Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Mule Deer - Leupold LTO

John,

Any first hand experience with this yet?

https://www.leupold.com/life/news/leupold-lto-tracker-thermal-sight-a-vital-tool-for-any-hunter/


It caught my eye previously, but after last night I'm thinking I'll have something in my backpack for next year.


Made a poor hit apparently, was on my hands and knees for 1 1/2 hours and failed to recover a deer. Thick nasty crap, I'll be going out again as soon as it's fully light out.

Something like this, might be just the thing in such situations.

IF it really works, it would be a good thing for recovery. My son and I spent about four hours the other day tracking tiny blood drips from a buck he clipped, lightly apparently. My arms look like I had a battle with a barrel of Siamese cats. While searching, I found a really nice 10-point another hunter had lost last Saturday. Tragic.

I'm not in favor of using such stuff for locating living, unwounded critters, as I think we have enough of an advantage as it is.

600yds. Impressive. Some body buy one and report back😀

And we all know darn well that is the first thing it will be used for.

Nice crisp fall morning with big game bedded down and well hidden on hillsides or in thickets; no need to minutely scan every square inch of ground for an antler tip or part of a leg, just pass this FLIR across likely areas to pick up the brightly shining warm bodies contrasting with the 20-40 degree ambient temperature. Lase the distance, crank up the scope, put a bullet through the bedded deer and then walk the 50 yards back to the parked UTV to go get it.

Heck, even the ad in the link shows what looks to be a healthy deer standing tall, not some wounded critter lying down.

This thing will sell like moonshine behind the barn of a Baptist revival meeting.

cal74,

Haven't even laid eyes on one yet, much less tried it.

Thanks for the reply, I was hoping you might have gotten your hands on one early.

Yes, I can see lots of people not using this as they should. But for others, it could be a great help in locating downed game.

I went back out this AM, picked up the blood trail and didn't really get any further than I did last night. Started grid searching and didn't turn up anything.

I'm 90% sure it was just a muscle shot, maybe in the upper leg. Perfect example of a firearm (XP-100) that's capable of 1/2" groups not doing it's job, because I didn't do mine adequately.

And we all know darn well that is the first thing it will be used for.

You're right, but I'm not convinced that such use will actually put much game in the freezer, given the difficulty of shooting through brush.

On the other hand, if the imaging is decent, it just might eliminate some of the "sound shots" some fools are prone to taking. High-tech stuff like this is sure to appeal to the inexperienced and desperate crowd, those most likely to send lead towards stuff they can't see clearly. Hard to say.

The old, fat, and lazy (also cheap) crowd, of which I'm a charter member, are less likely to want anything else to tote around their necks. Hell, I often don't carry or use binos because of the hassle and because of the movement required to use them might bust me in the tight cover I often hunt.

A couple of my buddies might need them to assure themselves that there are not 2,856 bears waiting for them in the pre-dawn.....

A little fantasized deadly peril adds spice to the hunt. Let the boys have their fun.

Me, I'm afraid of skunks in the dark, a much more practical phobia.😱

Better to spend the $700 bucks on ammo and practice to the point you don't make bad hits.

I'd say the LTO is bumping up hard against some ethical concerns. Thermal imaging for locating game? This is similar to where "drone technology" might be going.
On the other hand, I used to know some burglars who could really benefit from a tool like that. Is anyone home? Is there a dog inside?
Technology is fine but at what point is it no longer hunting and merely the deployment of gadgets?

Yep.

Had a close call with one, I kept crowding him until I put the flashlight on him.

I chose a slightly different route to where I wanted to go. I no longer assume everything I hear in the dark is a possum.

Last "skunk" I thought I was walking behind turned out to be a badger.

Using this device for anything other than finding lost/wounded game never occurred to me. Nor would I ever use it for anything else. But that's just me......

I can still track, and $800 would go a long way towards something I really want.

The $200 Barska knockoff can't be far off.

I have often wanted some sort of thermal imaging device for use in a Swather. Every year during first cutting, regardless of how careful we are, some (usually not many, maybe two or three, but any is enough) fawns get killed while cutting hay. This is a pretty sick feeling, hearing that telltale thwack as the fawn goes through the conditioner. They are still little enough they hang tight and they are damned near impossible to see. My first thought was to wonder if there is a way for this Leupold gadget to work in this way.

Not exactly hunting related, but some of those fawns would likely have become legal game at some point.

This is thinking outside the box. Mounted in the cab and hooked to a viewing monitor.
Some techie could have it signal an audible alert if an illuminated image is detected. Let me know when you need some "seed money".

Some Audi's are equipped with this exact technology to detect animals/people on the road at night. I've been a passenger with it on, it's impressive.

Not sure if Audi makes swathers...

