Henry Windmill Ranch · Montezuma County, Colorado

The Windmill Eye

Real deer, real elk, almost no answer key. You call it, then Claude's call comes out of the envelope and you get to tell him why he's wrong. Nobody is grading anybody — we are building the eye the ranch cameras will use, one argument at a time.

Mule deer Photograph of a wild animal to be judged
The card — one antler, then doubled This is how field judging is actually taught, and it is the only honest thing to ask of a photograph: read the antler you can see best, and let the arithmetic double it. Put in what you can read and leave the rest — a blank is more use than a guess you would not defend.
How old is he?
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Anybody should take him. That is a call about the animal, not about your tag — so it sits on its own and rides with any of the four.
Joe's phrase — “No forks, not trophy, voucher shooter.” Worth taking, on a management voucher rather than a trophy tag. Six a year, so this is the call that spends them.
The one you drive to at daylight on opening morning, before you look at anything else.

A dink or a young one needs nothing else — one tap and on to the next. The other two are worth the numbers, so they still want the call below.

Anything the four buttons don't cover, in your own words — a limp, a broken beam, where he ought to be, who ought to see him, what you would do about him. Optional, and it rides along with a dink too.

His card, and yours

Every bar is one measurement he committed before you looked. Drag the ones he has wrong. You do not have to touch a bar you agree with, and you do not have to touch them all.

Which part is he misreading?

Not the total — the piece. Tap the part and say whether he read it long or short. A total says he was wrong on this animal; a part says what he will get wrong on the next one.

Anything else

Put your own animals in front of everybody. Take the picture or pull it out of your camera roll — a trail camera card, a phone photograph off the glass, whatever you have. Your name goes on it wherever it is shown.

The photograph Ears in frame if you can. That is the ruler everything else is measured against.
What is he
Anything worth knowing Where and when, which camera, whether you know this animal. Optional.

What happens to him

He does not go straight into the deck. Claude has to look at him and write his own sealed call first — score, age, and why — before anybody scores him. If he saw your numbers first the whole thing would be a quiz instead of a disagreement. Once that is written he joins the deck for everybody, with your name on the picture.

The rest of this page asks how big he is. This asks a different question, and it is the one the ranch actually runs on: could you tell these two apart if they walked past the same camera a week from now?

Straight with you about what these two pictures are

Every pair you will be shown here is two different animals. Not a trick and not a test — there is nothing else it could be, because nothing on this place has been photographed twice yet. So you are not being asked to spot a match.

You are being asked what you would look at. When the cameras go up, the thing that decides whether a buck gets his own file or gets folded into another buck's is exactly this — and the mistake that cannot be undone is calling two animals one, because that destroys both their files at once. So the honest answer “I could not separate these from pictures like these” is a button here, and it is worth more than a guess.

What tells them apart Tap everything you would actually use. Your own words go underneath — that is where the buttons come from.
In your words
At a camera, a week from now

The last one is not a wrong answer. It is the most valuable thing you can tell us, because it is the mistake the register cannot recover from.

Everything else on this page is one opinion against another. A rack you can put your hands on is the only thing here that has a right answer — so this is where the answers come from. Twenty minutes with a tape turns a wall mount into the first fixed point this project has.

Why it is worth the trouble

Nobody in this exercise has ever been graded against truth — only against each other and against Claude. One measured rack anchors the whole scale: it says who runs high in inches rather than in disagreements. Five of them and every estimate anybody has made can be corrected.

What is he, and whose is he

The photographs

Take these properly and the pictures become measurable themselves, not just something to look at. Five rules, and the first two matter more than the camera:

  • Put a ruler in the frame, at the same depth as the antlers. A folding rule, a steel tape pulled out and taped across the beams, or a sheet of ordinary letter paper (8½ by 11, exactly) leaned against them. Without a scale in the picture no photograph can be measured, only admired.
  • Stand well back and zoom in — eight to ten feet, not two. A phone held close is a wide-angle lens, and a wide-angle lens makes whatever is nearest the camera bigger. That single mistake is worth more error than everything else here combined.
  • Camera at the height of the middle of the rack, lens square to it, not looking up or down at it.
  • Flat even light, no flash. A flash blows out the tips and the bases, which are exactly the parts being measured.
  • Plain background — a wall, a sheet, the side of a truck.

The tape

Every disagreement lands here. This is the list John and Claude actually work from — a correction, a rule of thumb, or a feature nobody had thought of yet.

The rule that makes this worth playing

Claude wrote a call for every one of these animals — a number, an age, a weight, and a paragraph of reasoning — before this page was published and before anyone saw it. Those calls are sealed into the page and they do not move. He is not scoring you against a key he already holds. One bull in the deck was officially scored after he was taken, and his card says so before you call him; every other animal here is a photograph of a wild animal nobody ever put a tape on.

So the comparison is honest in both directions. You are both guessing from the same picture. The only thing either of you can be measured against is what everyone else says — and when a group of people who have spent their lives looking at these animals all land in the same place, that is the ground truth, and Claude's distance from it is his error, not yours.

What each question is for

What happens to your answers

Sample photographs are marked on the picture and kept out of every number here. They are there so a new group can be opened before anybody's own pictures arrive — judge them for fun, but they do not move your average, Claude's, or anybody's.

They are kept under your name on the ranch's own board, so every call you make is your record and stays yours — nobody's answers are averaged into anybody else's. They are also kept in this browser, so a bad signal costs you nothing and syncs when you are back. The disagreements go on the list John and Claude work from. Nothing here is connected to a camera, a licence, or a season. It is a calibration exercise and nothing else.

The photographs are free-to-use reference images of wild mule deer and elk, collected for this exercise. Anything carrying a photographer's watermark was left out, along with the harvest pictures — wrong tone for what this is.