Brad Harvey: Make sure your camo is working

Ever noticed that hunters can be sold anything if you can convince them that it’ll improve their chances in the woods?

I’ll admit it, I’m a sucker for any product that convinces me that it can be the difference for me. After all, like most hunters, every minute that I get to spend in a treestand is extremely valuable and the more productive those limited hours are the better.

During the years there have been tons of products introduced to the market that made all kinds of guarantees. There have been thousands of deer calls introduced that made all kinds of promises, scent reducing spray products that do work, hunting clothes that are supposedly so scientifically advanced that they won’t let a deer smell you even if he’s in your lap and, the granddaddy of them all, camouflage patterns.

The idea that hunters just had to have the best looking camo pattern on is a fairly new concept. It was the mid-1980s when the two major players, Mossy Oak and Realtree, burst onto the scene with their first offerings that looked nothing like old military camo.

Instead of blobs of drab colors that looked like big paint splatters on the material, these companies gave us designs that actually looked like the woods where we were hunting.

Hunters across the country immediately began to believe in them and today it’s considered to be of the utmost importance to be covered from head to toe in the proper camouflage.

Have you ever wondered just how much that really mattered? After all, many a deer were taken over the centuries by hunters who wore no camo at all.

A little more than a year ago, researchers at the University of Georgia’s Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources released their findings from the most recent study of just what deer see.

This has always been a subject of much debate since it’s hard for us to comprehend the actual difference without, well, seeing it for ourselves and that’s impossible.

A deer’s vision is different than ours and I’ve written on the subject in the past. To put it simply, both our eyes and theirs contain specialized nerves called rods and cones that make vision possible, and color is interpreted by photoreceptors.

Deer, however, have far more rods than we do, which helps with their low light vision, while we have more photoreceptors that give us a greater appreciation of colors.

Deer eyes also have one feature that we don’t, and it’s called a tapetum.

This reflective layer is what causes their eyes to glow so brightly when your car’s headlights hit them but that’s obviously not its purpose. The tapetum allows light entering their eyes to bounce across the rods and cones a second time, giving them even better night vision.

With human eyes, we have three types of photoreceptors that allow us to see the three wavelengths of light: short, moderate and long. Deer, on the other hand, have only two types of photoreceptors which mean that they mainly just see the short and moderate wavelengths.

This results in vision that lets them see blues very well, but not be able to differentiate much between reds, orange and green. They also see yellow well but don’t differentiate color shades in the same ways that people do.

What this all means is that you definitely don’t want to be sitting in your stand wearing blue jeans, as it will result in you sticking out like a sore thumb to every deer in the woods.

We all know that blue is not a color that’s typically found in a tree.

Subtle changes of color in whatever camo pattern you wear won’t be interpreted by a deer’s eyes so patterns that create hard lines of dark tones against lighter tones would tend to work better at breaking up your outlines.

Deer also excel at seeing UV light. Most of the laundry detergents in the grocery store include UV brighteners to make our clothes look better, but they work against us in the woods.

They actually make us glow to a deer. Always wash your hunting clothes in a detergent that doesn’t include these brighteners. There are many brands made just for hunters that do a great job.

More than anything else, deer can see movement and that’s what busts us most of the time.

Like the wild turkey, which is legendary for their ability to detect even the slightest bit of motion, deer will pick up on anything that moves, so paying attention to everything you do in the treestand is a must.

If you haven’t given much thought in the past as to how a deer sees you, you might want to start. Having a good understanding of their abilities and dressing accordingly might be the thing that really does up your game in the woods.

This story was originally published September 22, 2015 at 11:49 AM with the headline "Brad Harvey: Make sure your camo is working."