Before you go
Two minutes with your hands.
Most gun dogs start the season a point heavy. Body Condition Scoring, the field version, tells you where your dog is before the season decides. One email, and it opens here.
The guide, then the Weekly Read on Saturdays. Unsubscribe any time.
The science · THE KENAI INDEX
One number for the morning.
A handler reads seven numbers at the tailgate and does the math in their head. THE KENAI INDEX does that math the same way every morning, then says it in one sentence you can act on.
Conditions for working a dog, 0 to 10. Weather-driven: a read, never a prediction.
The same morning, two ways.
First, the forecast you already have. Then what KENAI makes of it: the number, and THE KENAI READ, the sentence that tells you why.
YOUR FIELD ▾
38°
CLEAR · MORNING
H 58° · L 34°
NEXT 12 HOURS
THE INSTRUMENTS
PRESSURE ↑ RISING
WIND NW · GUSTS 14
HUMIDITY
78%
GROUND
41°
10-DAY FORECAST
NW 838°
‹ UPLAND ›
THIS IS THE MORNING.
Front rolled through overnight. Roosters up and feeding. Get the dog into the CRP early.
Every reading, and the math is yours.One number, and the sentence that says why.
An illustration, not a live reading.
What goes in.
Four weather factors, weighed by discipline. The shares below are an upland morning. Waterfowl leans on wind and the front and barely weighs scent; training leans on the conditions a young dog can learn in.
About 36% of an upland morning
Scent
How well the ground, the air, and the ceiling carry scent to the nose right now, from THE KENAI SCENT ENGINE.
Its own page: THE KENAI SCENT CEILING.About 29%
Wind
An inverted U. Dead calm pools the scent, a hard wind shreds the cone. The best of it sits around 7 to 10 mph, and gusts cost points.
Field work on detection distance, and long practitioner agreement on the shape.About 21%
Timing
First and last light, when birds move and the air sits still.
The hours around sunrise and sunset, from your location.About 14%
The front
Pressure trend and the temperature swing. A front moving through gets birds up and feeding.
Pressure here is read as bird movement, never as scent.What stays out, and why.
A standard people trust says what it isn't. These stay out of the number on purpose.
Contested
The moon
Its effect on bird movement is argued both ways. A contested factor inside a reference standard undermines the standard, so the moon stays an information card.
Standing ruling since the Index was named.By design
Your dog
The number is weather only. Your dog speaks through THE GOVERNOR, a caution on top of the number: a rest day, a hot afternoon, a long week.
Weather in the number, the dog on top of it. Never blended.Never
A guess
When a reading is missing, that factor drops out and the rest carry the number. We never fill a gap with a default.
If every input is missing, there is no number.Never
Where the birds are
THE KENAI INDEX scores the conditions for working a dog. It never claims where birds are, or that you will find them.
A read, never a prediction.How we checked it.
Before a threshold changes, the whole engine is run against a simulated season, and known mornings have to land where a handler would put them.
Simulated days of a season run through the engine before a threshold moves.
Of those days score 90 or better out of 100. A top morning is rare on purpose, so it means something.
Out of 100: where a perfect upland dawn lands. A thunderstorm lands near 30, decisively poor.
Read the morning before you load the dog.
THE KENAI INDEX is on the home screen of the app, free for two dogs. It reads the ground where you stand.