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I often get asked about thermal and daylight hunting. Some people wonder if it works like traditional night vision where you can't use it in the daylight. This isn't the case and thermal doesn't care about the light, just the temperature. Here is a neat example. I headed up to TBR for an afternoon hunt with the owner (Mr. TBR) who said that they would hear hogs behind his house during the day. So we set up to the east of where they were and tried called them of the woods and into a clearing. No luck. We moved to the other side and tried calling them into a water tank area. We would run the caller, then stop and listen for sounds. We did this several times until we could hear the hogs and it sounded like they were just inside the tree line. The owner and I were actually perched on the side of the dam, out in the open when the hogs came in, but we weren't silhouetted, stayed quiet, and didn't move around.
The opposite bank was about 200 yards distant. As you can hear in the video, the wind is blowing pretty good. Despite sitting less than 2 feet from me, I missed the start of the 3, 2, 1 countdown and the first thing I heard was "2." So I shot the first hog the sights settled on that was on my side of the group.
The shooting part was over by about 5:20 in the evening, long before dark.
Turns out, both hogs shot were mulefooted hogs. Mr. TBR shot a very large (240 lbs), mature sow with his .308. Mine turned out to be a small, 95 lb female. I didn't get any pics into the video of this, but my first shot spined the little sow and bisected the backstraps just behind the shoulder blades. The Hornady SST left a gaping tunnel with a pingpong ball-sized or just slightly smaller hole. She didn't run but became very noisy and I quickly put a second round through her with a double lung shot, pulling part of one lung out of the exit hole.
Removal of the backstraps was not as good as Mr. TBR had hoped. The 240 lb sow produced a set of the thinnest backstraps that weren't any thicker than what were coming off of my little hog. Of course on my little hog, they were considerably shorter as well and had a large section ruined in the middle from the shot. As Mr. TBR noted when referring to the backstraps, "They'll eat, but they won't feed many."
The opposite bank was about 200 yards distant. As you can hear in the video, the wind is blowing pretty good. Despite sitting less than 2 feet from me, I missed the start of the 3, 2, 1 countdown and the first thing I heard was "2." So I shot the first hog the sights settled on that was on my side of the group.
The shooting part was over by about 5:20 in the evening, long before dark.
Turns out, both hogs shot were mulefooted hogs. Mr. TBR shot a very large (240 lbs), mature sow with his .308. Mine turned out to be a small, 95 lb female. I didn't get any pics into the video of this, but my first shot spined the little sow and bisected the backstraps just behind the shoulder blades. The Hornady SST left a gaping tunnel with a pingpong ball-sized or just slightly smaller hole. She didn't run but became very noisy and I quickly put a second round through her with a double lung shot, pulling part of one lung out of the exit hole.
Removal of the backstraps was not as good as Mr. TBR had hoped. The 240 lb sow produced a set of the thinnest backstraps that weren't any thicker than what were coming off of my little hog. Of course on my little hog, they were considerably shorter as well and had a large section ruined in the middle from the shot. As Mr. TBR noted when referring to the backstraps, "They'll eat, but they won't feed many."
BANG BANG!!
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