As a solo female bowhunter in an area where cougars are known to roam, I figured out a way to have “eyes in the back of my head.” My husband had learned that there was a good chance that cougars would be deterred from stalking you if they see eyes watching them. So we came up with the idea of putting some “eyes” on the back of my hat.
I bought plain fishing spinners and used acrylic paint from the hardware store to paint the black iris and then the white sclera. I hung them from my head net with a safety pin. They can easily be moved to another hat, if needed, but don’t run them through the washing machine—the paint comes off! It gives my husband comfort to know that I have someone looking over my shoulder while I am out in the woods chasing elk.
Editor: We aren’t sure this could be proved, but it couldn’t hurt. Always use caution and check your back trail while hunting in country with big predators.
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- Fishing spinners
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- Paint black iris first…
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- then finish with white.
Several years ago, I read that farmers in India would wear a Halloween-type mask on the back of their heads for the same reason, only preventing tiger attacks. Must be a cat thing to sneak up from behind.
Game wardens in India use brightly coloured festival masks, worn on the backs of their heads to prevent tigers from attacking from behind. Cats are ambush hunters
This is common in India (tiger country) …Many have “face masks” they wear on the back of their heads to deter attacks while walking alone through the scrub….Tigers like to blindsided their prey, I imagine it’s a big cat hunting thing…you are wise
Below is from the book “Spell of the Tiger” written about the man-eaters in the Sundarban swamps (which is an excellent read).
“The masks worked as long as the tigers believed in them. Which was not for long. After five or six months, they were finding out that this was not the front of the human being,” Kalyan Chakrabarti told me when he visited us at the Tollygunge Club.
Kalyan was an intense and fervent man in his fifties, possessed of a dense energy, as if all his intuitions and theories and stories and plans were physically compacted into his short, stout body. He was adamant on this point: “They know what a human being looks like,” he insisted. “They know there is a back and a front. Then they are finding out that one is not a good front.” The masks, he said, were “a little gimmick that worked for a particular period.”