hunter becomes a normal irregularity in the landscape

Above Drawings submitted for US Patent No 5,572,823 titled "Hand Held Decoy and Hunter Shield," invented by J.R. Savaria (1996).

•••

René Bache, POPULAR SCIENCE: Pity the Poor Ducks, in the Portsmouth Daily Times (Portsmouth OH), May 24, 1919—

Duck hunters and other sportsmen in pursuit of game will no longer require "blinds" or other such means of concealment. They will wear snipers' suits instead.

The "cap of invisibility," which, when donned, rendered its wearer viewless, has figured in more than one fairy story. In the sniper's suit (as developed during the war) its miraculous function has been fairly realized.

What is a sniper's suit like? Most people have no definite notion on the subject beyond the fact that it is "camouflage" for the person. The matter, however, is easily explained, and can be made so clear that anybody may put together such a costume for his own use.

It needs no tailor's skill, goodness knows. The prime requisite of a proper suit of clothes is fit. But the sniper's suit must not fit at all. On the contrary, it must be vastly loose and baggy, not conforming in the least with the contour of the wearer. It must have no angles, for in nature angles are few.

The sniper's suit—for hunting snipe, or ducks, or what not—must be contrived and colored as to enable him to resemble as closely as possible his surroundings; to melt into them, as it were. It is made of the coarsest and cheapest kind of burlap, rubbed with mud or daubed with green or brown paint to imitate the color scheme of his immediate environment.

An essential part of it is a headpiece that can be pulled hood-fashion over head and face, the eyes of the wearer looking out through places that have been thinned for the purpose by the simple process of removing the burlap threads running horizontally. Tufts of grass or other natural vegetation growing in the immediate vicinity of the hunter's lurking place are fastened here and there to parts of his costume. He may even attach a few pebbles to it with short lengths of wire. His very gun is wrapped in a loose burlap bag, provided with a fringe of grass or leaves, leaving only the trigger and the sight free.

Now, if the hunter thus equipped were to walk about he would, of course, alarm the game. If he were merely to stand erect, he would attract attention (though immovable), because differing in form from his surroundings. But when he lies prone, and perfectly still, he becomes in appearance merely a normal irregularity in the landscape. In effect, he is invisible.

The noblest of all game animals is man. In warfare he becomes just that. During the recent conflict suits corresponding to the above description were commonly worn not only by snipers, but also by machine gunners, and by men who took part in raids across No Man's Land.

RELATED LINKS 

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness / 

FALSE COLORS: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage

CAMOUPEDIA: A Compendium of Research

on Art, Architecture and Camouflage

SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook

Native American camouflage / hidden in animal skins

Above Engraving by Dutch publisher Theodor de Bry (1591), based on a drawing by French artist Jacques LeMoyne de Morgues (c. 1533-1588), made during explorations of what is now Florida in the 1560s. It documents the use of animal skins for disguise, as described below by LeMoyne.

The Indians hunt deer in a way we have never seen before. They hide themselves in the skin of a very large deer which they have killed some time before. They place the animal's head upon their own head, looking through the eye holes as through a mask. In this disguise they approach the deer without frightening them. They choose the time when the animals come to drink at the river, shooting them easily with bow and arrow.

RELATED LINKS 

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? / Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness /  Under the big top at Sims' circus

Dan Campion / camouflage, surrealism and satiric wit

Dan Campion, The Mirror Test

At a recent book reading, I was fortunate to meet an Iowa City-based writer named Dan Campion. We had an interesting conversation, and he kindly shared a copy of his recent book of poetry, The Mirror Test (MadHat Press, 2024).

As an artist and designer, I was immediately drawn to the cover (shown here, designed by Marc Vincenz, using an image credited to Vincenz, Jake Quart and Sonia Santos), which—like the poetry it illustrates—works by a finely hewn balancing act between clarity and confusion.

Ambiguity at its finest pervades Dan Campion's wonderful poems. I myself, as an addict of clarion vision, as well as its famous subversion in the varieties of camouflage, stopped abruptly in his book at Blaze Orange, a quietly elegant comment about the irony of vision, its enablement, yet also its prevention. Here is the complete text of that poem, reprinted with the permission of its author (copyright © Dan Campion)—

Blaze orange, the opposite of camouflage,

creates a bold, conspicuous mirage

of safety, as if iridescence could

not stain with hemoglobin red nor would

it disappear completely under snow

that rushes down with vicious undertow

nor fail to stop or slow a motorist

who'll flat refuse the breathalyzer test.

