Episode
Ep. 507: Why Your Camo Pattern Matters Less Than What It’s Reflecting w/ Dr. Karl Miller (Part 2)
- Podcast
- East Meets West Hunt
- Published
- Sep 1, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3969
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/podcast
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Summary
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 let the image travel across the retina engaging new cones, and they process that visual information roughly four to five times faster than a human does, which Karl suggests means your movement looks to them something like slow motion. That leads into a long back and forth on jumping the string, whether a deer is reacting to the sound at all, and whether it might be seeing the bow flex or even the arrow itself. Beau brings his axis deer footage from Hawaii into it, where the deer were on the ground before the arrow arrived at 25 yards. The back half is camo, and it’s the most useful stretch of ei…