Busting the Camo Myth
Why Your Camouflage Might Be Making You MORE Visible to Deer, Not Less
Every hunter knows that good camouflage is an essential part of successful hunting, given the powerful vision that deer have as prey animals. Whether it’s darker colors in early season that match the foliage, or lighter ones in late season to blend in with the winter landscapes, effective camo patterns are crucial – aren’t they?
Well, sit back and consider for a moment what “hunting clothes” meant up until the 1970s – or Google it, and look at the photos that come up. The archetypical hunter of the 1950s and ‘60s wore a heavy wool Elmer Fudd red plaid shirt or jacket with a red plaid hunting cap and solid earth-tone trousers. Did deer somehow have worse eyesight back then? Or are we getting something wrong?
The answer is complicated – and it involves first understanding the way we see the world versus the way deer see it, which is almost unimaginably different.
Humans are predators. Our eyes are oriented towards the front, and we’re very good at focusing clearly on a single point. This is what allows us to read, recognize faces, and to target our prey. Deer, by contrast, would make terrible readers, but they do have excellent peripheral vision that allows them to focus on the entire horizon all at once, without having to even move their heads.
The speed at which they process that visual information is also 4-5 times faster than ours – in some ways like the fight scenes in The Matrix, where the world moves in super slow motion, giving you more time to react to incoming threats. It’s this ability, some researchers now believe, that allows a deer to duck an oncoming arrow – and not the sound of the bow string, as most hunters previously assumed.
Some of the most ground-breaking research on deer vision has come out of the University of Georgia, which has been studying the subject in great detail since the 1990s. Among their key findings are:
Deer are dichromatic --- they only see two primary colors, blue and yellow, making them less sensitive to colors like red, orange, and green. They can’t differentiate hunter orange from other colors.
Their eyes are equipped with more rods than cones, enhancing their ability to see in low-light conditions like dawn and dusk, when they’re most active.
Deer are highly sensitive to ultraviolet (UV) light. This sensitivity means that clothing washed in detergents containing UV brighteners makes hunters more visible to deer. So, basically if you wash your hunting clothes in most normal detergents, you will actually “glow” to a deer. What’s worse, many textiles (including lots of camo) have UV brighteners pre-mixed into the color dyes to make them look crisper.
Now let’s go back to the red plaid shirts of the 1950s for a moment and ask why hunters wore them? Well, just like we wear hunter orange today, it helped them to avoid being shot. They also must’ve figured out that deer are less sensitive to red color than, say, blue. In fact, if you were to walk past a deer wearing blue jeans and a hunter orange shirt, the blue jeans would stand out to the deer in the same way the hunter orange does to you. Even a red color is hard for them to see.
Additionally, plaid has the advantage of the large black lines that break up your shape. Deer’s eyes aren’t optimized for color or detail (like ours), but for shape and movement. So, basically, if you’re wearing something (or hiding behind something) that breaks up your shape, and sitting very still, it’s probably a highly-effective form of camouflage.
If, however, you’re wearing a very detailed camouflage pattern that still doesn’t break up your shape, and you’re moving around, it’s very easy for a deer to spot you.
One of the big mistakes many hunters make is choosing camo patterns based on what we think looks good, rather than on its ability to break up your shape. To us, it might look unattractive – but it’s precisely what makes the camo so effective. Think of tiger stripes... It’s not what we’re typically looking for when we shop at Cabela’s – and yet, it’s a product of millions of years of evolution that has made the tiger one of the most successful predators on the planet.
So, should you toss out all your camo and shop at the lingerie store, instead? Well, that would be interesting and quite possibly successful. But also probably very cold and uncomfortable. One of the great things about modern hunting gear is that it’s optimized for warmth, wind/moisture-resistance and protects you from things like thorny shrubs. So, it’s not just the camo, itself, that’s useful.
And it’s also probably not going to hurt to wear camo, either – assuming you choose the right pattern for the right time of year and the environment you’re in. But don’t be fooled into thinking because you’re wearing some expensive camo outfit that the deer can’t see you. In some cases, you’re still gonna stick out like a sore thumb. But even so, that might not even matter much as long as you sit still. If you don’t pose a threat, you’re likely to be seen as nothing more than a curiosity.
And if you feel like wearing an old red plaid shirt, go right ahead. If it worked for your grandpa and Elmer Fudd, it’ll probably work just as well for you, too.