The Thing With Thermals

I haven’t been hunting in the dark that long, but I’ve been hunting at night long enough to know…I want to see EVERYTHING.

Hunting at night is a completely different experience than hunting during day light hours. There’s an eerie feel to it, and all of your senses are heightened. The fact that you can’t see what lurks in the shadows can make for a nerve racking, but exhilarating experience.

Night vision is a great tool, but it has limiting factors. Most night vision optics are limited in their capabilities due to either moonlight or their infrared illuminators. Field of view, and distances to target are limited by these 2 factors, and can make or break your visibility and your hunt. Having a high powered IR always helps, but also comes with a price tag, and sometimes, depending on what we’re hunting with, we may have limited mounting options (i.e. a bolt gun has less space to mount an attachment than an AR style rifle).

Thermal hunting is a whole different world. Regardless if it’s a handheld monocular, binoculars, or a thermal scope…looking through it, and out into the world, is a completely unique experience. You feel like you’re in some advanced war fighter video game because you can see EVERYTHING.

My first experience with thermal scopes was with an older model Pulsar scope and I thought “wow…this is crazy”. I could see the heat radiating off the velvet of a deer’s antlers, I could see raccoons scurry down trees…I could see field mice zoom to and from the feeder, and I could see cows in a field 600 yards away. It absolutely opens up the entire night time landscape for you…and this was with an older scope with just black/white hot capabilities. Little did I know, there were more advanced Pulsar optics and different color pallets as well!

After using the Pulsar Accolade LRF binoculars and LRF Trail (LRF standing for Laser Range Finding), I don’t know if I could ever switch back to night vision. The picture quality, as well as the ability to range targets is simply amazing. I saw animals I’d never have been able to see at night with standard night vision, and I was able to range them, as well as get angles and elevation, to adjust my shots as needed. I tracked a coyote through thick brush, from over 400 yards away, to make a 139-yard kill shot, and tracked pigs, mixed in a pasture with cows and deer at 700, until they were in range for a decent shot.

One of the biggest disadvantages of hunting at night is losing depth perception. No matter how many times I ranged objects in the stand during the day, and marked them for use at night, the depth perception was always off, and I’m not afraid to admit, I missed a few animals because of it. The LRF capability takes the guess work out of hunting at night, and leads to more animals on the ground.

Thermal scopes and binoculars are a ton of fun. Even if you just use them to scan the night horizon, it’s amazing what you can see. It’s like turning the lights on in the pitch black. It’s a huge advantage, especially for predator hunting, but also just a really enjoyable way to observe the way the landscape comes alive when the sun goes down, and the animals that thrive after dusk.