There are many looks to hunting season, many small nuances which will tip-off an astute individual that it’s that time of the year.  Shotguns in the window racks of pickups.  Big decoy and ammo displays in sporting good stores.  “Welcome Hunters” signs the size of railroad cars plastered onto any liquor establishment with enough surface area to hold the banner without sliding off its foundation in a strong wind. 

One of the most obvious ways is the increased appearance of “camouflage” clothing.  This is a tool of great help in keeping you hidden from deer, turkey, snipe, waterfowl, antelope, elk, wives and various and sundry salesmen who come to your door (even though you should remember they’re only doing their job.)  Camouflage can also help you in hunting for compliments and members of the opposite sex.  These last two, however, while using the same basic premise, require different applications.  These should be covered later…and by a different writer.

Camouflage is actually a French word meaning “the art of dressing like a tree”…I think.  Modern usage as a verb means “to look stupid in the mall.”  Since this is a quite common pastime in malls across America, camouflage fits right in, so to speak.  To be truthful, several years ago I thought I had missed the beginning of hunting season altogether, until I figured out that “camo” was the fashionable style that week.  A point to keep in mind is to watch whether the total ensemble makes tactical sense.  In other words, camo shorts and shirt with a red leather vest, yellow stocking cap and white Nike’s is probably a fashion statement.  Another thing to look for is rank insignia.  Using the “frequent camo” method of hunting season recognition takes a more discriminating eye if you live near a military installation.

In truth, camouflage can be any shape, form, color or gender which would break up the lines and hide the true nature of an object.  Actually, I threw that last one if for fun, but I guess it could be used if you were trying to crash a N.O.W. meeting or attempting to get into the women’s locker room after a championship mud wrestling tournament.  Purely for journalistic reasons, mind you.  To do so for any other purpose would be unethical and I would not suggest such a thing – as a matter of fact, let’s just pretend I didn’t and forget the whole thing.

Where was I?  Oh, yes!  Early Native Americans, say, really early ones that got up before sunrise, used camouflage long ago.  Of course, they didn’t call it that.  The many different tribes had different names for it.  Translated roughly, it meant “acquiring dinner,” and it was just part of a larger process.  These Native Americans would use many different things for camouflage including domesticated animals, animal skins, stalking screens and even decorative, brightly colored paints.  The most effective method of hunting camouflage they developed was the stalking horse.  The hunter would approach the quarry hiding behind a grazing horse, careful to keep behind the legs of the animal.  It was possible to stealthily approach the rocks in this manner – after all, that’s mostly all there is in a quarry – rocks.  This did, however, work equally well with real game.  So effective was the stalking horse method of camouflage that it is now outlawed for waterfowl hunting by federal statute…Honest.

Another technique employed was the stalking screen, a thatch screen or some type of brush the hunter could hide behind while sneaking up on the animal.  In this way the animal sees only innocuous, non-threatening items.  Care has to be taken to approach only when the animal is looking away.  This makes sense because, at least I would think an attacking bush would be more intimidating than a hunter ANY day.

The animal skin method is already well known and is even part of the English language in the form of the saying “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”  While this works, it has fallen into disuse in modern times.  Probably because it would be imprudent to throw a deer skin over yourself and wander around with other deer in the field during hunting season.

Even the Native American use of paints helped to hide them by breaking up the human form.  This method was used with some success for camouflaging merchant ships from submarine attacks during World War I.  I don’t mean they painted up the crew in war paint or that they hired Native Americans to run the ship.  What they did was paint the ships in strange geometric patterns of lines and blocks.  The ships would then blend right in with the brightly colored, geometrically shaped islands which everyone knows dot the Atlantic…

Don’t even pretend to believe that!  Actually any pattern besides that of a ship made it difficult for the eyeball-aimed-torpedo-shooters of World War I to gauge the speed and distance of the merchant ships, thereby making them harder to hit.  Today’s computerized targeting systems don’t fall for these tricks, although sometimes very large oil tankers will fall for the “land-camouflaged-as-water” ploy, especially Alaska or Norway or some other northern locale.  This is why we have these huge oil tanker accidents in these areas.  I think the close proximity to the North Pole causes all those lines of magnetic force to get tangled up in the navigational wiring or something.

During World War II the use of camouflage became more intense due to increased aerial surveillance (looking) and attacks (bombing stuff).  Later military action (which were not wars, no matter what they seemed like while dodging small arms fire) promoted further development of these techniques due to increased guerilla warfare.  Many of the soldiers exposed to these tactics brought the advanced methods of camouflage home to use in the field of hunting…or in the field for hunting.  Either-or.

