Solunar Tables – text
About the Column
For more than 50 years, an indispensable guide for sportsmen across the country.
Bio
"The Original John Alden Knight Solunar Tables"
"Solunar Tables," one of the longest-running, non-comic-strip features in existence, started in 1934 with a man and an idea. The late John Alden Knight coined the word "solunar," combining "sol" (sun) and "lunar" (moon) to designate his annual schedule of the daily feeding times of game and fish.
Solunar periods, major and minor, designate the three or four periods of each day during which wildlife activity is the greatest. The major periods sometimes last longer than three hours; the minor periods, about an hour.
Outdoors enthusiast have found the tables invaluable in helping them plan well enough ahead so that they can be on the scene and ready when nature's biological clock tells the fish and game that it's feeding time.
Hunters and anglers are not the only ones who have depended on "Solunar Tables" for more than 50 years. Bird-watchers, divers, plant lovers and even pet owners consult the "Solunar Tables" to find out when nature will come alive.
In the late 1920s and early '30s, John Alden Knight, an avid fly fisherman from Pennsylvania, was interested in the best times to go fishing and hunting. Like all anglers, he was aware that dawn and dusk are good times to be out in the field. However, he heard that back in the early days the then-legal market hunters didn't limit their activities to those times, nor did they spend all day in search of their quarry. Rather, they seemed to know when they should be out searching for game.
Knight believed those times -- which were referred to as "odd hours" because they could be in the middle of the day, midmorning, whenever -- were somehow linked to the position of the moon.
Knight's theory was unorthodox for its time. To test it, he befriended the grandson of one of the most successful market hunters of his day, who explained his ancestor's methods.
Knight then kept voluminous and meticulous notes for several years. Observations in the Northeast, Midwest and Southwest made it clear that the basic theory was applicable anywhere and, furthermore, was applicable to all forms of wildlife.
Today King Features Syndicate distributes daily "Solunar Tables," tailored to particular geographic regions and time zones. More than 200 newspapers subscribe.