We bought my blaze orange T-shirt late one year

to spare me being taken for a deer

while walking through the woods. It's comical.

But even so, at least once every fall

I pull it from the bottom of the drawer

and put it on and venture out, secure.


Only recently, maybe ten days before I met Dan Campion, I had given a talk for a conservation group, about animal camouflage, in which one of the slides I showed was that of blaze orange hunter's garb. As for Dan Campion himself, I didn't recognize the name. Only later did I realize that in fact he was the author of a book I so enjoyed, years ago, about the humorous writings of Peter De Vries (1910-1993), titled Peter De Vries and Surrealism, a must read.

RELATED LINKS 

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness /  Under the big top at Sims' circus

whyah duck decoy, whyah no chicken hunting cartoon

Above This is the cover of the October 20, 1909, issue of Puck, an American humor magazine that was founded in 1875 and continued until 1918. This cartoon was published about five years prior to the official adoption (by the French Army) of the practice of wartime camouflage. So although it doesn't use the word, it is nevertheless a portrayal of camouflage, such as the employment of decoys.

In the cartoon, two hunters armed with shotguns (labeled on their clothing as "Political Boss" and "Public Service Corporation") are concealed in the reeds on the edge of a lake, waiting for birds overhead to alight. On the water in front of them are various bird decoys, labeled "Respectable Candidates," with which they hope to lure the flocks of birds (labeled "Votes") to land. The text below the cartoon reads "They know the kinds of decoys to use."

Also see Abbott H. Thayer's Vanishing Ducks: Surveillance, Art and Camouflage.

RELATED LINKS 

Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness /  Under the big top at Sims' circus

comical British camouflaged shooting jackets in 1894

suggested shooting jackets

Above This is a Victorian-era cartoon (most likely British), published in 1894, artist and source publication unknown. The heading on the original was Comic Pictures, with a subtitle of Some Suggestions for Shooting Jackets. It has no direct connection to the article that follows below in this blog.

•••

CAMOUFLAGE IS JUST GOOD OLD BLUFF APPLIED TO WAR TACTICS: The Greeks and Their Wooden Horse Originated It, the French Developed It and the Yanks Excel at it, in Salt Lake Herald-Republican-Telegram, April 28, 1918, p. 10—

Some folk will take you clear back to the wooden horse of Troy for the origin of camouflage, and still others insist that it was first used somewhere beyond that. Then there are those who contend that it was first used in this, the Great World War.

We do know of instances where camouflage was used in the fairly ancient history of our own country, as a country or colony, and we are fairly well up on the methods of utilizing it now that it has passed through its comic supplement stage and all the comic artists have had their go at it.

The country is taking it in its serious aspect and the war department is encouraging the best thought which can be concentrated on the subject.

It has been said by teachers of the art that camouflage, simmered down and stripped of its glamor, is nothing other than the good old peacetime game of bluff applied to war tactics. If it be that, then who shall excel the American at it?

CAMOUFLAGE FOR 'ALL
In the accompanying illustration are shown only a few of the many, many means of utilizing the art in land warfare. There are countless other tricks on land and more being used in sea fighting and air battles.

The camouflaged road Is the result of hanging boughs and brown cloth drapes over a road as flies hang over a stage. Troop movements may be made over such a road in comparative safety. The big French gun In Flanders pictured here is painted so as to harmonize with a wooded background. The oddly striped tree climber may hide without great risk of being seen by aviators of the enemy, in a tree top while he does sniping or observation work. The papier mache horse being used as an intelligence or listening station appears to the enemy as a horse carcass, not a sight to arrouse suspicion in No Man's Land.

Then there is the camouflage of so wrapping a man that he appears to be a tree stump.

ABSENCE COST LIVES
The olive drab and khaki uniforms worn by our fighting men today are the outgrowth of the costly absence of camouflage ln the past. The blue uniforms worn in the Civil War were so much in contrast with any surroundings the soldiers might lave that the boys of the South could find their marks readily. And the gray of the Southern troops was little better. Both were infinitely more serviceable, however, than the bright red uniforms worn in earlier wars by the British.

