A most wonderful story!
The stalking in snow is my favorite style of hunting.
Do you think the thermal imagery could be incorporated into detecting game earlier in the stalk?
It can.
Personally I don't think I'd go too far down that road.
I wouldn't feel good about having an animal on the ground that I had located with a thermal device.
I know rattlesnakes use thermal targeting but it feels like cheating to me.
I think the Leupold tracker is great for it's intended purpose. Worth the price many times over if it leads to a recovered animal.
I used to keep a pair of blue heelers in camp for the same purpose (recovery). They were sharp, totally understood the game, and would have been eager to help hunt. I know that in some places they hunt deer with dogs but not my style.
My favorite horse would alert me to elk. She would stop, then start rotating her ears in all directions, and then stare in the direction of unseen elk ahead.
One thing to remember about the thermal tracker is that it works best when you don't really need it.
If it is 70 degrees the thermal differential is going to be minimal and tough to get any image. The cold and snow conditions that I had were perfect for tracking. The elk tracks were obvious and the elk themselves would be very visible against the snow, so in either circumstance the imager is of limited usefulness. Even with those great snow conditions I only got one glimpse of that bull I was tracking and none of those smart cows never showed themselves. I happened upon a different bull whose tracks snitched on him but he made a dumb mistake that I don't think the first bull would have made.
