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TexiKan

40 Cal.
Joined
Jan 2, 2005
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Most of the "woods walks" tend to have bright yellow or florescent iron targets. I know this is to make it easier for the shooter to see them in the woods environment. Unfortunately, this got me thinking. (yeah..a dangerous thing!) If we pride ourselves as pre-1840s style marksmen, why are we not able to pick out those targets if they were actual animal colors?

I recall some participants on the woods walks having a difficult time spotting the targets and it made me wonder how they would be able to actually hit a real, live animal in the woods?

So, out of curiosity, does your club or event use any true colored woods walk iron targets...or are all highlighted in bright yellow?

TexiKan
 
Oatsayo,
Might have to do with the fact that the targets are not "Animal" shaped or that they donot move.

When i am hunting the thing that gives animals away is a definate shape of them or a part of them
or when they move that catches my eye.
 
I've seen both "natural" colors and the bright ones used. I figgur the targets are just that -targets. They aren't supposed to be similated game animals like a 3-D archery tournament. Although I doubt that there was any flourescent orange paint in the early 19th century. Usually by the time I get to shoot at em the paint is mostly gone and all ya can see is grey splash. GW
 
Paint just don't last well on targets and it's a whole lot easier to spray bomb 'em than to paint 'em like real deer or other critters. Might as well make 'em easier to see while yer at it.
 
Our club uses black targets shaped like animals. Some people have complained about the color but I think we have always used that color.
 
If they are going to do colors I prefer black or white because I am partly color blind. With white or black I am on an even par with all the other shooters, red, orange or blaze orange blends into the grass for me and I often have to wait for someone else to hit the target before I can shoot at the lead splat. I have talked many of the clubs around Indiana into painting clangers blue so it is an even playing field. After all 20% of males are color blind to some extent.

Now when the targets are black or white the shooters that depend on color are at a disadvantage and I can see them quite clearly.

Historically the cheapest paint was the red color that they put on barns. Rust red paint was just that. Iron oxide mixed with linseed oil is as cheap as you can get. All kinds of colors were available, white (lead oxide) was common. Black (bitumen) was common. So there is no reason to say that there wasn't any paint available. Certainly there would not have been any paint available for such luxuries as painted targets on the frontier but it would have been around in more settled areas.

There are records of recruiters during the Rev War painting King George's nose on a plank at 200 yards, so there is a target for you.

Many Klatch
 
last trail walk I built, I was asked to not use day glo orange for 2 reasons....
first being that the trade gun trail was done in orange and secondly, I did the rifle trail, is that day glo orange doesnt show up well for older folks and those with color blindness issues.
so I used blue or yellow and had some with green and brown that you really had to look for.
of course, you had to minipulate the limbs and foilage to really see the targets.
 
Many Klatch said:
If they are going to do colors I prefer black or white because I am partly color blind. With white or black I am on an even par with all the other shooters, red, orange or blaze orange blends into the grass for me and I often have to wait for someone else to hit the target before I can shoot at the lead splat. I have talked many of the clubs around Indiana into painting clangers blue so it is an even playing field. After all 20% of males are color blind to some extent.

Now when the targets are black or white the shooters that depend on color are at a disadvantage and I can see them quite clearly.

Come to think of it......black and white targets are fairly common, too. (white buffalo, white prairie dogs, white snake, etc.!) So, we have all elements to simulate the hunt.....a flint or percussion rifle, our clothes, a real wooded area, and BRIGHT white, black, yellow, orange or modern day-glo colors to accentuate a target!! Is that "PC"?

I am one of those slightly color blind guys. When I was in college, I tried to go back and work on the railroad. I could no longer pass the color blind test for slight variations of blues to greens. That was enough to prevent me from getting re-employed.

Part of the reason I brought this up is the fact a true woods target (say a squirrel) could or should be brown or grey, but bright white or orange??!! Other than the target not moving like a live one, the critter targets tend to be a reasonable facsimile of the animal, so why not use a color that matches a bit more?

TexiKan
 
They have black squirrels up in Michigan I remember... :hmm: And I have seen white ones in some city parks but they would not last long in the wild.
White or black seems like a good choice but you and I both know that "someone" will complain Chris... :shake:
 
No matter what color the swingers are painted, someone is going to complain. Some folks don't see blue, some don't see red, I don't see some shades of green, for example.

As one who has set up woodswalks and ranges at rendezvous, we gotta set things up for the majority of folks. After all, who knows who is coming and what color they can or can't see.

One friend who is a good shooter needs someone to point out the targets to him, no matter what color they are painted. Once the location of the target is pointed out, he will hit it, even though he probably can't see it clearly.

