The Hunter’s Moon is the full moon after the Harvest Moon, usually in October. It is the second half of the same story: the harvest brought in, the fields bare, and the bright moon turned from gathering crops to taking meat.
The harvest light, turned to the hunt
For a few nights in October the moon keeps doing what it did in September. It rises almost on time instead of an hour later, because the moon’s path still meets the horizon at a shallow autumn angle, so the early evening stays bright for several nights running. Over a stubble field with the crop already in, that light fell on open ground where deer and fox were feeding, fattened for the cold and easy to see. Hunters used the long bright evenings to take the meat that had to last the winter. The Harvest Moon fed people from the field; the Hunter’s Moon fed them from the wood.
Another name that is actually old
Like the Harvest Moon, the Hunter’s Moon is not part of the twelve-name list that American almanacs assembled in the 1930s. It is an older English name, recorded in the early 18th century, naming a real seasonal job rather than dressing up a date. The two autumn moons are the genuine survivors among the moon-names. Most of the rest, like the Wolf Moon, were tidied into a calendar much later.
The moon’s other names
The October moon has carried other names for the same season: the Blood Moon or Sanguine Moon, for the killing and the turning leaves, and the Dying Grass Moon for the year going brown. None of these is the red “blood moon” of a lunar eclipse, which is a separate thing entirely, caused by sunlight bending through Earth’s shadow.
What we are really looking at
The Hunter’s Moon is the harvest light spent a second time. The same low, lingering moon that let the farmer finish the field let the hunter fill the larder, in the short weeks before winter shut the year down. Two moons, one stretch of useful light, named for the two things it was used to do.
Image: Frederick Richard Lee and Edwin Landseer, “Scottish Landscape, Bringing in a Stag” (19th century), National Gallery. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Sources
Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.
- The Old Farmer’s Almanac / Farmers’ Almanac, ‘Hunter’s Moon’
- Sky & Telescope, ‘Here Comes the Harvest Moon’ (skyandtelescope.org)
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Harvest moon’ and ‘Hunter’s moon’
- Oxford English Dictionary (first recorded English use of ‘Hunter’s Moon’, early 18th century)
- timeanddate.com, ‘Hunter’s Moon’