Over the years, I have gone round and round about in my beliefs regarding camo for deer hunting. I started back in the early 80’s just using whatever was at hand, mostly stuff recycled from my paintballing. I was a bowhunter, and I usually wore an old milsurp M-65 field jacket, and the deer did not seem to mind. Well, I say that, but really they were too busy snorting at me for the mothballs I packed my wool pants in to be paying attention to the camo pattern.

Over the years, I started thinking that I had to maximize my hunting experience, give myself every advantage I could, live on the cutting edge of technology. . . drivel, drivel, etc. I bought Trebark. I bought Mossy Oak. I bought early autumn, late season, treestand camo, ground camo– I’ve got trunks full of camo. I worried long and hard. I always looked for good bargains before and after season, but I always found myself adding to my wardrobe.

Back in 2001, it all started to change. That year I got my current 200 acre farm and officially moved all my deer hunting to Kentucky. Ohio was a much more bow-friendly state. KY is great bowhunting, but there are three gun seasons packed into October and November, including the rifle season. I ended up bowhunting more during seasons requiring Hunter Orange. KY requires a minimum of a vest and hat in solid orange. It got me to thinking.

First off, I had always had an aversion to Hunter Orange. As a bowhunter, I had always been able to duck it. You go to all this trouble to hide yourself with camo, and then somebody wants to put a wide patch of solid color on you. Yuck. I still had visions of myself as a pseudo-primitive. Orange just did not seem aboriginal enough. When I faced my first Youth Season at the farm, I . . . well, let’s just say I skirted the law as best I could and still afforded myself what I saw as a safe margin of visibility.

This is probably one of the few times you will find me talking about deliberately flaunting a game law. However, there it is. I did it. I meant to do it. I did it wantonly. The only reason I am telling you all is that I grew a bit that season, and I realized my error.

Rifle Season came around, and I was still skirting things. In those days, and still today I regularly wear a cotton duck Hunter Orange poncho for the opener. It’s 6X 4 feet of continuous UV-radioactive Hunter Orange. It is painful to look at in sunlight, and the first thing I would do after I got to my stand was to either hang it off a branch or fold it over the shooting rail of my stand. I felt I was being safe, but I was not wearing it.

I had little Mooseboy out with me, and we were up in the buddy stand at Heartbreak Ridge. I had the poncho over the shooting rail in front of us. A herd of deer came down and grazed right underneath the stand. The big orange poncho? They could have cared less. I managed to shoot a nice buck out of the bunch. It was the first one I had taken at the farm, and the first time my son, Mooseboy, had ever seen a deer taken. He was hooked. I became a believer right there: Hunter Orange was not a problem.

Let me fast-forward a few years. I had done a lot of thinking about that day and the days since. I still wore camo head-to-toe during bow, but threw on the orange come rifle season. Regardless of what I wore, deer regularly parked themselves under my stand.

Then the UV-Killer/Atsko thing came along. If you are not familiar with this site, I don’t want to rehash it. The bottom line is that I was asked to do a bunch of product testing of the UV Killer product by an Atsko rep, and the product fell far short of what they were touting it to be. I got to thinking some more. You can find my ruminations here on the weblog. Look up the categories of UV-Killer and Elephant repellent over there on the right, and you can read my thoughts on the matter.

Ethics

My aversion to Hunter Orange has mellowed into a grudging acceptance, and eventually a full embrace. Go back and read my piece on Hunter Ethics from last year. Hunter Orange fits into this, because whether I felt Hunter Orange is right or wrong, safe or useless, it is immaterial. Eventually I had to recognize that ethical hunting means conforming to the local laws. I was giving myself an unfair advantage at least relative to the other hunters in my neighborhood by not following the rules. Wearing it did probably increase my safety, and reduced the chance that some other schmo was going to wreck his hunting trip by shooting me.

How about the game? How about the deer? Does Hunter Orange really affect your hunting outcome? Does not wearing it have any kind of advantage? I began to doubt that it ever did.

