Ep. 507: Why Your Camo Pattern Matters Less Than What It’s Reflecting w/ Dr. Karl Miller (Part 2)
About this episode
Beau Martonik and Dr. Karl Miller discuss the intricacies of deer vision and its implications for hunting.
Beau Martonik sits back down with Dr. Karl Miller for the second half of their conversation, and this half is entirely about what a deer sees. Karl was part of the original work that got inside a whitetail’s eye to determine whether deer perceive color at all, and he later worked with Sitka on a camo pattern developed around deer vision rather than human vision. He starts with the hardware. A deer’s pupil opens about three times wider than ours, which alone is roughly nine times the light-gathering ability, and a reflective layer behind the retina called the tapetum bounces that light back across the rods and cones a second time to roughly double it again. The pupil is a horizontal slit rather than a circle, and it rotates to stay level even when the deer drops its head to feed, so a deer eating acorns is still watching the horizon. They see roughly 310 degrees, whereas we see 120. Then the tradeoff. Deer have no fovea centralis, they can’t accommodate for distance, and their visual acuity at a stationary object comes in somewhere around 20/40 to 20/60. Karl’s line is that they’d almost need corrective lenses to drive. What they do have is motion. Their eyes stay still and…
More episodes of East Meets West Hunt
- Ep. 508: How Hunting Less Put Them on More Good Bucks w/ Jameson Curtis and Kelly McGraw
- Ep. 506: Deer Biologist Explains Why Scrapes Peak Two Weeks Before the Rut w/ Dr. Karl Miller (Part 1)
- Ep. 505: Lee Ellis Kills a Giant Every Year in a Different State. Here’s the Pattern. (Part 1)
- Ep. 504: Building Grit, Breaking Hard Hunts Into Small Pieces, and a Kodiak Goat in a Whiteout w/ Adam Foss
- Ep. 503: A Full Season on Iowa Public Land, Self-Filming, and Knowing When to Pass w/ Joel Burham // Whitetail Fit
- Ep. 502: What GPS Collar Data Reveals About Buck Bedding | Mountain Buck Scouting Series
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