Braddock's famous defeat by the Indians may be traced to the shining targets offered by the scarlet uniforms of Braddock's men for the arrows of the Indians, while the slim, brown figures of the natives blended so harmoniously with the tree trunks, the ground and the underbrush that the Britons could scarcely see where they were.

In the East have sprung up, since the war sucked the United States into itself, numerous schools for camoufleurs with official and semi-official training forces. Artists are going into the work with enthusiasm.

JUNGLE ITS ORIGIN
The American Institute of New York is beginning next month a series of lectures to engineers and painters on "Camouflage as an Aid to Modern Warfare." Lieutenant H. Ledyard Towle of the Seventy-First NYG machine gun company, an expert camoufleur and an artist and painter of some note, is to deliver the Ieclures.

In a lecture recently before New York artists, Lieutenant Towle sald:

"The Lord knows more about camouflage than any of us amateurs. Consider the lion and his tawny mane. In repose he Is a tiny undulation on the sunburnt clap; the zebra, with his stripes, lost in the shadow of the tall grasses: the leopard, with his spots, crouched for a spring amid the sun flecked leaves of a tree, who would suspect his presence? Isn't it astonishing that with such examples of the value of protective colors that we have done so little to develop the idea? The chameleon gives us the art perfectly demonstrated."

The French made the first effective use of camouflage in this war. They were the first to see that its results warranted specialization in it. After the Germans were turned back at the Marne and the lines of opposing trenches stretched themselves from the sea to the Swiss border, the fight in the west theatre resolved itself into a standoff as far as actual fighting was concerned, and the battle became one of wits. Fool the other fellow and victory was yours.

FRENCH WERE FIRST
The French withdrew from the fighting ranks artists, painters, metal workers, photographers, architects and engineers. A special corps of camoufleurs was formed. Their work has been marvelous.

The camoufleur's art has reached its apex in No Man's Land. The toe of a dead soldier's boot may house tho eye of a periscope and from the boot to a trench may run the tunnel through which the observer communicates. An old post, left standing after the wire entanglement it supported has been shot away, may have a periscope eye and a tunnel. A limp form in the uniform of a soldier enmeshed in the wire may lure comrades out to bring It in. And when they touch it they may set off a bomb which ends their quest—and their days.

The first company of American camoufleurs is encamped just outside Washington and volunteers and drafted men aro being sent there weekly from all parts of the country.

To use the words of Lieutenant Towle again:

"If the wit and technical cleverness of a few men can be the large factor in saving a regiment, then the time and trouble taken in the process of training for camouflage will have been well spent." 

RELATED LINKS    

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness /  Under the big top at Sims' circus

Sale-priced books on camouflage / free shipping

blending / assuming the look of an overturned stump

Above  Cartoon from Lilliput Magazine, date and artist unknown.

•••

Arthur Henry Howard Heming, The Drama of the Forests, Romance and Adventure.  Garden City: Doubleday, Page and Co, p. 61—

As regards trailing game, whether large or small, he [a Canadian Native American] cautioned me to watch my quarry carefully, and instantly to become rigid at the first sign that the game was about to turn round or raise its head to peer in my direction. More than that, I should not only remain motionless while the animal was gazing toward me, but I should assume at once some form that suggested the character of the surrounding trees or bushes or rocks. For example, among straight-boled, perfectly vertical trees, I should stand upright; among uprooted trees, I should assume the character of an overturned stump, by standing with inclined body, bent legs, and arms and fingers thrust out at such angles as to suggest the roots of a fallen tree. And he added that if I doubted the wisdom of such an act, I should test it at a distance of fifty or a hundred paces, and prove the difficulty of detecting a man who assumed a characteristic landscape pose among trees or rocks. That was years before the World War had brought the word camouflage into general use; for as a matter of fact, the forest Indians had been practicing camouflage for centuries and, no doubt, that was one reason why many of the Indians in the Canadian Expeditionary Force did such remarkable work as snipers.

our chef is no dub, and is good at camouflaging grub

Patent Drawings

Above Application drawings for US Patent No US2005/0081272 for a “camouflage hood assembly,” for use in game hunting, invented by Richard Dean Shaklee (2005). The hunter’s face is concealed by a suspended hood, covered with webbing, which the user can see through.

•••

Camouflage in WAR-TIME JINGLES by Men in Service, in The Blue Island Sun (Blue Island IL), damaged page, no readable date (c1918)—

At camouflage our chef’s no dub,
And every day at mess
He practices on all our grub,
With great effectiveness.

