Tag Archives: camouflage

Hiding In Plain Sight

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HidingMtEvans0587-0600

Mountain goats aren’t really known for being stealthy. They don’t have a lot of need to be. There aren’t that many predators up here at the top of the world at over 14,000′ to get them so they usually just hang out not caring very much about who sees them.

Yet Nature, who is in charge of animal protection here in this world, has chosen to give them life saving camouflage anyway. When you enlarge this image by clicking on it, and you know you should, you’ll see that even with them standing out in plain sight your eyes will drift right over them and you’ll often miss seeing them. This effect is even more pronounced when the herd is scattered out and the individuals take on the coloring and look of the boulder field they like to forage in.

Occasionally a coyote and on the rarest of occasions a mountain lion will find its way up here in the hopes of catching a lamb or a sick billy-goat but they’re usually so whacked out by the lack of oxygen up here that their efforts are half-hearted at best. Still the camouflage is there in case they need it.

This is Mt. Evans by the way, and it is 14,264′ up in the air. It is also one of the tallest of our national parks with all kinds of neat facts that you can read elsewhere about how cool it is. The road up here is not for the squeamish and will often involve some or all of the passengers in your vehicle crouching on the floor to avoid the sheer terror of the incredible drop offs just inches away from your tires. Drivers Pay Attention! Gravity is not your friend up here.

For those of you who are going to ask “Is that blue real?” the answer is no. It’s actually bluer than that. I had to tone it down in Photoshop from the real color because it is SO blue, and that is the famous Colorado blue you hear about, that my staffers walking by catching a glimpse of it on the monitor would be frozen in their tracks, stunned into immobility, so totally hypnotized by it blueness, that they would be paralyzed and fall over in what we call the Blue Coma. Since some of you may be viewing this on portable devices and doing things like walking or chewing gum I thought it best, in the interest of your safety, to bring it down into a more tolerable color.

Soon and that is in a couple of weeks, the ewes will start having their lambs and the tourists will start arriving to see them. The park opens later in the year than most other parks because this geography and weather up here are similar to arctic conditions. There’s tundra scattered around everywhere with arctic plants growing and biting winds and fast-moving storms that race in just to catch everyone unaware, so they, the people in charge of these places, want to give the inquisitive tourists every chance of making it up and back down alive. Plus the roads are mostly snowed shut until sometime in mid June. But life is an adventure and you’re alive or should be so jump in the old Celica and get on up to the top of the world. There’s views, and vistas, and far-reaching sights that will make you say “oh Wow” or even “Holy Moley” and you can see the Mountain goats hiding in plain sight. It’s worth it.

We’re In For It Now

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NatureArt2362

These are actual living trees. Notice anything different about them? That’s right they’re camouflaged. “What’s the big deal?” you might ask. Well, I’ll tell you the big deal. They’re camouflaged! You can’t see them because they blend in. You had trouble identifying them when you first looked at the picture didn’t you? That’s what camouflage does. You can walk right up to them and not see them until it’s too late and you’re laying there on the ground with busted glasses, bark in your teeth and your nose all out of joint.

Sometime back we wrote an expose about Camouflage, or Camo as it lies to be called, and fortunately posted it right here on BigShotsNow.com under the title “Camo – It’s Not Just For Wearing To Wal-Mart Anymore”, you can find it here:  http://www.bigshotsnow.com/camo-its-not-just-for-wearing-to-wal-mart-anymore/

We thought things were getting bad then but now it looks like we may have underestimated the danger. These trees pictured above, are living and proliferating right in the middle of downtown Denver. I’d tell you where, but they’ve blended in so well we cannot relocate them at the moment. We’ve been watching for unconscious people lying about on the sidewalk and have been checking various hospitals for increases in admissions with facial trauma, and other than the usual uptick after a Bronco/Raiders game it has been quiet. We’ve been querying local dentists to see if they’ve been plagued with bark removal cases from front teeth yet. They’ve responded there have been a few extra cases but we can’t triangulate the center point yet given the spotty response. We need to relocate these trees, so we can at least mark them with police warning tape.

The Institute believes this is becoming an insidious problem and cannot just be laughed off as a bunch of near-sighted, pot smoking Denver-ites walking into trees because they’re too baked to see where they’re going and that’s what stoners do. No this is too serious for that. What if a wind storm blew down some of these camouflaged trees over a roadway, like maybe I-25, you’d still be hearing cars crashing into each other up in Cheyenne. Would your insurance company pay off because you deliberately drove into trees lying across the road because you just “didn’t see them”? We think not. Well there you go, that’s just one problem. What if this malady spreads to other trees. Like fruit trees for instance, how would you even know when the fruit was ripe to pick? Worse yet how would you be able to buy it if you couldn’t find it in the produce section of your favorite Piggly Wiggly because it was camouflaged? The problem just gets worse the more you think about it.