This brings us to the commercial development of modern camouflage.  Originally, any clothing in an olive drab color was considered camouflage enough, and it’s true that anyone wearing an outfit in this color becomes virtually indistinguishable while standing next to a convoy of trucks painted the same color.  The consistency of one color, however, does little to break up the specific outline of the human form.

The next step was the standard of large areas of multiple shades of green, or the “camo” design which most people picture when the word is mentioned.  This pattern became very popular.  People used the design for all their hunting related equipment from firearms to coolers.  Some of them even painted their vehicles with this motif.  If you’re a hunter,  I don’t recommend this unless you are adept at patching small holes in metal, glass repair or other useful aspects of auto-body mechanics.

I do know a man, an ardent hunter (read: obsessed), who painted his whole house, below the shingles, with the standard camo-pattern.  He even had olive drab curtains and draperies.  He was quite proud of his small, stucco duck blind set on a corner behind a few trees and when he was finished on a Saturday afternoon he went downtown to tell everyone about it.  All of the conversations he initiated had two things in common:

1)     The camo house

2)     Beer

After he had talked to everyone he could find and closed all the local pubs in the small town, he walked the streets all night looking for his house, spending the last few hours before dawn (and most of the AM) in a liquefied state on a cot in the jail house.  He has since painted the house pink with white shutters.  His pickup, however, remains to be found.

          Anyway, since then there have been further commercial advances in the realm of personal camouflage.  Now, for example, you can purchase clothing and equipment which will blend into any environment:  snow, lightly colored fall foliage, desert sand and finely patterned trees or bark.  These advances themselves have caused a new problem.  In countryside full of defenders with guns who are looking to repel the aggressors, blending into the surroundings is a good thing.  In an area swarming with armed personnel not specifically out to shoot you, looking like a chokecherry bush can be, uh, detrimental to your continued well being.  As the quality and use of camouflage clothing has increased, accidental shootings have increased proportionately.  This means people who were well proportioned got shot more often…I think.

          Whatever the problem was, there was a problem (it’s hard to argue with this type of logic, isn’t it?).  Eventually, after much thought, consideration and pressure from the boss to revive the floundering personal camo market, an informed someone came up with a most wonderful idea:  Since most all big game is color blind, why not impose a camouflage pattern on something safer.  Say, a color which does not occur in nature, like – BLAZE ORANGE!

          Those of you who are color blind yourselves or even totally blind can recognize this color by its sound.  Yes, scientifically this color causes such a wide range of light vibration that it actually transcends into the audible vibratory range.  This is a wonderful invention for use in being seem by people who are sporting shrub shooters.  I call this bright orange pattern “Camo-flag”, since it attracts attention and has drastically reduced the incidence of accidental shootings, while not having a substantial effect on the big game harvest.

          Now, it’s true that camo-flag doesn’t work with turkeys, a prey which is not color blind.  Camo-flag is not generally used in archery hunting, either.  For this you need a complete camouflage outfit including gloves, headnet and dull boots…all in NEON GLOW GREEN!

         Welcome to Naturalist’s Corner.  Today we’re going to talk a little about fall.  Actually there’s nothing much you can do about a fall after it’s started – once you’ve lost your footing you’re pretty much under the jurisdiction of the laws of physics until you land.  So the best way to deal with fall is just to watch where you put your feet.

          Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way and since we still have some space left to us, let’s talk a bit about autumn.  Autumn is that time of year, which precedes winter in the seasonal schedule.  It gradually moves us from the sweltering heat of summer to the crisp days of frozen fan belts.

The official start of fall is heralded by the autumnal equinox which takes place on September 20 or 21 – depending on whether it’s a leap year, what day Easter is on and adjusting for the Congressional Monday Holiday Bill.  At any rate, the equinox is that day which is made up of nearly equal parts day and night…along with a bit of dawn, a smidgen of disk and just a dash of salt to taste.  This phenomenon occurs twice a year; once in the spring as the days get longer and once in the autumn, as the days again grow shorter.  This is described in its name by the Latin words “equinox”, which means “equal night” and “autumnal”, which means, um, autumn.

