Bowhunter – September 2019

Equipment Editor

Tony J. Peterson

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T

28 BOWHUNTER /// SEPTEMBER 2019

DURING A RECENT conversation with a young hunting-in-

dustry insider, we got on the topic of camouflage. The

fellow I was chatting with simply said, “I don’t believe in

camouflage or scent control.” I don’t know how many

times we’ve gone down the road on scent control, but

there are proven methods that work. Maybe not 100

percent of the time, but definitely more than zero.

Situation-Specific Camo

HOW MUCH DO SPECIFIC CAMOUFLAGE PATTERNS AND GARMENTS AFFECT YOUR

BOWHUNTING SUCCESS? LET’S TAKE A CLOSER LOOK.

As far as camouflage, his statement

is one that echoes of the olden days,

when hunters wore blue jeans and red-

plaid shirts into the woods. They were

also hunting deer that hadn’t been

hunted much, and not insignificantly,

were reputed to rarely, if ever, look up

into a treestand.

Things have changed on that last

front, as we’ve all witnessed plenty of

times. Deer these days do look up, be-

cause enough generations of them have

figured out that one of their most lethal

predators likes to sit in trees. To acknowl-

edge that reality is to leave the door open

for the camouflage debate as well.

You could get away with blue jeans,

or even just drab solids while sitting

in a treestand. There’s no doubt that

some deer would cruise right on by

and miss you completely. But the hard-

er they’ve been hunted, the less chance

there is that they’ll tolerate anything

that catches their attention — espe-

cially mature does with a couple of

fawns in tow. You might get lucky on

a young buck, but the matriarch who

has laid claim to the timber you have

permission to hunt? Forget it.

And what about trying to employ a

ground game on whitetails? Without

camo, that’s going to be a hard “no” for

this bowhunter. The same goes for West-

ern forays as well. Maybe I’m just seek-

ing any advantage I can get, and that

it’s really only in my head. But without

head-to-toe camouflage, I don’t have a

whole lot of confidence in filling tags on

a variety of game.

This is a long-winded way of stating

that I don’t buy the argument that cam-

ouflage doesn’t matter for big-game ani-

mals. This belief was further solidified

for me last year while hunting some pub-

lic land in South Dakota. I was tagged

out, so I brought my hunting partner

Technology used to create camo patterns like

Pnuma’s Terra are helping hunters fool the

eyes of big-game animals like never before.