By By Otha Barham / outdoors editor
September 10, 2004
Just how effective is camouflage clothing for hunters? Dove season got underway last weekend and hunters who didn't wear camo, opting instead for white T-Shirts and bright colored caps, are still wondering why doves shied away. These hunters wore items that struck the doves eyes as unusual in their feeding spots. And game animals and birds don't like unusual, which all too often means danger to them.
There are dozens of camouflage patterns around. With enough time and money, one could match his or her destination hunt area with clothing that would cause one to simply vanish there. And that is the goal; to abide in the game habitat, blending so well with the natural colors and shapes that you are unnoticed.
Wearing camouflage while hunting can be fun. Once I was sitting quietly in central Colorado, listening for a call from a wild turkey gobbler. I didn't much care whether one called because I was scrunched up against a tree being still, taking in the scenery and enjoying being out in the wilds. My hunting partner, Tom Crowe, approached from my right, tiptoeing along, eyes alert, shotgun at ready, hunting himself a gobbler.
Tom didn't see me there all camouflaged and still, and he sat down by a tree just 60 feet from me and began calling like a lovesick hen turkey. I answered him with my mouth diaphragm call without moving anything except my jaw. When his startled eyes found me virtually there in his lap, it tickled us both.
Wrong species
Another time I was sitting on a log on a high ridge where I had been exchanging wild screams with a rut-crazed bull elk. Things had been quiet for a few minutes when I heard a stick crack and slowly turned just my eyeballs to the left. A trophy mule deer out for his mid-day exercise was moseying along, nuzzling a leaf here and a sprout there, paying no attention to the big projection on the log me. He got so close I could here him breathing; perhaps within eight feet.
The big buck never sensed me and slowly wandered off to wherever big bucks spend their lunch hour. It goes without saying that deer season had not yet opened. My camo had prevailed again.
Another time I was sitting in half-grown pines in Kemper County some forty feet from a large pasture where I knew turkey gobblers liked to strut. Of course I was in full camo. No turkeys were talking so I took out my Knight and Hale crow caller (the wooden one outfitter Doug Harbour gave me) and blasted off a few loud, raspy calls. I tried to sound like a crow in distress, hoping to either provoke a gobble from an irritated tom or bring in some crows to start a melee. Quarreling crows will often coerce a male turkey into gobbling, thus revealing his position.
A lone crow came nearby and answered my pleas with raucous cries of his own. He soon made his way to the very tree under which I sat, all the while screaming alarms that would have put Paul Revere to shame. He stayed and squawked until I became weary of him and stood up to shoo him off. I couldn't have heard a turkey gobble because of this possessed crow's continuous clamor. He refused to leave.
That crow stayed around until I had to abandon my setup. Whatever he thought that moving piece of the landscape was that yelled at him and pointed a gun at him, it concerned him not one bit. He was bent on finding and defending that poor dying brother that was somehow ensnared under that tree.
Close encounter
The most incredible experience I have had with camouflage happened on a leafy ridge in Maryland where I sat in turkey woods against the base of a huge oak tree. I was so far from a road that I expected no other hunter to be around. The only one I ever saw on that ridge came trekking along toward me that morning. He was walking directly toward me and so I assumed he had seen me and was coming over to say hello and perhaps inquire as to why I too had walked so far into this remote spot.
He was getting along quite fast and was on me quickly. As the hunter stepped within an arm's length of me, I noticed his eyes were focused straight ahead along the ridge. He never broke stride, never looked down at me, never saw me! I could have tripped him for Pete's sake!
Like me, that fellow didn't expect to see another hunter that far back in the woods. And so he was concentrating on his search for a spring gobbler. But I mentally bragged to myself on my camo clothes and face paint. They must have matched the environment pretty well because I got my bird every year on that ridge.
I am a big fan of camouflage. It's fun to disappear once in a while. Hiding from some of life's demands you say? Well maybe just for a little while.