Fall, however, is not so much a day on the calendar as it is a time of the year.  It is a transitional season, which begins on that first cool morning you have to wear your jacket out of the house.  Followed by that second cool morning when you have to remember where you left your jacket since you had to drag it along after the temperature shot up to 85 degrees by 10:00 A.M.  Yes, autumn is not a definitive season like summer or winter but a time of change.  It is a gray area, which is not really warm and not really cold but rather a slipping from one to the other.  In truth, autumn was never really considered a season in past societies…that concept was invented and initiated by snowmobile dealers and snowblower salesmen in order to have a basis for pre-season sales.

Autumn sees the leaves drop from the trees and the temperatures slip downward.  Frosts begin to settle and plants droop.  Eventually the snows will drift to the ground.  What do all these things have in common?  They’re all FALLING, get it?  Leaves FALL.  Temperatures FALL.  Snows FALL…  Oh, sure, the leaves turn brown and plants turn brown so it could have been called brown instead of fall, but temperatures are not brown and snow isn’t brown – except in some highly industrialized areas and in the case of volcanic activity.  Anyway, this change is so dramatic we call the season fall.  Besides, it’s easier for kids to spell than “autumn” – where did that “n” come from, anyhow?  What’s the purpose for that?

The shortening days and the cooling temperatures come about at this time of year because of the position of the earth in relation to the sun.  At this time of year the planet, in its journey around the sun, tilts on its axis.  This can be understood by driving your car down the highway and around a curve at, say, 80 miles an hour.  You will notice as you drive around the arc that your car will lean heavily as you follow the road to the next straightaway.

On second thought, don’t try this on your own, since you may slide into the ditch and cause $3464.83 damage to your vehicle.  Anyway, you can see by this experiment that the planetary tilt is simply caused by the earth coming into a really sharp turn as it races around the sun.

This slight tilt our home experiences causes the light from the sun to strike the Northern Hemisphere at a less direct angle, thereby allowing less energy to reach the Earth.  This could be more easily understood by imagining the amount of collision energy exerted on a car by driving straight into a row of fenceposts at, say, 80 miles per hour, which might totally wreck a vehicle beyond repair.  By comparison, the same vehicle at the same speed sliding into the fenceposts at a less direct angle, like from off a curve, would receive only $3464.83 in damage.  That is kind of why it gets cooler in the fall – because nature can’t drive.

The smaller amount of daylight experienced in the fall is also attributable to this same tilt of the Earth.  Because of the new angle, the sun rises above the horizon later in the morning and sets earlier in the evening.  Another reason contributing to this effect is governmental intervention; that is, the change from Daylight Savings Time back to Standard Time.  What this encompasses is removing the hour of daylight they tacked onto the end of the day in the spring.  Then they send it to the Southern Hemisphere where they got it from in the first place – and that’s why the length of the seasonal days is varied in the different hemispheres.  It’s some kind of hemispherical, international treaty thing.

Finally, the cooling temperatures and the shorter days combine to cause the most dramatic transformation of the season – the changing of color and the subsequent shedding of leaves by the trees.  What causes this theatrical display?  Seems to me that the trees would want to keep covered in the winter to keep warm and shed in the spring like mammals.  But then trees are not mammals, which is a good thing or we would all be raking up clumps of fur in the spring instead of leaves in the fall and the darn stuff would blow all over the place and you couldn’t wear any dark sweaters or light jackets ‘cause the hair would be all over and…well, you get the idea.

Let’s get back to the leaves and that color change and falling thing they do.  These steps are taken for the purpose of water conservation.  It seems that in the winter the freezing of the soil reduces the supply of moisture to the roots of the trees.  To experience evidence of this, simply stick a straw into an ice cube and suck real hard.  See what I mean?  Anyway, since leaves have a large surface area they loose a great deal of moisture to evaporation.  In an attempt to avoid fatal dehydration, the tree, signaled by a combination of shortening hours of daylight, cooler temperatures and Christmas decorations in department stores, creates a barrier of cells where the leaf stem joins the twig.  This slowly causes the leaf to starve and die.  The attachment to the twig weakens and the leaf eventually falls to the ground…  In effect, the tree strangles the leaf and flings it from the branch.  Fickle, isn’t it?

Scientifically, the color change occurs from the same action.  Deprived of nutrients and moisture, the leaf can no longer form new chlorophyll.  As the old chlorophyll breaks down, the green color disappears.  The leaf then takes on the red, orange and yellow colors, which were always present but were masked by the green of the chlorophyll.

Besides, if somebody strangled you, you’d turn pretty colors, too.