Also at the bottom of the page is a link to all the landscape pictures.
Choosing the right camouflage for the landscape you hunt isn't that difficult but picking a pattern than suits many needs from one side of the country to the other can be more of a challenge.
As someone that started hunting as an adult I approached the activity with caution and started my hunting camouflage collection by visiting goodwill and purchasing mismatched realtree type cotton blend pants and tops or making my own home dyed army camo versions for a more water resistant and rip resistant set up. These patterns worked just fine for how I started.
Now that my hunting is expanding from hunts that only last one evening or morning where the comforts of society are just a short car ride away to hunts that are in far off lands where staying out in varying ranges of weather are required for longer periods of time, the more I need to think of purchasing quality hunting clothing that helps keep me out longer and was designed for hunting.
Based on hunting TV shows and YouTube videos from quality providers a number of brands are prevalent that are used by hunters many of us know. Randy Newberg, Steven Rinella, Remi Warren and Mark Kenyon, just to name a few. The brands that are show most often are Kuiu, Under Armour, First Lite and Sitka. These brands can carry some heavy price tags but most are designed to keep you out longer by being engineered for keeping us warm and dry while keeping the weather out.
With these brands being expensive and knowing that a grand or more may be needed for a full system to combat most weather situations, I wanted a pattern that would suit many of my needs from the forests of North Carolina to the sage covered mountains of Arizona or the alpine forests of Wyoming. To help determine my best option I produced an experiment of each brand and several of their current patterns by placing them in a number of landscapes across the country.
Here is a video of the experiment, watch it, fast forward it, pause it and make your own decisions. In the coming days, the images from this video will accompany this video and be available for you to view and flip through. Be sure to comment with your opinion or suggest additional patterns.
Got to the Agricultural Field Photos
Go to the the Alpine Forest
Got to the Winter Big Woods
Go to the Nebraska Grasslands
Go to the Open Rocky Mountain Forest
Go to the Open Sage Covered Mountains
Go to the Sage Hillside with Evergreen Backgrounds
Go to the Stony and Forested Mountain Top
More coming as I complete them.
You make the big assumption that animals are seeing the same thing that the humans see. In fact, the cones and cylinders in eyes of game animals differ quite significantly from the human eyes. So their color and contrast perception is very different. Take hunter orange as an example, modern rifle hunters would rarely tag an animal if they were seeing hunter orange the same way the human eye does.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment. Yes, I mostly agree that all these patterns probably fool us more than a cervid's rods and cones. From what I have read, brown, orange and green may not stand out nearly as much as blues or blue light. However, I know many hunters that have done just fine in blue jeans and a dark t-shirt. Blending in to the background is an advantage, not moving is the killer.
DeleteAgreed. Thanks for the great content!
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