How to Choose the Right Camo for Your Terrain
When it comes to choosing the right camo, you want to focus on your terrain. From everyone’s favourite ‘sticks and leaves’ camo to science-backed unstructured patterns – there’s multiple designs to choose from.
Here’s how to choose the right camo for your hunt.
How does camo work?
As every hunter knows, one wrong move and your whole chase can be spoiled. But even though most hooved animals have strong senses, they have poor vision. They see things in a blurry way that means you appear more as an outline, silhouette or blocks of colour – rather than a defined human. They’re also red-green colour blind; it’s difficult to differentiate between shades of red and green meaning even clothing items like Blaze safety gear appear brown.
The main purpose of camo is to break up your silhouette. If your camo does its job right, your outline will be so fractured that the animal you’re hunting can’t see you at all.
How to choose the right camo for your terrain
The best camo is the one that blends seamlessly into your terrain. And the best way to achieve this to get your colour choice just right. That means browns and blacks in dense bushland or blues and whites around the ocean.
For pattern, it comes down to personal preference. Animal eyesight lacks detail, so any high-definition patterns are there to impress humans. If you love the look of realistic sticks and leaves camo – we say, go for it. But most importantly, don’t compromise on colour matching just to get a pattern you like better.
Here are our top camo recommendations for all terrain – available at Ridgeline for men, women and kids.
The ultimate all-rounder
For most hunting trips, we recommend Realtree Excape camo. It has been specially designed to mimic natural elements while also blurring your silhouette from distances between 10m-200m. The advanced colour engineering allows this camo to blend in with multiple terrains; from the green of grass gullies to grey rocks in alpine areas.
Made for ocean fishing
Blend into the ocean waves – the Terranea Squall fishing pattern is ideal for light-coloured terrains. With a science-backed design, it uses the principles of chaos, fractals and surface turbulence to create a camo that makes you near invisible to your game.
Learn more in our fishing clothing buyer’s guide.
Blend in with the scrub
Ridgeline’s classic Buffalo camo relies on all the same principles of outline distortion and colour matching to help you avoid visual detection on the hunt. With a slightly darker colour palette, we recommend this camo in dense bushland and scrub.
Stand out to other hunters
You know the saying, ‘if it’s brown, it’s down’. Safety camo in bright orange is designed to make you visible to other hunters. Thanks to the red-green colour blindness of many hooved animals, you can wear Blaze orange camo in most terrain without being detected. It’s highly recommended for kids on the hunt, as well as a legal requirement in some states.
Does it matter if my camo matches?
This is a common question for beginner hunters. The good news is, you can mix and match different camo patterns. Sometimes it even works better at distorting your silhouette. But it’s still important that both pieces were designed for the terrain you’ll be hunting in. Wearing the wrong colour for the terrain is a sure-fire way to get spotted.
Got your camo sorted? Finish off the gear with our guide to the best hunting boots.
