An Honest Review: HIK Vision Vulkan 15mm 35mK Smart Thermal Monocular (by Digby Taylor)

[All words and imagery are copyrighted to Digby Taylor of Guns On Pegs: https://shoothub.gunsonpegs.com/]

Being what some might call a traditionalist, and certainly a ‘hobbyist’ when it comes to stalking, the idea of utilising a Thermal Spotter for a weekend’s Stalking in the Highlands had never really crossed my mind. With the usual price of a half-decent bit of kit being north of £1,500, I didn’t have many plans to change that.

With my other hat on however as the Shoot Account Manager at GunsOnPegs - dealing mainly with estate owners and keepers - when offered the opportunity to review the HIK Vision Vulkan 15mm 35mK Smart Thermal Monocular, which retails at a fraction of the cost, I thought it was worth a try.

Having spoken to the team at Elite Optical Distribution (distributor for the HIK Vision Vulkan’s) shortly before a trip to the Highlands for a Sika Stag, I thought it presented the perfect opportunity, not only to trial it from a Stalking perspective, but also to see how the reasonably priced unit could be used by gamekeepers on shoots across the country.

Fieldtesting the HIK Vision Vulkan Thermal Monocular

On my way up North, I happened to be stopping off to visit a client just north of Manchester, and whilst walking around the shoot looking at the gorgeous topography, I got my first chance to get to grips with the Spotter in a real-life scenario.

As far as functionality goes, the Vulkan spotter is pretty smart. It has a load of features you wouldn’t have expected from a unit this well priced. There were four image modes - although I stuck with white-hot and red-hot, a hot-track feature where the hottest point on the screen was lit up with a green crosshair, and image and video recording.

The spotter was small enough to fit into my coat pocket, and the image quality - at least on the 1x magnification - was great.

Having not used a Spotter much before, it took a while to get used to how best to make use of it.

The Spotter is definitely not a substitution for your eyes - I spotted a Fox about 350m away (much to the dismay of the keeper I was with) with my eyes, sitting on a rock on the far hillside.

Looking through the Spotter, I was very unlikely to be able to detect the Fox from that range, as all the boulders on the hill stood out having been heated by the sun all day.

After the Fox spooked and ran up the hillside, the Spotter did a better job of showing a moving object, but species identification from this range is difficult.

Similarly, 10 minutes later, the Spotter helped me notice a heat spot in the heather from 150m, but lack of detail from this range meant I didn’t know what it was until I saw it with my own eyes - a Hare.

The same could be said for the poults around the pens - knowing they were there meant I could find them with the Spotter, but I don’t think it would have worked the other way round due to the size of the birds.

A keeper I know in Norfolk uses his Spotter to identify which trees his birds are roosting in at night, and move them on if they’re not where he wants them; I don’t think this spotter has the accuracy to help with that.

I was however looking forward to putting it through its paces over the next couple of days in the Highlands.

Unfortunately, having arrived at my friend’s estate just north of Inverness, the weather couldn’t have been worse - low cloud and drizzle.

Not only was the Stalking going to be hard work, but the detection limit of the Thermal was also severely limited by the atmospheric conditions as the light deflected off all the water droplets in the air.

We headed straight for a sheltered clearing on the edge of a block of forestry which we thought might be holding some Deer, sheltering from the battering the rest of the open moor was getting from the weather.

Sure enough, as we crept into position on the edge of the treeline, and looked down into a hollow, we bumped a Sika Hind, desperately hoping it wouldn’t let out a yelp to alert any lurking stags of our presence.

Having disturbed this area nonetheless, we continued on, hugging the treeline, stopping and looking every 10m or so for movement or a heat source on the spotter.

This sort of Woodland edge Stalking is when the Vulkan came into its own; close range - never more than 80m visibility - with relatively thick vegetation.

Having crawled through the low-hanging branches to a viewing point over a sheltered clearing, I could see immediately the heat spot of what could only be a Deer sheltering under a tree in the heather.

I sent my friend who had the Rifle ahead of me, as the Deer wasn’t visible from this angle.

A few paces in, a Stag stood up and trotted down the hill to the thicker cover.

I called out to stop him, at which point my friend fired a well-placed shot to drop him straight away.

As anyone who shoots Deer bigger than a Muntjac will know, now came the hard work - a 2hr pack-out before we were able to bring the car in to finish the job.

It was brilliant to know that without the Spotter we would have likely not been in a position to take a steady shoot after inevitably spooking him.

You could also see just how useful the tool would be for tracking a wounded animal, as the blood spots for the first 15 minutes afterwards were clearly glowing in the picture.

For a keeper who relies on their Thermal to keep on top of their predators, or to move birds around and keep an eye on wandering partridges, I would perhaps recommend the slightly more expensive HIK Vision Vulkan 35mm 35mK Smart Thermal Monocular. It has a detection range of 3,000m and improved quality of image when zooming in. However, in all, for the price, it is a great piece of kit.