Great point. And I think you would do better wearing purple, lime green, mauve, and Prussian blue camo, or even paisley than you would do wearing a solid brown shirt.

Sitting still is probably the best thing you can do but breaking up large color patches will really help all those times we screw up and shift our weight, shrug at a nat or shiver.

Sage advice. I never had the luxury of hunting deer from a stand. The only way I've ever done it is "still hunting" (walk a few steps and freeze) or with my butt on the ground and my back against a tree.

My friends and I hunted crappy, over-pressured land, so dead stillness was the only option. It worked. A young buck once came within about 5 yards of me, and damn near took a nibble off my buddy one tree over.

Truer words were never typed.
Sit down. Shut up. Be still.
I'm a mildly successful public land deer hunter, but I don't use blinds, stands, scents, scent blockers, feeders, trail cams, calls, decoys, rattlin' horns, tactical sniper rifles, NASA-designed camo or personal invisibility forcefields.
I usually shoot deer not because I'm some kind of uber-hunter, but because I get there earlier than anybody else, I find my spot, I sit down, I get everything arranged the way I want, and then I don't move. Period.
I think, just for giggles, I'll take a camcorder out this fall and record every single hunter or pair of hunters, or threesome of hunters, or foursome of hunters (yes, I've seen it) that will invariably come crashing by me during the course of Oklahoma's nine-day public land season and then post it on Youtube.

Well spoken Dave.

Sitting motionless in blaze orange consistently works better than the most fashionable camo on a fellow who can't sit still.

You nailed it Dave.
The last two things I say to my son (17) before splitting up is be careful and sit still.
I dislike the solid blaze orange the broken pattern orange seems much better but Cons. Dept. won't hear of it here.

dinfos... Hoosier National Forest? Used to be one of my favorites for Grouse.

dinfos,
You jogged up a suppressed memory of around 1980. Was squirrel hunting 8 miles outside Steelville Mo (population center US, at least then). Was sitting against a small tree when I heard what I thought was squirrels playing on ground and coming my way. I wasn't camo'd or anything else but I raised my shotgun on top of my knees aiming in their dirrection. Thru the green tree leaves and limbs pushed two black noses along the ground (seaching for acorns I guess). On came two very nice sized deer, on up to no more than 2 foot from my foot. I had my mind made up if they take another step, for self protection, I'm gonna shoot that lead deer in the head. At that point they saw me but couldn't figure out what I was (at this point I had never sat so still in my life). I guess I was just a strange object that they couldn't figure out so they turned to their right and mossied off a bit apprehensive.

Gritz,
Sounds like you have a 17yr. old like I have.

They say that most fishing lures catch fishermen, but not fish. I think the same sort of thing could be said about a lot of the camo on the market - it impresses hunters, but not deer. I spend more money on really warm clothes than on camo. Sitting still for several hours in sub-freezing temperatures is impossible when hypothermia becomes an issue.

I like the way Gritz described it, "the single act of being".
As an older hunter with a bad back, I can't really sit all that long without exercising. However I've found that I can lay down and hide pretty good for extended periods of time. The day I knew I was doing something right, I was Turkey hunting with a decoy and was lying prone with all this camo stuff on and a little bird of some kind landed on a twig about 3 inches from my right eye. Then it was a contest to see who would move first, me or the bird. I won, after what seemed like 10 minutes, (probably more like 1-2 minutes) the bird flew. By the way I got my Turkey about 15 minutes later. I call it blending in with the mountain. I first learned the art of not moving by sitting in a Duck Blind with my step dad and uncle, a couple of grouchy old Italians who were masters of the art. If you moved when you shouldn't, you heard about it for weeks. Good training for a kid.

Sounds like Forrest Gump!
"Sit down!" "Be still!"

As a kid growing up, we went from tree stands to box blinds! Box blinds were a relatively "new" concept and worked very, very well.
With a small kerosene heater, I could sit still for quite some time even in the coldest weather which brings this story to mind.
It was extremely cold one morning. I lit my heater and sat back waiting for daylight. Since my job required working days, afternoons and nights, my sleep patterns were the pits! I woke up a bit after daylight, shivering in the cold. The heater was doing fine but the breeze was slipping the warm air right out my shooting window. An 18 inch square of plywood lay in the corner of the stand and placing it on top of the heater, forced the air back into my lap and I warmed up and dozed off again. I awoke with a start about an hour later, deer galore in the back side of the opening I was hunting and my eyes began to burn! I suddenly realized the plywood was on fire! Trying to find a buck with burning eyes and fighting fire was a tall order, but I finally got the fire out and the deer never figured it out!

Bubba

Hey Bubba

Is that when you learned that wood burns?

A woman who works for me bowhunts every year for deer in the Bighorns since she prefers not to mingle with the grizzleys in the Absorkas. She mixes and matches camo patterns but admits that she tends to use wide spotted camo rather than darker smaller patterns. In the west where the ability to see a considerable distance is always present if you look at someone wearing a small pattern camo shirt from quite a ways off they appear to be wearing a solid color. Additionally this lady even has camo lens in her sunglasses. Often she kills a really good buck with a single arrow. To prove how still she sits in her stand, on one occassion she had a rather large owl actually land on her shoulder. It was about mid-morning. Needless to say she did move at that point, so did the very much surprised bird.