See This Season's Cutblocks: Recent Satellite Imagery for Canadian Hunters
The satellite view in most hunting apps is years old. Use Sentinel-2 imagery from the last few weeks to spot new cutblocks, burns and roads before you go.
The Satellite Map Is Older Than You Think
Most hunters treat the satellite view on their phone as a picture of the ground as it is. It is not. The high-resolution imagery behind Google, Apple and Mapbox satellite maps is assembled from photographs taken over several years, and across rural Canada the tile you are looking at can easily be three, five or more years old. In a city that barely matters. In working forest it matters a great deal.
A block that was logged last winter is standing timber on that map. A burn from this summer is green. A new haul road that now runs to the edge of the ridge you planned to walk in on does not exist. You can do every part of your pre-season satellite scouting properly, find the funnel, the bench and the feeding edge, and still drive in to find the whole slope has been cut to stumps since the photo was taken.
The fix is not a sharper photograph. It is a more recent one.
What Sentinel-2 Is
Sentinel-2 is a pair of Earth-observation satellites (now three) run by the European Space Agency under the European Union's Copernicus programme. They photograph nearly every piece of land on the planet on a repeating cycle, and at Canadian latitudes a given patch of ground is photographed every few days. The imagery is free and public, which is why tools like this can exist at all.
The trade-off is resolution. Each Sentinel-2 pixel covers ten metres by ten metres of ground. That is far coarser than the satellite basemap you are used to:
- You will not see a single tree, a trail, a treestand, a tote road through the bush or a truck parked on a landing.
- You will see anything that changes a large area of ground: a cutblock, a burn, a new road, a flooded beaver meadow, a field that was cut or left standing.
A typical 200-metre cutblock is twenty Sentinel-2 pixels across. It is unmistakable. A fresh cut shows as bare ground against green timber, and its road spur usually shows with it.
So think of Sentinel-2 as answering a different question from your normal satellite map. Your satellite map answers "what does this ground look like in detail?" Sentinel-2 answers "what has changed here lately?"
Why Recent Change Matters to a Hunter
Change is what moves animals. The things Sentinel-2 shows well are exactly the things that rearrange a hunting area from one season to the next.
Fresh cutblocks. A block logged this year removes cover and changes travel routes almost overnight. Deer and moose that bedded in that timber have moved. Within a few years the same block becomes a browse factory as it regenerates, and it becomes one of the best places on the landscape to glass. Knowing the age of each cut on your map tells you which is which.
New roads. A new haul road means new access, for you and for every other hunter with a truck. Ground that was a long walk from the nearest road last season may now be a short drive, and the hunting pressure follows.
Burns. Fire resets habitat. A recent burn is open, black and often unproductive the first season, and then greens up with the kind of new growth moose and deer seek out. A burn you did not know about can also close access or make a planned route impassable.
Water and fields. Beaver activity floods low ground, and farm fields change from standing crop to stubble. Both change where animals feed and how you approach.
None of this replaces walking the ground. It tells you where to walk.
How It Works in CANhunt
In CANhunt, Sentinel-2 is a map provider. Open Map Style, choose Sentinel-2 instead of Mapbox, then pick Satellite or Hybrid. You keep the full satellite basemap underneath, and the most recent clear Sentinel-2 pass is drawn over it.
A few details are worth knowing, because they are how the layer stays honest.
It picks the clearest recent pass, not just the newest. Clouds are the enemy of satellite imagery. A pass from yesterday that is seventy percent cloud shows you weather, not ground. CANhunt looks at every pass from the last 45 days and chooses the clearest usable one for each piece of the map, trading a few days of age for a clear view of the ground. If nothing clear enough exists for an area, it draws nothing there rather than showing you a cloud and calling it the ground.
It tells you how old it is. Under the Sentinel-2 choice in Map Style you will see a line such as "Recent imagery up to 6 days old · 0% cloud". It reports the oldest pass on your screen and the worst cloud cover, so a fresh corner of the map cannot vouch for a view that is mostly a fortnight old.
It works in a zoom range where the detail is real. The recent imagery draws between roughly zoom 10 and zoom 14 on the map's zoom control. That is the scale where a cutblock or a burn is clear, from a whole drainage down to a single block. Zoom in closer than that and the regular satellite map shows instead, because at that point it is the sharper picture of the same ground. Zoom out further and the app asks you to zoom in.
You may see seams. The ground is photographed in large squares, and neighbouring squares are often photographed on different days. Where two passes meet you may see a line where the colour shifts slightly. That line is honest: those two pieces of ground really were photographed on different days.
It Needs Signal
Sentinel-2 imagery is fetched live, because its whole value is being recent. It is not saved into your offline maps. Out of cell range, the app tells you that recent imagery needs signal, and your map shows whatever you have downloaded.
That makes it a kitchen-table and truck-seat tool. Use it before you leave, or when you have a bar of signal on the drive in, to check whether the ground has changed. Then rely on your offline maps once you are in the bush.
A Workflow for This Season
- Scout the way you always have. Use your normal satellite map and topography to find funnels, bedding and feeding areas, as in our beginner's guide to scouting Crown land.
- Switch to Sentinel-2 and check for change. Pan over each spot you marked. Look for bare ground that was timber, black ground that was green, and road lines that were not there before.
- Note the date. The caption tells you how recent the imagery is. A block that shows fresh in imagery a week old was cut recently.
- Adjust the plan. Move stand and glassing candidates off freshly cut ground and onto regenerating cuts nearby. Rethink access around new roads, both for your own approach and for where other hunters will now go.
- Download before you go. Save your scouting area for offline use with your usual basemap, so your boundaries and marks are there when the signal is not.
The Short Version
Your satellite map shows you what the ground looked like. Sentinel-2 shows you what it looks like now, at a coarser scale, updated every few days. Used together, they close the gap between the photograph and the season you are about to hunt. In British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec and every other province with working forest, that gap is often the difference between the plan you made at home and the ground you actually find. If you are hunting Crown land in British Columbia this fall, it is worth ten minutes before you load the truck.
Sentinel-2 imagery contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data.
