The maturation and merits of camouflage

By By Otha Barham / outdoors editor
Oct. 31, 2003
I had grown tired of tramping over blowdowns, scrambling up rocky slopes and hiking the rims of huge basins. The air at 9,000 feet elevation was thin and it was hard to get enough of it. I sat down on a big log to let my lungs catch up with the job of supplying my blood with the oxygen that my working parts were demanding.
My resting spot was on a wooded flat near the edge of what a winded flatlander might call a (bleep) cliff, but what most mountain hunters would view as just one more change in elevation. Scattered low brush among an overstory of mature fir surrounded me. I sat until my breathing returned to normal and lingered a while because my leg muscles were enjoying the rest.
Having made no attempt to hide, I was surprised to see a deer's legs approaching just 15 feet away. Only a couple of bushes screened the deer's head from my view. Instinctively I froze in place.
Antlers appeared and then the head of a magnificent mule deer buck. He was now perhaps ten feet away and had not spotted me, a dangerous predator prominently perched close enough for a handshake (hoofshake?)
Wrong species
The trophy buck was in no danger because deer season was closed and it was a bull elk that I sought. He paused, nosed a branch and wandered past me slowly without ever focusing on me.
I am sure there was a slight drift in my favor of what appeared to be no wind at all. But what I credit most with my going undetected was camouflage clothes.
In days of old, before camouflage hunting clothes, hunters had to take other precautions to avoid being detected. Candor compels me to admit that I remember those days. So I have witnessed the appearance and development of today's camo clothes. It has been so successful that large companies have formed just to produce camouflage hunting clothing; Mississippi's Mossy Oak being a world-wide leader in the field.
When camo became as essential as the hunter's rifle or bow, manufacturers rightly began making every imaginable item in camo patterns. Hunters bought flashlights, knife sheaths, watch bands and even underwear in their choice of camo patterns. Perhaps like hummingbirds are attracted to red feeders because they remind them of sweet red flowers, many hunters see camo and it speaks to cherished rewards from having been invisible to wild animals.
Personally, I want to be able to find my flashlight or skinning knife if I happen to lay it in the leaves, but everyone to his own liking. And yes, there might be a time when one might embrace invisibility during a biological duty, but camo underwear just don't look right to me.
Repeat performance
The incident with the buck noted above happened above Gore Pass in Colorado. It was repeated in a strikingly similar incident, again with a mule deer buck, in the mountains to the south that border New Mexico. And just last year I slipped to within twenty feet of a squirrel that sat watching me without missing a bite of the acorn on which he was chewing. My Mossy Oak hoodwinked his sight.
As I sat against the base of a huge oak tree in western Maryland, another turkey hunter slipped past me, his mind on a gobbler and his eyes searching his surroundings. He passed within 12 feet of me in open woods and never knew I was there.
A great horned owl, his kind known for incredible eyesight, mistook the red diaphragm elk call in my mouth for a bloody morsel of something edible He would have taken my face off had I not cut my eyes at the right time and ducked his determined dive at the elk caller. He had failed to identify my camouflaged body as being much too large for a mid-morning snack.
We hunters now take camouflage garb for granted. I for one stand up and salute camouflage. It hides us from game animals we seek. But for many of us, becoming invisible in the woods hides us from office desks or cell phones or irate customers or rush hour or monthly bills or yard work or whatever it is we need to get away from for a time. If just for a little while.