Do Hunters Really Need to Wear Camouflage? Here Are the Colors Deer Can See
BY Herschel Smith
48 minutes ago
In What Colors Can Deer See (and also here), we discussed cammo and colors deer can see. ODL follows up its own reporting with even more.
The University of Georgia’s Deer Lab has been on the cutting edge of most of this research, and Outdoor Life recently caught up with Blaise Newman, a PhD student at UGA who is studying how deer vision influences their behavior. Her research in the Deer Lab is being sponsored by Sitka gear, and it looks specifically at how whitetail deer use their eyes to avoid predation as they move through different landscapes.
“What I focus on is understanding how deer’s vision helps them meet their ecological needs—how their physiology helps them meet their basic needs and functions,” Newman says. “Sitka funded this project in an effort to advance everything we know about deer vision. As a camo company, it makes sense. They want to know how they can make their camouflage less detectable by deer.”
Hunters used to believe that deer were unable to see color, and that they only viewed the world in shades of gray. We can now say with certainty that deer can see color— just not in the same way that humans do because their eyeballs are physiologically different than ours.
BLUF, don’t worry about red and orange. Do worry about lack of pattern that just becomes a one-color blob. Don’t wear blue.
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