On today’s Pro Tip, we will be going over some techniques we have learned in the military to help you as a hunter become more successful. The first of which is how to match your background, which Tyler is demonstrating now. The first and most important step in matching your background is determining what elevation you are going to be at.
For this position, Tyler is going to be in the prone so we have picked the low lying grass to match the background.
In this example, Tyler has matched himself in a kneeling and sitting position to his surroundings. Obviously the vegetation has changed when he goes up in elevation. One of the very important things to remember is what is in front of and behind you, as you can see from this angle he has not matched the vegetation that immediately surrounds him.
From this angle you can see that he has used a tripod to help build a blind, and give himself a good solid shooting position.
This is the same vegetation from our previous example; however, we don’t have the advantage of our foreground and background vegetation. This looks out of place to a game animal that has walked this trail its whole life.
The most effective and economical way to attach natural vegetation to you or your equipment is through the use of rubber bands, I always carry a pocket full of these into the woods with me, because I can connect pretty much anything that I am going to need to camouflage myself, to whatever my surroundings are. As you can see we have built this entire position out of pine boughs, rubber bands, and our equipment.
Another big advantage of the rubber band is the ability to change your vegetation quickly and easily. That way if you are predator hunting, and you set up for 15 minutes and then move to another location, it doesn’t take you all day to re-camouflage. You can just pull out the vegetation that you had used and put in whatever your new surroundings are.
Another key to this camouflaging technique is using fresh vegetation. You wouldn’t want to set up something like this the night prior, because throughout the night, this will die and it will look unnatural.
One thing to keep in mind is that you want to cover hard lines and reflective surfaces, so you can put a little bit of vegetation in front of your objective lens, like we have here, and still see just fine. In the event that you don’t have or don’t want to use a tripod, it is very simple to create a good ground blind using a fallen stick and the rubber bands. As you can see here, when Tyler takes a good seated position, he virtually disappears.
If you utilize these simple and inexpensive techniques on your next hunt, you will be able to enhance your camouflage position, making you much more successful. Until then, stay Army strong.
