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Hunting seasons are upon us, and New Hampshire Fish and Game is reminding hunters (and other people going into the woods) that it’s a good idea to wear blaze orange, sometimes called Hunter Orange. Humans can spot this almost-neon color a mile away but it is not obvious to most animals with black-and-white-ish vision, including deer.

At my previous newspaper, the Nashua Telegraph, I once wrote an awesome, brilliant piece about blaze orange with lots of geeky details – e.g., Hunter Orange is defined as having a should dominant wavelength between 595 and 605 nanometers, a luminance factor of not less than 40 percent, and an excitation purity of not less than 85 percent (if you really want to dive deep into those topics, click here).

Even better, I hid in the woods wearing a blaze orange jumper and not wearing a blaze orange jumper while a photographer snapped pix, which we ran to demonstrate the clothing’s effectiveness. Talk about “news you can use”!

Alas, all this seems to have been lost in mists of changing databases and backup systems as the Telegraph changed owners, so you’ll have to take my word for it. But meantime, get a blaze-orange hat or bandana or something like that and wear it when you go hiking over the next several months.

There has not been a case of an accidental shooting of a non-hunter by a hunter in New Hampshire in many, many decades, but you wouldn’t want to be the first. Hunters accidentally shoot each other or themselves almost every year in the state, but they haven’t shot by-passers.

 

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