He serves a cereal, of course,
For breakfast every day,
The same would even fool a horse,
It tastes so much like hay.

The tea and coffee that is placed
Before us in that hall,
Are camouflaged so they don’t taste
Like anything at all.

And he can camouflage the stew
That’s given us to eat,
So we can’t find a gol darn clew
Of any kind of meat.

On his efficiency I would bank;
Today I tried to take
A bite of solid hickory plank,
Disguised as sirloin steak.

While camouflage may be an art,
We possibly may need,
I’m asking you, please have a heart,
Why camouflage our feed?

When I was a boy I saw Cokes and ice cream cones

Drawings for Game Blind (US Patent 2,992,503), 1961

Byron P. Hovey, One Jump Ahead: Memories of a Yankee. New York: Exposition Press, 1982—

When four years old I moved with my parents into a large house owned by A.B. Taylor and I celebrated the change of houses and general surroundings by climbing into a two-wheeled ox cart and immediately falling from the stern to the ground, striking a stone and cutting my forehead very severely. I was said then and has been repeated by those who knew of the accident that this fall affected my brain—I yet carry a prominent scar as a result of it, but by parting my hair exactly in the middle I have managed to camouflage it.

•••

Something new is always exciting, and it is fun to look back and recall when some things started. When I was a boy I saw Cokes begin. At first, many people were opposed to Cokes, believing them to be intoxicating. But they were not. At a World’s Fair I saw ice cream cones for the first time. During the First World War, the word “camouflage” came into use. This word was a wonder to me. Radios came into use while I was young, and I recall the first time a presidential campaign was put on the air. When I was in about the fifth grade airplanes were new. In school some of us children looked at Popular Mechanics magazine one day and decided that airplanes would never be developed, as they were not practical. How wrong we were!

I recall the first time I saw a French-style telephone. I tried to use one but put the wrong end of the receiver to my ear. I can remember when electric lights replaced gaslights. I even remember the old phonographs that played cylinder records. Helicopters, modern elevators, diesel locomotives, electric doorbells—these were firsts with me also. My, how things have changed over the years—always something new and better…

•••

Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future. UK: Penguin, 1964—

The most important and urgent problems of the technology of today are…the reparation of the evils and damages wrought by the technology of yesterday.

Camouflage Artist | Anne Lemanski

Camoufleur © Anne Lemanski 2014

Above In recent days, we've been fortunate to run across the innovative sculpture of Anne Lemanski, an American artist whose representations of animals are in part derived from her knowledge of protective coloration in nature, aka animal camouflage.

Abbott Thayer would be delighted.

The piece shown here is Camoufleur (2014), and is made with vintage paper, epoxy, wood, etc. It measures 15.5 x 15 x 8.5 inches. There are many other works by her that are equally astonishing, as can be viewed on her website. See Ocelot (2016) and Tiger Target (2016) below.

All works copyright © Anne Lemanski. Reproduced with her permission.

Ocelot © Anne Lemanski 2026

Tiger Target © Anne Lemanski 2016

Khaki Hunting Outfits in Camouflage History

Article on hunters' use of camouflage (1917)

The following is an excerpt from a syndicated article that was reprinted in newspapers throughout the US during World War I (see original page above).

SOLDIERS' KHAKI UNIFORMS CAMOUFLAGE RESULT OF HUNTERS’ EXPERIENCE in Fort Wayne Sentinel (Fort Wayne IN), December 11, 1917, p. 16—

While the term camouflage may be applied in the world war to masking batteries and hiding troops from enemy fire, it only describes the tricks long in use among hunters for years, and even among the American Indians, according to Lester Pritchard of Battle Creek, who has won more than a local reputation as a hunter.

According to Louis Ebert, a well-known hunter, camouflage has been employed by Missourians for years. “At the Culvre Club and at the Lemp Club duck hunter used camouflage,” Mr. Ebert said, “Culvre Club members have built large tanks whose color is a dark brown and sunk them in the streams. The hunters hide in the tanks and wait for ducks to come close enough to be shot, then they poke their guns over the top of the tanks and fire. At the Lemp Club trenches similar to the kind dug by solders in France are being used as a hiding place for duck hunters. The hunters, garbed in khaki and squatting in the trenches are protected from the keen eye of the duck or goose because the brown of their togs and the surroundings harmonize."