WHY WE MADE DESOLVE CAMOUFLAGE

We are passionate hunters and have always had a drive to find bigger trophies, make longer shots and to get closer.  So, to understand the animals better will give us the upper hand and enable us to do this. It seems that almost every hunter has a story about watching a deer on a clearing, whilst sitting dead still in the shade, down wind and hundreds of yards away, and all of a sudden that deer looks up and stares straight at them. These stories combined with the tales about UV light and enhanced vision dragged us on to the internet to try and understand the science behind animal vision and how we could improve the way we hide ourselves from hooved animals. What we found spurred us into action to make some drastic and urgent changes to the way we produced camouflage.

SCOPE AND CLARITY

Most hooved animals have their eyes located on the side of their heads. Whilst this enables them to have a field of vision that spans about 270 degrees, the clarity with which they see is diminished. This is where it gets a bit technical and theoretical depending on which study you look at. The main finding is that both the detail and clarity are reduced in ungulate vision compared to human vision. The easiest way to think of this is to imagine that deer see a blurry image, as if they need glasses.

As they don’t see fine details they identify their potential threats based primarily on outlines and symmetry. They are able to identify silhouettes of object in their sights and can detect symmetry in that of a face of a human or other predator which is facing the prey. Both elements set off a warning signal to the prey of a potential threat.

What this tells us that the detail and realism of the leaf and stick shapes in the camouflage pattern are not very important as they aren’t able to be clearly defined by an ungulate anyway. What is important, is our outline. While trying to blend into the environment we still have a very defined outline which means we are still easily detected by Ungulates. This is paramount when we think about camouflaging ourselves from our prey.

COLOUR-BLINDNESS

Almost all animal’s eyes are made up of a series of internal rods and cones. Each of these serves a function of interpreting light as shape and colour. Ungulates or hooved animals have been determined to lack the cones required to easily discern colours in the red spectrum. From this we can determine that they are effectively red-green colour-blind. This means that most shades of greens, browns, yellows, oranges and reds are all seen as one similar colour to deer. This is why hunters are able to wear bright blaze orange clothes without standing out from the natural surrounding environment. However, the other side of the colour table, blue, can be determined as extremely out of place in the natural environment to a deer just as it is to the human eye.  

ULTRA VIOLET (UV) LIGHT

UV light can most easy be thought about from our perspective as a type of glowing light. The Human eye has a built-in filter which blocks out about 99% of UV light. If that filter wasn’t in our eyes, we would see some short-wavelength colours stand out from the crowd like something shiny reflecting in the sun light. The best example we can see of UV light is when looking at neon paints or bright white T-Shirts that glow in nightclubs under black lights. Ungulates do not have this filter covering their eyes, meaning these colours in the UV spectrum glow a lot brighter, especially in low light conditions. This UV glow doesn’t occur very often in the natural environment which is why this will alert an ungulate when these UV colours are present. A lot of modern dyes and laundry products used in the creation and washing of hunting clothing contain colour brighteners which in fact are UV enhancers. This may be why experienced hunters will often swear to have had more success at getting close to deer in their old “worn in” hunting clothes.

NIGHT VISION

How animals see at night shouldn’t really affect most hunters as we can’t see ourselves. However, it is interesting to shed some light on why deer are more likely to move around at first and last light. Ungulates have a layer in their eyes called the Tapetum Lucidum which sits just behind the retina. This layer acts like a type of mirror and this is what we see when shining a light at them at night. This layer sits at the back of the eye so that any light that isn’t absorbed by the retina on the first pass, gets a chance to be soaked up on the way back out.

Because of this process deer and most other hooved animals have far greater night vision than humans. This Tapetum Lucidum layer has probably evolved to give prey animals the ability to feed at night under the cover of darkness when their predators are in bed. Unfortunately for the prey however it seems that most of their natural predators, big cats, dogs etc, have evolved to keep up and now see just as well in the dark.

THE COMPLETE VIEW

When all the elements are brought together the view looks unclear to our eyes. The important thing to consider is that although we cannot fully comprehend how the world would look through their eyes, we can use the individual aspects to draw a picture of how we can attempt to manipulate their weaknesses.

We know that details are lost and everything in the wide scope of vision is seen as shapes of colour, detected by their outline. Most yellows, oranges and reds are lost on them and are seen as different shades of greens or browns. It becomes clear that to truly be camouflaged, we must erase our outline by disrupting the ungulates depth perception using patterns and colours that they can see in the environment.

DISRUPTION VS MIMICRY