Rubs, Scrapes and What Does The Deer See, Part Two©

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It’s that time of the year and the white tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) are running, the bucks are rubbing trees and making scrapes.  “But what does the deer see ... Ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding!?”  

 

What does the Deer See!?

Hunters used to think that white-tailed deer were colorblind, only seeing the world in shades of gray, but now researchers know that deer can see colors, just not in the same way as humans.  So, what does the deer see and what does this mean for hunters and other visitors to the wild parts of North America? 

 

Basically, rods in the retina provide coarse detail in low light situations and cones provide finer detail and color vision, containing photopigments that allow you to see the colors.  The biggest difference between human and deer vision is the different number of rods, cones and the number of photopigments, pigments which convert light into color signals, found in their retinas.  

 

Humans have trichromatic vision because their retinas contain three photopigments which allow us to see colors.  The first is at the short wavelength of very dark blue-violet at 420 nm (nanometer), the second one at the moderate wavelength of green at the 530 nm range, and the third at the long wavelength of orange-red at 565 nm.  Additionally, human eyes have more cones than deer eyes, while deer eyes have significantly more rods.  And because of this, humans can see details and colors much more clearly than can a deer.  But our lenses filter out almost all the available UV light, preventing us from seeing shorter wavelengths which are visible to many other animals, including deer.

 

The University of Georgia Deer Lab (UGA) has done much of the research on the white-tailed deer’s visual capabilities.  They  discovered that deer have dichromatic vision and that a deer’s retina only has two photopigments with just two peaks.  The first one is at the short wavelength of dark blue at 450 nm, and the second at the moderate wavelength of green at 537 nm.  And deer are 20 times more sensitive than humans are too blue.  In fact, deer see blues much more vividly than a human sees red and can even see ultraviolet (UV) light between wavelengths of 300 nm and  400 nm.  This is one reason deer can see so much better in low-light conditions than can humans.  Also, unlike humans, deer’s eyes don’t have an ultraviolet filter that protects them from the Sun’s harmful rays.  According to Dr. Gino D’Angelo, “The lens in a deer’s eye are perfectly clear, where ours are more like yellow shooting glasses that filter out some of that ultraviolet”.

 

All things on the Earth are exposed to UV light all day long, but this wavelength is overpowered by visible light.  As the visible light begins to fade at the end of the day, the shorter UV wavelengths make up much of the remaining light.  UV light is most abundant around sunrise and sunset, although it lingers deep into the night, and the moon and cosmic rays shed some all night long.  Deer eyes have adapted to the low-light conditions of dawn and dusk when UV light is dominant, and this is when they can see their best and are most active.

 

What does it all mean?

Since deer’s eyes can’t see longer wavelength colors like red and orange, to a deer bright oranges and reds, look like muted grays and browns. 

According to Blaise Newman at the University of Georgia Deer Lab (UGA), “Deer don’t see blaze orange the way that we do, but it’s not like you disappear.  It can be very neutral, but if you don’t have some form of breakup you can look like a dark blob in the forest.  So, if you can get blaze orange breakup, that’s always a good selection”.

 

Also, per Newman, “Deer are a prey species ... Having detailed discrimination isn’t really important to deer.  They just need to be able to detect and escape something”.  With a deer’s dichromatic vision limiting the number of colors that it can see, deer have less “chromatic noise”, and not having to process so many colors, allows their eyes to detect movement much more quickly and easily.  Newman explains, “They see motion at an astounding rate compared to our own ability”.

 

To us deer vision might seem like a pale imitation of what we see, but that’s only because we’re seeing the world through our eyes.  As omnivores and tool makers, we need to see in finer detail and to be able to recognize a wider range of colors.

 

But with a deer’s ability to see into the ultraviolet wavelengths, there are things that they can see that we cannot.

 

According to Daniel DeRose-Broeckert of the UGA, when viewed with a black light, fresh rubs glow more during the pre-rut, and fresh scrapes glow more during the rut, he explained that to deer “rubs look like highway reflectors ... When the rest of the woods are dark, the rubs and the urine in the scrapes are highlighted because it’s throwing a different color, a brighter color, than the light that’s contacting it”.

 

The reason for this is that when deer leave rubs on trees, the bark layers, saps and other plant parts photo-luminesce, and so do the secretions from a buck’s forehead gland.  The wavelengths produced by the urine in the scrapes, according to DeRose-Broeckert, glow in the UV range “like spilled milk” or “spilled white paint”.

 

And now we know “what does the deer see!?”

 

I hope that you enjoy learning from this resource!  To help me to continue to provide valuable free content, please consider showing your appreciation by leaving a donation HERE.  Thank you and Happy Trails!

 

 

I hope that you continue to enjoy The Woodsman’s Journal Online and look for me on YouTube at BandanaMan Productions for other related videos, HERE.  Don’t forget to follow me on both The Woodsman’s Journal Online, HERE, and subscribe to BandanaMan Productions on YouTube.  If you have questions, as always, feel free to leave a comment on either site.  I announce new articles on Facebook at Eric Reynolds, on Instagram at bandanamanaproductions, and on VK at Eric Reynolds, so watch for me.

 

That is all for now, and as always, until next time, Happy Trails!

 

 

Notes

 

 

Sources

 

Collins, Dac; “What Colors Can Deer See?”, January 5, 2023, [© 2025 Recurrent], https://www.outdoorlife.com/hunting/what-colors-can-deer-see/, October 18, 2025

 

Durkin, Patrick; “Buck Rubs Never Fail to Fascinate”, February 10, 2017, https://www.bowhunting.com/blog/2017/02/10/buck-rubs-never-fail-fascinate/, October 18, 2025

 

Honeycutt, Josh; “Learn How to Read Deer Rubs for Greater Success”, October 1, 2025, [©2025 Outdoor Sportsman Group], https://www.gameandfishmag.com/editorial/reading-rubs-scrapes-greater-success/536907, October 18, 2025

 

Infantry Journal, Psychology For The Fighting Man, [Penguin Books, Washington, 1945], page 62, https://archive.org/details/psychology-for-the-fighting-man/page/4/mode/2up, accessed November 1, 2025

 

Olesen, Jacob; “Eyes of the Forest: What Colors Can Deer See and How Is Their Vision?”, [© 2013-2025 Color Meanings], https://www.color-meanings.com/what-colors-can-deer-see-vision/, accessed November 1, 2025

 

“Rubs Versus Scrapes: What’s the Difference?”, March 13, 2023, [© 2025 Outdoor Specialty Media], https://crossbowmagazine.com/rubs-versus-scrapes-whats-the-difference/, October 18, 2025

 

“Buck Rub, Buck Scrape”, November 13, 2011, https://prairiegardentrust.org/buck-rub-buck-scrape/, October 18, 2025

 

Wikimedia, “Deer rub.jpg”, October 22, 2015, by Wasp32, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deer_rub.jpg, October 18, 2025