Sporting Rifles Colin Jones Tests The Archer

Night Vision Outing

At lambing time in Mid Wales, Colin Jones tries out Starlight's Gen 3 Archer Night Vision on Foxes.

Mid Wales has the unusual tag of suporting a head of in excess of 100 sheep for every person and as such has the ability to sustain a substantial, healthy fox population.

My standard foxing outfit is nothing exclusive, consisting of a CZ527 rifle in .223 calibre, a 6-24x50 SP raptor scope (which my company distributes), a lamp from Clulite and, if calling by hand doesn't work, an electronic caller from LR Active. This outfit has never let me down and any misses have been down to pilot error.

However, at this time of year misses are costly. Every shot counts. Locally we have a small number of shooters who, though keen, are not particularly accurate. As the season progresses, this results in a number of lamp-shy foxes so I needed some help.

Enter Julian from Starlight Night Vision. ''Try one of our Archer units'' he says. ''You can't miss''. I accepted the offer and a day or so later it arrived with the sample SP scope I had forwarded to Julian to test. Julian always reccomends a Leupold VXIII but the Raptor works, too.

A dry Sunday afternoon with Wales v Scotland on the box was the ideal oppertunity to zero in. A quick trip to a nearby farm and we're back to 1in groups at 150 yards. At 8 pm, its off up the road to pick up my lamping companion Norm (my wife calls him my wife) and into the night we go. We took a lamp for insurance. Within 10 minutes we spot the tell tale eyes shining back at us, so turn on the Archer and IR illuminator.

This was the first oppertunity to view a fox through the unit and I didn't expect to see a full scope's worth of target staring back at me. I passed the rifle to Norm for a look and he was equally impressed.

The fox was around 160 yards away with a safe backdrop, so safety off, set trigger and good night Eileen. We repeated the exercise at the next farm, however this time we decided to see how close we could get without spooking him. At 60 yards we thought enough was enough and bang, same terminal result. Two shots, two clean kills, both of which were on farms with twitchy foxes.