05 — Why fields are sometimes empty

A dash or a note such as “the agency publishes no figure for this” is a finding, not an omission. Zones without a printed county list, bag limits deferred to a separate booklet, fees that exist only inside a login-protected portal — in each case we say what is missing and where to look, rather than approximate.

The same applies to whole states and species: coverage is being built up state by state, and the absence of a page says nothing about whether a season exists.

06 — Structure as part of accuracy

A technically correct date can still mislead. Most states split a season into segments with closed weeks between them, so a single “opens” date describes the first segment only — and for waterfowl the first segment is usually an early teal or youth hunt, months before the regular duck season.

That is why our season tables name the segment beside its date, and why the hub pages state the opening date and what it belongs to rather than a bare figure. Presenting the structure honestly is part of getting the fact right.

07 — The yearly review

Regulations are set annually, so the almanac is rebuilt annually. Each record carries a review date as well as a verification date, and pages are re-read against the agency when the new season's regulations appear — not merely rolled over with the year changed.

08 — Corrections

If a figure here disagrees with your agency, the agency is right. Send us the page and the source showing the correct value — info@hunteralmanac.com — and we will correct it and re-stamp the verification date. Reported errors are the most useful mail we receive.

What this process cannot cover is set out in the disclaimer.