On the outdoors.

How Hunters Win At Hide And Seek

April 25, 1993|By John Husar.

As they say in the tobacco commercials-we've come a long way, baby. In this case, the gains are in the practical outdoors art of disappearing from view.

Within 20 years, we have gone from primitive World War II and Vietnam camouflage to sophisticated patterns and colors that literally blend the human form into a background of twigs and trees. When the camouflage is right-and the hunter/naturalist is motionless-animals can walk right toward you and fail to see the human form.

I learned the value of appropriate camouflage after my first three unsuccessful deer seasons as a bowhunter.

I actually thought I looked pretty good. I wore the popular military "duck cammo," the corn-colored leaf pattern found in every store. That would break up my outline, I was assured. Well, maybe so. Perhaps as long as I hid behind a screen of dead reeds and stalks in a duck blind.

But the deer never came close enough for me to hear their derisive snorts. And the ducks also seemed to have second thoughts.

I didn't start killing game until I realized I probably ought to look more like a tree in the forest than a jumbled stalk of corn. Collectively, hunters took years to figure that out.

Robert Hoague of Pancake, Texas, (there really is such a place), was at the forefront of that hard-won education. As director of academic programs at a Dallas university, Hoague was smart enough to sense an untapped market for sophisticated hunting gear in 1977. He began to toy with basic ideas. En route to founding his own camouflage clothing company, Hoague learned some surprising truths on how animals actually see.

First of all, he said in an interview at the recent Mid America Hunting and Archery Show, forget patterns rife with brown. Browns tend to coalesce into an easily recognizable humanoid block.

"Just watch a guy wearing brown cammo walk away," Hoague said. "His outline becomes more and more dense. You really can see him well from a distance."

Likewise, Hoague says, yellow and green patterns are no-nos.

"Deer see yellow, and there is something about green that makes animals wary," he said. "They see green differently than we do. Unless it's the perfect shade, it doesn't work."

Hoague fancies a lighter spring and winter cammo featuring black limbs, gray twigs and tan background, which he calls "Sticks and Limbs." He also markets one for the fall with barely recognizable leaves called "Sticks and Leaves."

"It's amazing how a lighter cammo blends with the woody background better than darker patterns," he said. "It's exactly the opposite of what you might expect."

Hoague's breakthrough came when he toyed with the old Tiger Stripe patterns from the Vietnam War. While those patterns generally involved horizontal stripes, Hoague realized actual tigers have vertical stripes.

"As soon as I painted the stripes vertically, I knew I was onto something," he said.

He began observing mostly vertical tree and shrub patterns and noticed most limbs appear darker than he realized.

Through studies of modern optical theory, he realized eyes will pick out larger limbs and ignore the background. When they also are drawn to clusters, they tend to lose sight of an overall form.

Through years of experimenting with camouflage patterns traced from photographic slides, Hoague strived to reproduce those optical illusions. He said he knew he had gotten close when he perched among some cedar trees in gray and tan and deer looked right at him and never saw him.

"I found that gray and tan can make you disappear, but it works even better with black lines in it," Hoague said.

"I'll tell you how good that is," he added. "I never bowhunt higher than four feet off the ground, and all my shots are from 6 to 10 yards."

For some reason, even when other people can observe hunters dressed that way in cedar trees, animals can't, Hoague said.

"To them, the human form disappears," he said.

Hoague said camouflage clothing was not developed properly until manufacturers of leading brands discovered they could make money by franchising their patterns for a variety of products.

"Before that, it was a catalog sort of business," he said. "There were manufacturers who didn't even want their stuff sold in stores."

He tips his cap to marketing breakthroughs by Jim Crumley's Trebark brand, which features a dark, dense woodland pattern. Then came Spartan Realtree and Haas' Mossy Oak, now followed by Hoague's Modern Camouflage of Dallas.

"All of the big brands have had imitators," Hoague said. "But the worst thing for camouflage was those firms that came out with clothing lines designed by a bunch of New York artists who didn't know conservation and never got into the woods. They may make beautiful prints, but they have nothing to do with the way an animal sees things in the woods."

Hoague thinks camouflage is on the threshold of further revolution, chiefly in the obscure area of "binocular rivalry." This involves the optical illusion arising from two completely different patterns, such as those ocular dot patterns in which an image or message can be hidden.

Hoague is experimenting with a unique pattern method that resembles leaf clusters at 20 yards away. Clothing along those lines may be a season or two away.

Meanwhile, bowhunting experts such as Fred Lutger of Freddie Bear Sports in Tinley Park advise camouflage purchasers to be selective.

"Some things on the market aren't worth anything," Lutger said. "A lot of stuff that was popular now is obsolete. Why, if I had Tiger Stripe in my store nowadays, the only thing I could do with it is mop up the floor."