The Efficacy of Camo

Now that brings up the efficacy of camo in general. Will dull solid colors work as well? Do we really need all this camo hooplah? Let me be honest. I had to give up bowhunting a few years ago due to a bum shoulder. I hunt with a gun almost exclusively now. However, I am still hunting out of the same treestands, and I still have about the same number of deer coming by at close range. Whether I am up in my stand with my binos scouting or decked out in Orange for the high holiday of The Opener, it does not seem to matter a whit. I do usually hunt behind a camo skirt when I am up in a treestand; all my buddy stands have shooting rails and each one gets a camo skirt made of nylap. So all the deer sees is from the chest up. Check out my entry from last year: What do deer really see? The answer is that Hunter Orange is a dull yellow to them, about the same color as a freshly turned maple leaf. I have also tried going out in my carhart brown duck bibs and barn coat. That does not seem to honk them off either. Deer seem completely unimpressed by that, so there probably is not all THAT much of a difference between a solid color and camo.

What does seem to honk them off is movement. Maybe camo can hide movement. This year I saw how that limit can be stretched. I hunted in a lot of wind all through season– 15-25 with heavy gusts. I saw very few deer from my stand, and they all seemed abnormally concerned with my treestand. Some were getting spooked from well over 200 yards out. I was scratching my head on this until I did a sit at my luxury box ground blind at Midway. Midway overlooks a pasture and at the far end, back in the woods a ways is my treestand at Campground. It did not take long to figure out why deer were giving that a wide berth. Every gust of wind had that nylap camo skirt flapping around. It was the one thing moving in the woods.

It is all about movement. Camo probably has some effect in hiding movement, but stillness beats the best camo. I encourage others to test the limits of this statement.

The Clown Suit

Back when I was tilting at the Atsko windmill, I made the boast that  I would hunt in an orange clown suit with a neon sign that warned that I was a hunter, if they’d publish the pictures of everything I killed.  Atsko did not take me up on that bet.

Clownsuit up a tree

Well, this year, I finally came across the ultimate UV-Radioactive Clown Suit. A buddy called me during the summer. He’d ordered an orange set of bibs and a quad-parka in 3X, and they did not fit. He’s let me have the whole thing for $40. I jumped at it. Roomy? Yep. I can at least fit on another layer under these things. It had a Herters label, and I figure someone had ordered them from Cabelas and then died of eye strain. Yikes! The widow had put them up on EBay.

How did the Clown Suit work? About the same as the same exact Mossy-whatzit camo bibs and quad I’ve been wearing for 10 years under the orange poncho. If the wind blew and the skirt on the treestand blew around, I had nothing. On the rare days it was calm, I was invisible to the deer.

What the Deer See

So what do they see?  I ran a pic of the clownsuit through the  color blindness simulator I mentioned a while back

http://www.colblindor.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/

The Clownsuit (how the deer see it on right)

Here’s A Note About Hunter Orange and Turkeys

I have seen guys wonder if the UV-Killer idea should be extended to turkeys. No. There is no scientific research showing turkeys react to UV. If you see your buddy this spring spraying UV-Killer on his turkey clothes, slap him back to his senses. However, the color orange seems to be the universal freakout signal to turkeys.

I wear a hunter orange cap for the Turkey Opener. That is usually when all the neophytes are out. I take it off after I get settled in to my first blind of the day. By Sunday afternoon, the goobers have all gone home, and I worry a lot less. I also carry and wear my orange poncho if I intend to hunt the edge of the property, where I could catch a stray shot from across the fence. However, this all goes deep into my gear bag before I seriously hunt turkeys. Turkeys seem to treat the color orange the way Japanese treat Godzilla. The hat and poncho are only on while I’m walking in or out. Use orange for safety, but use it wisely.

This fall, I saw a whole herd of gobblers across the field. I was in my clown suit, deer hunting from my stand. They got a peak at the orange and they ran. Just about every year I get that kind of reaction from the turkeys I see during deer season. One year, I got a spectacular show from a mixed flock that came out into the field just in front of my treestand. It was a fairly large group and the turkeys all took turns peaking around a particular cedar tree, seeing me in the stand, and then running away towards the other end of the field. Halfway there, they’d run into previous turkey and that turkey would launch his/herself into the trees, that would scare a turkey off a branch and that turkey would alight at the back corner of the field, the other hens gathering near the cedar tree and run back to where the whole thing had started and the process repeated all morning.

In another instance, I had a young gobbler come up the logging road in front of my stand. He caught sight of me in my orange poncho and started doing this crazy dance that was sort of a half-strut/ half-hiccup, finally he let out what might very well have been his very first gobble. He did this all the way past my stand and well down the road going the other side.

Bottom line: turkeys and orange do not mix well.

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