Yes it is a problem. And problems need solutions, and of course that is what we do here at The Institute, we fix problems, even if the public doesn’t recognize that there is one  yet. We are going to be much more reactive in locating these trees and once we’re sure of where they are, we are then sending out teams of taggers, mostly gleaned from halfway houses and juvenile detention halls, with specially formulated Tree Tagger Paint that sticks to trees and glows in the dark, to paint warning messages on these obstacles to public health. Messages like “Whoa, Dudes! Watch it, Camouflaged trees here!” this would be for the stoners or burners, as one of our experts in Urban Street Slang likes to call them. Or possibly “Say, careful there, Camouflaged trees here, you wouldn’t want to have to replace those pearly whites right up there in the front of your face, Would you?” This would be from our friends in the Dental community. We know it’s a little long for a slogan but then you have some fairly educated people in Denver who like to read and would appreciate the erudite warning.

This is a battle we’re just beginning to fight and we know there is going to be an uphill struggle to get everyone on board with this. Public education is paramount if fighting this new threat. We need hotlines for people who have received unexpected whacks to their face to call in and give us the details so we can determine if one of these camouflaged trees was responsible or if you simply shouldn’t have replied to that drunk in the bar. We need your help in this ongoing effort to combat camouflage. So help us, so we can help you. Remember, We’re from The Institute, and we’re here to help.

Camo – It’s Not Just For Wearing To Wal-mart Anymore

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Camo2173Lizard, Page Arizona                            click to enlarge

Ever since the popularity of Reality TV we’ve noticed an uptick on people wearing camouflage. You see it everywhere. There doesn’t seem to be a public place you can visit now where you won’t see someone, or a group of someone’s, wearing what is now known simply as Camo.

What all these people have to hide is beyond me. They can’t all be in witness protection. The varieties of Camo are also amazing. There are sports camo, fashion camo, swim camo, arctic camo, jungle camo, urban camo, camo specifically for Pennsylvania, army camo, Baptist camo, Specialty camo, like guys wear that hide in the grass and shoot other guys, Camo you wear fishing, camo lingerie, camo flavored pop tarts, camo wax, camo classes to learn how to speak camo, the variety seems endless.

What’s more, through some kind of osmosis, animals have begun picking up on this trend and many of them have developed their own specific kind of camo as you can see in the image above. That’s right camo wearing lizards for instance. I don’t know how they found out about it. Maybe through some kind of exposure to TV rays or something. This intrigued us here at the Institute and we decided to send one of our top herpetologists out in the field to bring back a report on this newest phenomenon.

We chose the one everyone calls Lizard boy since he was observed eating flies off the wall of his tent, to go to Page, Arizona where the barely noticed lizard was last seen. He was wearing camo after all, the lizard not the Lizard boy, wait, the Lizard boy was wearing camo too, anyway he was the only one available so off he went.

The reports we got back were scattered and somewhat fly-specked but it seems that this new lizard camo is so effective that our field agent couldn’t locate it. Neither the lizard nor the camo. There was no lizard to be found. There were places where a lizard might have been, which were identified by the lack of any insects within the effective tongue range of a lizard, (in this case we believe a zebra-tailed lizard) which in this species is 3.9cm, but it was hard to confirm that identification due to the fact that the lizard was camouflaged. This was disappointing as we had spent a lot of time and money on this research with absolutely nothing to show for it.

All in all this has been a compete bust, No lizard, no reports, no Lizard Boy, he’s gone, there’s no sign of him anywhere. Although come to think of it, if he was able to get a hold of some of that new lizard camo he could have  been standing right there and we’d never have noticed him.

Some of the conclusions we were able to come to, were, camo works, it’s popular, not just in the deep south like before but everywhere. It’s pervasive. It’s not unusual to see chic young women entering swanky Spas on Rodeo Drive wearing spa camo or dancing the Hollywood nights away in sultry disco camo. It’s a wonder that anyone can find anyone else nowadays.

We still have the problem of finding our herpetologist, Lizard Boy. We can’t just leave him out there, lying in the sun with his tongue out, stuffed to the gills with flies, so we’re sending one of our staff retrieval specialists out to bring him back. That is if we can locate any of our Institutes’ vehicles after we had them painted in the newest camo colors.