Nova Scotia hunting seasons

Every boundary in Hunt traces to the authority's own published GIS. A drawn boundary is not a claim that rules inside it are certified; each species page says unit by unit which are.

• Eight species answer from six codified instruments: white-tailed deer, moose, black bear, snowshoe hare, ruffed grouse, coyote, red squirrel and crow, in 11 rules certified for 2026. Every encoded season is province-wide in the regulation's own words — Deer Hunting Regulations ss. 10(4) and 11(4) say taking deer under either stamp "is not restricted to any specific deer management zone" — so the zone governs the animal class and the stamp rather than the dates. Everything else Nova Scotia permits is UNKNOWN.
• Ring necked pheasant is the one Nova Scotia season written geographically, by county, and it is NOT encoded: the province publishes no geographic county polygons. Three candidate datasets were tested — one returns boundary LINES with no name field, one returns 49 features with empty properties and is municipal rather than geographic counties, and the province's ArcGIS boundary folder has no county service. Mapping the rule onto the deer zones would invent a boundary, so it stays unresolved.
• Bullfrog and porcupine have real entitlements under General Wildlife Regulations s. 3 and neither is in the species catalogue, so rules for them would be refused as UNVERIFIED. They are species-lane requests.
• Six hunting prohibition orders under Wildlife Act s. 21 are in force with NO PUBLISHED TEXT — the Registrar marks them "(no text)". In six named localities North Ground knows a prohibition exists, knows its citation and county, and cannot read its terms or extent. This is the one case where "no restriction found" would be a false negative where a restriction is known to exist, so it is a standing limitation on every answer.
• Legal hunting hours are certified as a rule and not as a clock: General Wildlife Regulations s. 11(3) defines sunrise and sunset as the values tabulated in Schedule A for Yarmouth, Halifax and Sydney in Atlantic Standard Time, with no interpolation formula. North Ground has not transcribed the table and will not substitute its own astronomy, so no exact window is offered.
• No moose or bear geography: the province licenses only its deer zones as open data. Its moose zones appear solely on the Provincial Landscape Viewer's ArcGIS service, which carries no licence of any kind, so North Ground holds no Nova Scotia moose boundary and draws none rather than showing deer zones under a moose answer. This is a licence finding, not a missing ingest.
• Management zones are species-specific, so the usual one-zone-per-point model does not hold here.
• This page describes sport hunting seasons. It does not describe harvesting under treaty or Aboriginal rights, which is a separate legal context North Ground does not evaluate.

• Deer Hunting Regulations, N.S. Reg. 239/2013 · Government of Nova Scotia
• General Wildlife Regulations, N.S. Reg. 205/1987 · Government of Nova Scotia
• Nova Scotia hunting regulations · the authority's own hunting page

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