And the eyes have it

I have been obsessed with camo since I was a youngster. To the point that, for a high school art project I made a camo t-shirt. Initially I dyed the shirt brown using onion skins as a base colour. Then I tie-dyed it with a light khaki derived from green vegetables before I embossed the shirt with brown prints from a bracken fern.

The sense of accomplishment I had from making it myself, then busting bunnies while wearing it, gave me a real incentive to strive for more.

Now, as a 28-year Army veteran, I’m still playing around with different camo patterns and colours for hunting. While my old Army issued cams may work well during warfare, they don’t function as effectively as you would think for hunting.

And it doesn’t take long in the field to know there’s a problem. Many times, I’ve been on Army patrols wearing Auscam trying to be a quiet as possible - only to have birds call out with their predator alarm. A few incidents like this and a curious mind starts wondering…

I’m a scientist, so I know that birds are tetrachromats - they see four colours. These are ultraviolet (UV), blue, green and red. By contrast, humans are trichromats and can only see three colours: blue, green and red. Interestingly, humans see