Mandatory Orange on Ground Blinds?

odis7326 from KentuckyHunting.net asks:
deer hunting from blinds:

would like some feed back on a idea i had the other day when i was thinking about how as a deer hunter there could be a safer way for hunters to hunt from a blind. i had a buddy that had his blind shot at while he was in his ground blind, lucky he dident get hurt, but was really shaken up by the whole experiance. also i wonder if maybe it wouldent be to bad of an idea to require a hunter that hunts from a ground blind to have at least some kind of a colored flag put out side of the blind, just to let all others that see the blind know ,that it has a person is in side of it, i think this could be a good hunting safty practice. i did hear about a hunter last year in ark, that was killed because a hunter fired a shoot thru a small tract of woods, that had a hunter in side a blind. and after game officers talked to him, he said of course that he dident even see the camo blind, DA DA DA. well this is why i thought that if that blind had had some kind of flag of some bright color, then maybe that shoot would have not been fired at least not in that direction, would like to know how you all feel on this idea. thanks...................
Making hunter orange mandatory on blinds would require a hard look at the morbidity (death and injury) statistics associated with that sort of thing. I don't think that the body of accident reports would indicate that mandatory orange would help. On the other hand, you could not get me into one of those pop-up blinds without some orange out.

You did not state whether your buddy was shot at directly. In one possibility, the other hunter shot directly toward the blind and just did not see it. Another possibility is that the other hunter was acting irresponsibly and was shooting at bushes, sounds, or a sky-lit deer and might not have had a clear view in the direction of the blind. In the latter case, orange would not have helped. I've taken incoming fire several times. In each case, orange would not have helped, because the other hunter was acting irresponsibly to begin with. My close calls have been:

1) A poacher on our property in turkey season unloading his magazine on a flock. We were on our way to hunt that flock and some shot blew by us off to one side.
2) A group of hunters hunting diagonally across a corner of a stubble field shot at running deer with their slug guns, the shots exited the field, entered the opposing woodlot and went whizzing past me. Luckily I had a 2' tree trunk between us. One slug took out a rotten limb near my head.
3) Walking between the house and the curing shed, I had a round go whizzing over during the last week of rifle season. I never heard the gun shot associated with it. Whoever fired it was miles away.

None of these happened in a ground blind, but you can see where that no amount of orange would have protected me in any of these cases.

A blind has a lot of surface area and also holds a permanent record of punctures. It will therefore amplify every incident. If the blind had not been there, how would your buddy have known? Perhaps he saw the guy fire at him. However, I could not have sat in that blind unless it was very well decorated.

We had an incident a couple of years ago. A hunter on a neighboring parcel came tromping down in the dark on Opening Morning and erected a pop-up blind right on the other neighbor's property line and set up to hunt with his back to the line. The goofy part of it was that it was right in the corner where the second neighbor kept his bait pile. Luckily that neighbor saw the goofball setting up and was able to successfully hunt around him. However, if things had happened a bit different, if the hunter had set up earlier or the neighbor had arrived later, it could have been tragic. The neighbor went over to the blind as he was leaving and chewed the hunter out.

Me? I stay out of that corner entirely. That bait pile of his draws game and hunters. I stay well away. Furthermore, I could not have hunted there comfortably, imagining the whole time that at any moment a bullet would be coming through my back, orange or no orange.

When I talked to the neighbor, his biggest problem was that the hunter did not have hunter orange showing. When the neighbor confronted him, the hunter was clueless and argued that he was hunting legally (he wore an orange vest and hat) and ethically (he was hunting with his back to the property line).

When I am hunting, I wear an orange poncho that goes well below my waist and an orange hat. You can see it here:



I use it when I am in transit both for turkey season and deer season, and when I get to where I am going I either hang the poncho over a branch or bungee it around a tree trunk. It's 5' X6 ' fully laid out. This is in addition to whatever is legal. On Opening Weekend of deer season, it usually stays on me the whole time. On Opening Week of turkey season it comes off and becomes part of my seat cushion, but you bet it comes back out after I've shot one. Somewhere in the bottom of my turkey kit is also an orange baseball cap.

One other thing: what probably saved the goofy hunter in my story was that he was carrying a flashlight. Deer and turkey do not carry flashlights. Carry a flashlight on your way in and out during all seasons. It's not there to just light you way. It's also there to announce your presence in the dark.
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