This illustrates the old adage that even a blind hog will occasionally find an acorn. Some folks just gotta look a little harder for their acorn. :wink:
 
J.D. said:
No matter what color the swingers are painted, someone is going to complain.

One friend who is a good shooter needs someone to point out the targets to him, no matter what color they are painted. Once the location of the target is pointed out, he will hit it, even though he probably can't see it clearly.

Hey.....I think Paul and I know this guy!!!

Yes, it is true that someone will take issue with the colors. So where is the "challenge" to hitting a target? Other than distance and size, the color of the target seems to be the universal complaint. I guess what I am thinkin' (uh-oh....there he goes again) is that there should be a mix of generally earth tone critter colors. (Equal opportunity colors for the shooters!)

So, after all of this.....do any of you guys mix the colors and use more browns, blacks, etc. instead of those bright ones?! Or is "bright" and "easy to see" the general accepted norm?

TexiKan
 
Olney , Illinois has white squirrels all over the place. It's a fine to hit one with a car, or if your pet kills one.

http://www.ci.olney.il.us/
 
TexiKan said:
Yes, it is true that someone will take issue with the colors. So where is the "challenge" to hitting a target? Other than distance and size, the color of the target seems to be the universal complaint. I guess what I am thinkin' (uh-oh....there he goes again) is that there should be a mix of generally earth tone critter colors. (Equal opportunity colors for the shooters!)


So, after all of this.....do any of you guys mix the colors and use more browns, blacks, etc. instead of those bright ones?! Or is "bright" and "easy to see" the general accepted norm?
TexiKan

Depends on the event. For rendezvous, bright colors are the norm. We get too many complaints if targets are painted natural colors. Go figure?

The challenge IS hitting the targets. Most aren't all that easy. Some even contain optical illusions.

For woodswalks, we paint targets natural colors and the competitors gotta find them in the woods.

The NDN targets are painted with red primer, a red,brown color so's they look like....red skins.
 
We have had target painted a variety of colors some like them some don't I never gave it much thought, I just want to see it, it does seem kind of funny to use flourecent orange if you hunt in a state that requires you to were orange
 
As long as everyone is shooting at the same
group of targets,what is the problem???
Of course being Political correct,we would
have a regular course,color blind course,female
course,white course,black course,dumb course,
smart course,tall course,midget course,etc,etc
etc.
Lets just shoot B/P and hope we hit something we were aiming at...and have and develope friends
that feel the same way. Which I have never found to be a problem.IMO
snake-eyes :hmm:
 
That sounds great! But it does seem the hobby has its extremes and many of those details about what can and cannot be used, PC this and PC that.......tend to come up from some very vocal people.

Although the color question doesn't bother me much,(I asked primarily because of curiousity)I do want to be able to address the vocal few who make more than an issue of this at our Rendezvous, and I have heard the color blind position more than once.

I'll be the first to admit there is a challenge to seeing a woods walk critter because of our pre-conceived idea of what one should look like. And heck, I too, enjoy shooting at and occassionally hitting them! But ever so often, we get those who expect ideal conditions, etc... Oh boy. Like you said, Snake Eyes, we should not get to the ultra PC course but hope to make the event enjoyable to the majority. Yes, that would indeed be nice!

TexiKan
 
I don't see color as much of a problem. We have had guys painting bangplates with Pink, and Chartreusse, and purple paints.

Much more of a problem is the habit of some clubs to set out their bangplates so that they are visible at one time of the day, but hardly visible at all in shadows later in the day. The guys familiar with the course, and the layout of the targets, time their " run " so they get the best lighting conditions to see the targets. They don't always win, of course, but they do stack the deck against other shooters who have to shoot when the sun has moved and is now casting shadows on the targets. The only time I have complained is when they obviously used dull neutral colors on targets that were in deep shadow, while using the colorful paints on the targets that were in full sun. The dull colors( brown, black, olive green, or a combination of the them) made it next to impossible to spot the target, much less shoot it. I have never seen a squirrel wearing Camos! except at one of these shoots.
 
I think our bunch just paints them so they stand out in the brush so we don't have to spend a bunch of time trying to find them to shoot at them(notice I said AT), we used to shoot most of the year before they needed touched up then they might be most any color depending on who scrounged up the paint and the manor of humor that possesed them at the time. We have had some animal targets that were painted as close to the natural color of the critter as we could get.
 
TexiKan said:
Snake Eyes, we should not get to the ultra PC course but hope to make the event enjoyable to the majority.Yes, that would indeed be nice!
TexiKan,
That is exactly what I ment! If I failed
I appologize:redface::redface::redface:
snake-eyes
 
Gene,
who and where are you shooting with/at?

Any target that can be seen is good enough for me, even if I have to work to see it! Thats what this came is about anyways!
 
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