Which is proper hunting attire:
Camo or brightly colored for safety?
According to my hunter safety class, absolutely bright colors You do NOT want to get mistaken for game.
Depends on what you are hunting, and where you are doing it. Most places I know anything about require deer hunters to wear at least a specified amount of hunter’s orange. 22 square inches comes to mind, but I do not know if that is the actual requirement. Duck hunters tend to go more with pure camo, or brown.
Depends a lot on the situation. Are you hunting on public or private property? How much land and how many other hunters? What kind of game are you hunting? What kind of cover will you have?
In some states, you are required by law to wear a certain amount of “hunter’s orange” when hunting. My state (Texas) has such a law for hunting on public land, though there are some exemptions for certain game such as turkey.
I’ve only ever hunted on private property, which is a much more controlled situation than hunting on public land. My hunting party and I know exactly how many of us there are and what area each of us will be hunting. Even then, in a “crowded” hunting situation, I usually wear some blaze orange, or at least wear it whenever I’m on the move from one location to another.
If I’m hunting deer from a box blind, what I’m wearing doesn’t really matter. If I’m on a tripod or sitting on a hill, I’ll wear full camo.
Hunting turkey, I always wear full camo, head to toe including face and hands. Those suckers are really hard to fool.
Hunting dove, I’ll wear camo, but if I’m with a big group I’ll be sure to wear some orange, too. Lots of guns taking lots of shots in those situations, and they should all be pointed at the sky but you never can tell.
There’s orange camo, but I don’t have any and can’t speak to its effectiveness. It doesn’t count in some of those states that have laws regarding wearing blaze orange when hunting on public lands.
“Attire?”
If you’re going hunting (first time?) wear yourself some warm work clothes with a lifejacket-sized bright orange vest. And look where you’re aiming.
That’s true in MN. DH always wears blaze orange when deer hunting, since white-tailed deer are color blind, and not all hunters are smart about what they’re shooting.
Most mammals only have two types of cones in their eyes, so their color vision isn’t very good. (Primates like us are an exception; we have three types of cones.) To a dog, for instance, a red ball and green grass are both the same color. So prey mammals have visual systems that are much more keyed to movement. So a hunter wearing a blaze orange hat and vest who’s standing motionless may be screamingly obvious to us, but all-but-invisible to a deer (while the opposite is true for a camo-clad hunter who’s figity). So wearing blaze orange while hunting mammals makes sense: it cuts the risk of an accidental shooting considerably, while not affecting the hunts success.
Hunting birds is another story. All birds have good color vision, with a minimum of three cones in heir eyes. Some, like dusk and geese, have four cones, and their color vision is even better than ours! And many birds have visual systems which key to movement as well. Wear lots of blaze orange while hunting birds, and you won’t catch much.
There are camo patterns in blaze orange available. Here are some examples.
Solid orange. And most game animals won’t care.
(I find it amusing when hunters dress head-to-toe in camo. The detail in the Real Tree stuff is especially hilarious. It’s basically a fashion thing.)
I suspect those work about as well on birds as they do on us, unfortunately. Remember, many of them have even better color vision than we do. Blaze orange was picked as the hunter safety color because it stands out so well, so if a human hunter can be spotted by another human hunter because he’s wearing blaze orange camo, he’ll also be spotted by birds. The camo pattern will help break up the visual pattern of a human form, but the blotches of blaze orange will look unnatural, and most animals avoid unfamiliar things.
I think solid orange is better than orange w/ darker patterns. Just a guess, but when you move, an animal will be able to see the latter better than the former.
Not if you’re hunting turkey or duck, or even dove.
The OP is ridiculously vague.
Or whom…
As artemis pointed out, this is not true for birds. I can speak from much experience that full camo covering is very helpful when hunting turkey. They have excellent eyesight and are very wary. I am pretty sure that one bird I called in got spooked by a yellow logo on the bottom of my boots.
The main point is to break up your outline/shape. If you’re wearing solid orange, a deer may not see the color but it can see a large, blank, unusual shape, and that may spook it, especially if it moves. The camo pattern–even over blaze orange–helps break up that pattern, making you look “smaller” if not invisible.
That said, some situations–like hunting in big groups or on public land where you don’t know who’s out there–necessitate making sure you are clearly visible and identifiable to other hunters.
[=elmer%20fudd&filters[primary]=images&filters[secondary]=videos&sort=1&o=3"]The fashionable hunter is wearing this.](http://media.beta.photobucket.com/user/Kman0072/media/elmer_fudd.jpg.html?filters[term)
StG
Yeah, and for the deer, wearing blaze orange is okay. But in others’ links with the “orange camo,” that is theoretically much better, because even if deer don’t see the orange well, they could notice a large, uniform field and realize that it’s a possible hunter. The other patterns break it up, so they essentially see a black/brownish-yellow pattern instead of black/orange.
RealTree, Mossy Oak, and other companies are bit much, true, but they want you to buy their product so they make it “sexy.” When upland hunting, I wear surplus camo or normal color-appropriate clothes, no fancy stuff and no orange. People argue over traditional blotch vs. stripes vs. RealTree vs. MARPAT, I don’t think there’s much resolution.