By: Jace Bauserman    August 3, 2023.

Camo gets a lot of love, and rightly so. After all, quality camo keeps us hidden from the eyes of our quarry and helps us fill the freezer. You have a winning combo when outdoor clothing manufacturers blend a top-tier camo pattern with excellent apparel, and Browning has done just that with their popular Wicked Wing line of waterfowl apparel. 

Browning has been winning at the outdoor clothing/camo game for years. Like any forward-moving manufacturer, Browning continues to move the deception needle further while providing hunters with garments that promise maneuverability, comfort, heat control, odor control, etc. 

Browning’s latest camo was crafted specifically for the waterfowl crowd. Dubbed AURIC, this pattern utilizes a combination of naturally occurring colors and abstract shapes that cause maximum eye disruption in waterfowl.

The brains behind Browning’s latest waterfowl concealment system, Russ Jones, took no shortcuts when creating the pattern. Jones and his team wanted to ensure the pattern did what it was designed to do — fool the beady eyes of waterfowl — before bringing it to market. 

“I think we have something with this pattern,” said Jones. “Of course, it looks great, but for a camouflage pattern to work, it has to do more than look great. Animals don’t see things the same way we do. It’s nice when a camo pattern is racy and has excellent eye appeal that grabs people’s attention, but the pattern is worthless if it doesn't conceal."

According to Jones, you can’t create a waterfowl-specific pattern like a big-game one. 

Why?

“When we created our OVIX pattern in 2022, which is a Western pattern, we wanted to choose colors that picked up on surrounding colors,” Jones said. “When you're looking at a haze in the sky, like smoke, and the sky is kinda red, the lightest color in your clothes will pick up that same color. The colors in our OVIX pattern will pick up on other colors in the landscape and disrupt an animal’s view. However, we couldn’t take the same approach with waterfowl because the viewpoint of birds looking at the pattern is aerial.” 

Jones and the Browning team did a ton of research and spent a lot of time looking down on marshlands, wetlands, and various other environments waterfowl frequent. 

“We quickly realized there is no defined horizontal plane and no vertical plane when looking from above,” Jones continued. “We had to create shapes that would disrupt the eyesight of the birds horizontally and vertically.”

Jones went on to explain that with horizontal and vertical shapes within the pattern and natural color palates you see in phragmites, marshlands, and tall grasses, the pattern causes maximum disruption to the eyes of waterfowl.

“The result is a pattern that has proven to confuse the eyes of waterfowl and keep those eyes from pinpointing hunters,” Jones added.

Another benefit of AURIC is that when you get one of those special waterfowl days we all dream of — fog rolling in, clouds hanging low, snow spitting — the pattern disappears among the frag. 

“When you get the right optical lighting,” Jones said, “the pattern doesn’t disrupt the birds’ eyes; the design acts like a mirage and makes the hunter part of the environment. The hunter will virtually disappear when the right optical lighting conditions are present.” 

Unlike other camo patterns, AURIC isn't identifiable as a micro or macro camo pattern, which is good. You can often look at a camo pattern and see the micro and larger macro shapes. AURIC has an excellent sense of flow, which helps with eye disruption and blending. 

“As mentioned, we looked at the AURIC pattern from above. We looked at a hunter in a duck blind in a marsh and then took those colors and the natural shapes we found and set them in horizontal and vertical patterns to ensure the birds couldn't pick up on a certain plane and their eyes would be bouncing around it. All the testing shows we created an ultra-effective waterfowl pattern that will serve hunters remarkably well.” 

The ink used in the AURIC printing process is also a big part of the pattern’s effectiveness. According to Jones, waterfowl don’t see in the same gray tones as big-game animals. For this reason, the ink used in AURIC was tested under various lighting scenarios, with UV rays bouncing off it to ensure the ink produced no ultraviolet color outlines that would stand out to waterfowl. 

In recent years, we've seen a massive change in the look of camouflage patterns. For decades, stick-and-leaf patterns from Mossy Oak and Realtree seemed to dominate. While both manufacturers still make remarkable patterns that work exceptionally well, there has been a paradigm shift in the camo world. 

In recent years, we've seen a massive change in the look of camouflage patterns. For decades, stick-and-leaf patterns from Mossy Oak and Realtree seemed to dominate. While both manufacturers still make remarkable patterns that work exceptionally well, there has been a paradigm shift in the camo world. 

Today, digital patterns continue to gain traction, and more and more consumers are going the digital pattern route.

Jones believes this is due to the disruptive effect digital patterns create. 

“When looking at a mimicry pattern like a stick-and-leaf, the goal is to make the pattern look exactly like what's behind it, and it's tough to do that because environments change all the time. These patterns look significant to us and have solid shelf appeal, but because it’s a mimicry pattern, it’s difficult for the pattern to be versatile.

“With a digital or disruptive pattern, the eye sees a shape in nature that it could pinpoint as a shape it could see in a tree, in the marsh, etc. With a digital pattern, you are tricking the eyes. Big-game animals see in a gray color palette, so they don’t pick up on the sticks and limbs as much as humans. The disruptive patterns confuse their eyes and, in my opinion, keep the hunter concealed much better. 

“Waterfowl will pick up on ultraviolets, and with the correct ink and horizontal and vertical shapes blended with natural color patterns, AURIC confuses the birds’ eyes.”

This season when you head to the field for ducks and geese, look for top-end clothing items like the Browning Insulated Wader Jacket, Rain Shell Jacket, Insulated Bib, and other Wicked Wing gear cloaked in AURIC. Not only will they keep you warm and comfortable, they’ll also help you finish more birds due to the disruption and disappearance the pattern creates.