Re: color for hunting deer on Long Island & upstate
The eye is important.
Predators stare, and prey animals are evolved to pick out the staring eye. Apparently at least part of our own evolutionary makeup includes that particular instinctive attribute, because our attention is instinctively drawn to the eye buried in the background. Often it's the first part of the animal which catches our attention. It is so instinctual that usually we don't even recognize this first impression, but the autonomic nervous system draws the head; eyes and ears, to the proper direction, and that's when recognition actually occurs.
This is a 'tell', because our instinctual motion often triggers the automatic flight response from the prey. This is something hunters need to practice suppressing. Move the eyes, but restrain the head turn. Do it slowly enough so that the motion is lost in the overall motion of the background. In essence, we are short circuiting the instinctive response, replacing it with a trained alternative response. Often I can sit out in the open for hours, on the edge of the thicket, without being observed. My technique is to merge my motions with the natural motions of the underbrush. As it sways with the wind, I duplicate the frequency and amount of motion, so my image is lost in the natural motion. In this way my camoflage technique is completed, far better than if I remained rigidly still while the rest of the environment moves around me.
The hand's movement is observed as a flash of contrast against the background, triggering another instinctive attribute, picking out motion from the background.
Animals' visual acuity is often very different from ours. Many of them have eyes whose retinas are evolved for entirely different optimisations than humans. Nocturnal animals often lack retinal receptors for certain colors, allowing the retina to be populated in their place with more of the simpler black/white receptors, which are better suited for night visual perception. They see contrasts where we don't, and miss contrasts we see, and their black/white optimization spots motion more effectively.
Those colors are excepted from the visual perception and are sensed as being identical to no visual radiation, and seen as black. Orange and black are visually identical to many prey species, do not visually contrast with each other, and will only work in a breakup pattern when interweaved with colors that the animals <span style="font-style: italic">can</span> sense. For example, putting black and orange together creates precisely the same visual aspect as wearing all black.
Greg