Story by David Sams, Lone Star Outdoor News
Large red stag were bedding in the middle of the morning in a thick mesquite flat. We eased along, stopping and looking through the handheld thermal trying to find them. Most thermal use is for nighttime, but why not use it for locating animals in the daylight?
We didn’t see any heat signatures or find the stag that morning, but we did stumble onto some scimitar-horned oryx. They were on the edge of the field and slowly slipped into the thick brush. We could clearly make out their outline, but the deeper they got in the brush, and disappeared. So, we learned that you can’t see every animal; however, the thermal works well in full sun.
Burris Optics introduced three all-new thermal sights, the Burris Optics Handheld (BTH), Clip-On (BTC) or Riflescope (BTS) Thermal Sights. Each thermal unit is available in 35mm and 50mm options. They offer a variety of color palettes, brightness controls, hot tracking, picture-in-picture and the ability to sync to mobile devices to record the action.
The Burris Thermal Handheld unit can hot track targets past 750 yards. Perfect for pre-dawn scouting or locating blood trails and animals downed at last light, the handheld unit features a 4X zoom to track heat signatures of animals in dead of the night. Realtime Wi-Fi- to-mobile connection allows others to view, control and record from a mobile phone using the Burris Thermal App.
While watching a feeder and scouting for bucks, a few deer were coming out way before daylight, so I pulled out the unit and ran some video and color temperature checks.
The unit worked great, and you could tell the bucks from the doe. The resolution was good unless you zoomed all the way. It was well below freezing and the battery life was holding its own. The intuitive buttons are a bit hard to operate but my fingers were also frozen. And I had to be careful that the unit didn’t roll off the window sill, as our 8-foot tower blind has a bit of a lean to it.
The Thermal Handheld retails for $2,462 for the 35mm version and $3,454 for the 50mm version.