When the LRF was introduced,some ((mostly naive and optimistic types) proclaimed it would be used so that hunters would know what shots not to take. Others(skeptics) said many would use it to take any shot imaginable.

This will be the same. The thrust of any new technology (it seems) is to reduce and avoid the development and use of as many shooting, woodsman ship and hunting skill sets as possible.

Now thermal imaging will find the game. "Hunters" who can't even manage that simple chore will use it to locate unwounded game....you can bet on it, humans being inclined to take the easy route in anything, like sheep.

But just like the LRF, it aint going to make them better hunters. But you know i do understand where you're coming from. and agree, some will use it as a crutch.

Its always the case.

Sorry to the OP for this tangent.

I keep reading where some say this device is an ethics concern. It is making "lazy" hunters. It should only be used to recover game.

The one thing other than our spoken and written language which separates us from the other vermin on this planet is our ability to make tools. Human beings by far are the best tool makers in the world.

This device from Leupold is another step forward in tool making. A tool is used to make a job easier or more efficient/productive. This is assuming the majority of the people using it have the intelligence to operate it.

We all use tools to hunt. None of us are chasing down game in our bare feet and strangling it to death with our bare hands. I understand the push back to something new. We also don't like change.

Regardless of what this device can do, we still have regulations which govern the hours we hunt and bag limits of the game we hunt.

The end result in hunting is to harvest/kill the animal we are pursuing. To argue over how we do it leaves us standing on a slippery slope. Just my 2 cents.

Methinks your "brush" is too broad.

Laws put a fence around how we hunt. Some things are inside that fence; others are outside. Since we are engaged in a sporting activity, not merely slaughtering our food, our tradition is that our quarry has to have a reasonable opportunity to evade our efforts to find and kill it. Their "tools" are superior senses, speed, agility, knowledge of their habitat, and cover. We have intelligence, weapons, camouflage, decoys and various baits, and optics on our side to help us locate or attract our quarry, and then kill it, and those have proven to be sufficient for our purpose, while still allowing the game a good chance of escaping by the simple expedient of remaining hidden or distant. Devices like this, drones, live action remote cameras, remote shooting devices, etc take that arrow out of their quiver and shouldn't be allowed, by either the law or our self-imposed restrictions. For scouting and retrieval, sure; for control of vermin like hogs, rats, and livestock killers, absolutely; but not for game animals being pursued under Fair Chase. This is supposed to be sport, not warfare, despite the efforts of manufacturers and military wannabes to make it so.

Great thinking...


Pheasants, porcupines, skunks, fawns, etc., will all thank you!



An aftermarket setup would be good for those of us who can't afford to shell out +$120k for a new machine.

A similar argument over ethics can be made when a drone is used to "scout" from the air.

Another sad possibility would be where some idiot might use one of these to locate game and accidentally shoot a hunter.

Used a thermal unit for recovering grouse 10 years ago.No image,just a heat graph.They work well if you do not have a dog.

My problem with this thermal imaging device is that in the hands of unethical or stupid people it can be used to spot living things. What if I am sitting on the hillside in the brush watching my favorite game crossing and some dimwit sends a round into my spot? Does it work like that or does it say "deer at 250 yards"? Having not seen one or even read about one until I saw this thread I know nothing about them.

The link in the first post has good info on it. But if you want to see something like this in action, go to youtube and search for "apache helicopter takes out insurgents" or some variation of that.

A thermal imaging system (or FLIR - forward looking infrared*) shows the differences in heat between various objects. Warm blooded mammals show up brightly against their cooler backgrounds, in colored images you can even see differences in heat around the body - warm heads and cooler extremities. You can see those differences in body heat in the pic of the deer below.

In theory you should be able to make out the outline of the animal you're looking at but looking through brush one obviously might not see the entire animal. Or if I got this right, if an animal is bedded and completely hidden to normal vision you might not even have to see the animal, its body heat might warm up the surrounding vegetation slightly but enough to cause a contrast against the other ambient vegetation.


It's always hard to make ethical arguments for or against new technology since it’s just a continuum going back to teeth and nails – we went from spears to bows and arrows to better bows to black powder to smokeless with faster, flatter trajectories to scopes to better scopes to range finders to you name it. It’s hard to criticize a fellow for using a high powered scope if you’re using peep sights because the fellow on the other side of you can criticize you for using smokeless powder and the arrow slinger can criticize the BP shooter and on and on.






* I may have FLIR and thermal imaging mixed up but it seems to me they both use the same basic principles, but I'm no expert at this.

No one mentioned spotting big critters like game wardens...

And, hot on yo trail, they'd probably be putting out a great heat signal...

But, they probably got all that stuff, already.

It may just level the playing field a bit, giving new meaning to "fair chase"...

DF

I've never encountered that line before. Gave me a chuckle

This new thermal animal locating device may add to our success in the field finding game?

Has anyone tried one?

Thermal locator