Humans have been hunting for more than two million years. While we enjoy a solid spot at the top of the food chain today, our ancestors didn’t have it so easy. Over time, we developed tools and tactics to increase our odds of hunting success, but even in the modern world, hunting can be a humbling experience.
Prey animals evolved acute senses over thousands of years to help them evade predators, and modern hunters still have a difficult time beating those keen eyes, ears and noses.
Humans are still using our brains to help level the playing field in the wild. One company is using breakthrough science on how animals see to create cutting-edge camouflage patterns that make hunters virtually imperceptible to the animal eye.
Bowhunter wearing SITKA Elevated II pattern in frigid temps | SITKA Gear
What is SITKA Gear?
SITKA Gear specializes in high-performance outdoor clothing. Their ultimate goal is to solve the unique problems hunters face in the field, so they can “focus less on their gear and more on the extraordinary experience hunting provides.”
The company is obsessed with innovation, and they regularly use leading-edge research, technology and materials to push the hunting gear envelope. Everything they design seeks to improve hunter safety and success.
Hunters put their gear through the wringer every hunting season. Photo by Daniel Webb
A unique approach to camouflage
John Barklow is an accomplished Western big game hunter and former operations officer for the Naval Special Warfare Cold Weather Detachment in Kodiak, Alaska. To say he’s had experience with camouflage is a serious understatement.
Barklow is also the senior product manager for SITKA Gear’s hunting line of camo. In that role, he helped SITKA design several of its big game camo patterns.
However, Barklow admits that designing camouflage to fool prey animals in their natural habitats is a far cry different from designing it for warfare.
Traditional camouflage, whether for hunting or military use, has always been based on the way humans see the world. SITKA, with Barklow’s help, took an entirely different approach: They attempted to see the world through the eyes of the animals.
SITKA uses science and technology to help hunters disappear in the woods | SITKA Gear
Ungulate vision
SITKA’s Optifade was the first hunting camo developed using revolutionary research in animal vision science. To do that, the company enlisted the help of Dr. Karl V. Miller, a Wheatley Professor of Deer Management at the University of Georgia’s famous deer research lab.
Housed at The Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources on UGA’s main campus in Athens, Georgia, the lab has been conducting whitetail-related research since the late 1960s. Dr. Miller and his graduate students have authored hundreds of scientific articles and technical reports on deer behavior.
“One of our main focuses has been whitetail deer sensory capabilities - how they perceive the world through their sense of smell, their sense of sight, and through sound,” said Dr. Karl Miller in an interview for the East Meets West Hunt Podcast.
“The eyesight is something we’ve really attacked in research relatively recently. The more we find out about how deer eyesight works, the more we realize they live in a completely different world than we do.”
SITKA is one of the few companies to dig into Dr. Miller’s research when designing their hunting gear.
“I have done very little work with commercial operations in the past. We’ve been mostly academic, but SITKA does things right. They put the science behind the products they develop.”
When designing their Optifade Concealment Patterns, SITKA took Dr. Miller’s research and applied his findings to a computer program Barklow likes to call “Ungulate Vision.”
“His work over the last 30 years or more has determined how ungulates see - what colors they perceive, which colors are accentuated and which are muted. Although Dr. Miller has worked specifically with whitetail deer, he has been able to extrapolate that any ungulate will have basically the same rods and cones and see pretty much the same way,” Barklow said.
“Ungulate Vision is basically applying a filter to the picture in the shades that deer see, so that when we look at the camo in a computer picture, we can see what the deer perceives.”
Hunter wearing SITKA Elevated II pattern - late fall | SITKA Gear
What deer see
“When comparing deer sensory perception to our sensory perception, they aren’t better or worse. A deer is better at doing things that a deer does, and we’re better at doing things that people do… Deer are finely tuned to their environment,” Dr. Miller said.
Just like human eyes, whitetail eyes have rods and cones. Both are responsible for converting light into electrical signals the brain uses to process vision. Rods are responsible for low-light vision. Cones work at higher light levels and are what allows the brain to perceive color.
The fact that a deer has cones doesn’t necessarily mean they can see color,” explained Dr. Miller. “What gives the animal the ability to see color is the photopigments on those cones. We see in three primary colors because we have three photopigments on our cones - red, green, and blue. All of our other colors are mixtures of red, green, and blue because that’s what our photoreceptors are.”
“We actually went into the deer’s eyes and traced out on the cones and how many photoreceptors they had. It turns out deer don’t have three photoreceptors. They have two. So deer don’t see in three colors, they see in two.”
With only two photoreceptors, deer vision is very similar to how colorblind humans see. However, there is one twist.
“Deer have a much better ability to see blue than we do. As a matter of fact, their ability to see blue is twenty times our ability to see blue. It is very vivid to a deer,” said Dr. Miller.
Deer also see blue better, because human eyes contain a yellow pigment which helps filter ultraviolet light so it doesn’t burn the retina. The yellow pigment also filters out some blue wavelengths.
