Thread: Thermalling deer

1justin have you actually looked at a deer through a thermal imager? I have an XQ50, and I can assure you that the images I have seen are not 'basic shapes'.

I recently watched a hind grazing her way across a grassy terrace in full darkness. I watched her raise her head and look around to check her surroundings, just as you would by eye if there was enough light. The clarity was such that I could see her turning her ears trying to pick up any unusual sounds. I could also clearly see the 20 or so cattle beasts bedded down in a hollow between myself and her, so I left her alone and moved on to another area I knew there would be deer.

Basic shapes? Definitely not. Unmistakably a hind and cattle.

I also watched 4 deer sneaking away off a grassy riverbed into the bush - obviously aware I was there, also in pitch black. I would never have known these were there without the thermal imager.

I never fired a shot at any of these deer. Once it was light enough, I put the XQ50 away in my day pack, and my 14 year old son and I hunted the clearings up the side creeks as we always do, and my son was fortunate enough to shoot a nice yearling hind.

To suggest I had no idea what I was looking at when I could watch her raise her head and turn her ears trying to pick up a strange sound, as any of you who have seen deer in the wild do, is ridiculous. This particular area I have hunted 30+ times, I know exactly what was behind where the hind was standing.

This particular area often has deer grazing the bush edge. We need to cross the main river to have a chance of shooting one. We only used the thermal imager to see if there were any there before crossing - this was to see if it was worth waiting there till it got light enough to shoot, or using the time to move upstream to other likely areas.

Could you explain how we were 'cheats'? The thermal imager didn't enable us to fire a shot before it was light enough to see through the scope. In fact mostly what it showed us was the ones we had scared off in the dark that we otherwise wouldn't have known were there.