“It’s kind of like putting yellow shooting glasses on. When you put yellow shooting glasses on it increases your clarity a bit, but it also reduces your ability to see blues,” Dr. Miller explained.
“Deer took their yellow shooting glasses off. They don’t have that yellow filter. That means the blues are actually getting through the lens and getting back to the photoreceptors a lot more than they are in the human eye.”
Macro and micro patterns
There’s more to camo than shades of color. Patterns are just as important when you’re trying to trick the keen eyesight of a prey animal.
“There’s kind of a three-step process to developing camo patterns,” Barklow explained. “It’s figuring out what works to fool the animal. Then figuring out what colors you can use. And finally putting them together in a way that the contrast still meets the science.”
SITKA’s camo uses both micro and macro patterns to trick an animal’s keen eyesight. Photo by Daniel Webb
Predators that stalk their prey often evolve a macro pattern in their coats to help break up their body symmetry and outline, like the stripes of the Bengal tiger. In contrast, ambush predators often have spotted coats that use a micro pattern to help them blend into the background.
SITKA uses strategic contrast and shading to break up the hunter’s body symmetry using both macro and micro patterns in their camouflage.
What about waterfowl?
Deer, elk and moose aren’t the only animals that modern humans hunt. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2021 Migratory Bird Hunting Activity and Harvest report, there were 1.04 million active waterfowl hunters in the United States during the 2020-21 season. Hunting waterfowl and other bird species is just as popular among American hunters as pursuing whitetails.
Since ducks see differently than deer, SITKA had to adjust their tactics when designing their waterfowl camo patterns.
“There’s really not a lot of research into waterfowl and turkeys and how they see,” Barklow said. “We know turkeys see very well. We know that they see in color. There just isn’t the same extensive research that has been done on deer.”
“We took what little research we had access to and mostly looked at engagement angles,” Barklow explained. “Birds are obviously going to fly overhead, coming down at an angle to the water.”
SITKA used overhead drones to better understand exactly what the birds were seeing as they approached camo-clad hunters in waterfowl environments. SITKA’s Optifade Waterfowl Marsh pattern uses a swirling digitized pattern that exploits the vision of constantly moving birds on the wing.
The approach makes SITKA’s waterfowl patterns stand out from the competition, who mostly design their patterns as though the bird is looking at the hunter from ground level.
The human element
Developing successful hunting camo also includes appealing to a human element. Ultimately, it will be humans purchasing the gear, so balancing patterns that can effectively fool animals in the field while being visually appealing to people is a sort of tightrope walk.
Barklow relates developing camo patterns for big game hunting to military history. He has some personal and professional experience in this department, having worked with a military program that designed digital patterns for US Special Operations.
“Before the first Gulf War, the US was trying to figure out what the next desert camouflage pattern was going to be for US and NATO forces,” Barklow said. “When they did all of their research, collected samples, and finished their analyses, they realized that shades of pink were pretty good for fooling the human eye.”
Despite the research, the US didn’t deck out its service members in rose-colored camo. Instead, the US and NATO opted for the now famous six-color “chocolate chip” desert camo pattern.
Barklow credits Norman Schwartzkopf, the Allied Commander at the time, for the decision. “He said, ‘There is no effing way I am going to send my men into war wearing pink,’” Barklow recounted. “I’ve always remembered that, because even though they weren’t selling it for monetary reasons, they had to make sure that the troops felt comfortable and confident going into battle.”
“It’s the same when you’re developing a pattern for hunting.”
“Camo at some level is a fashion show,” Barklow admitted. “People want to look good. They want to feel confident.”
Quality camo boosts hunter confidence. Photo by Daniel Webb
Performance in the field
Although SITKA started its camo development using science and a computer lab, that wasn’t where it ended. The real test was how well Optifade Concealment would work in the field. That’s where Barklow realized the company had hit a home run.
“I had these experiences [wearing the camo] where I got so close to an animal that I could see the whites of their eyes,” Barklow said. “The animal wasn’t looking at me. He was looking through me. I could get away with some movement that I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to get away with in the past.”
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how many research studies or computer programs are used. When the rubber meets the road, SITKA’s Optifade Concealment patterns just plain work.
Hunter uses SITKA’s Optifade Concealment patterns to take down a buck. Photo by Daniel Webb
What the future holds
Although hunters have had plenty of success with SITKA’s camo patterns in the field, the company isn’t ready to sit back and rest on its laurels. They understand that whitetail deer are diverse creatures. With an extensive natural range, deer hunters engage these popular game animals in habitats that range from sparse, brown Texas scrub brush to thick, green Louisiana swampland.
“I think what we’ve found with the whitetail consumer is their needs depend on what part of the country they are hunting in and what time of year,” Barklow said. “So we’re trying to work through some of that and build somewhat universal patterns. We don’t want our patterns to be too specific, so you have to change patterns every month, so we’re working on patterns that can work in pretty much any environment.”