The need for clarity

A predawn stalk in damp, murky conditions is the ultimate test of your equipment particularly the optics. ZEISS’s latest riflescope and binoculars get top marks

- CHRIS DALTON

Lessons are often best learned the hard way, something my father never tired of telling me. I think I may be morphing into him because I frequently hear myself offering the same advice to my own, now grownup, children and my grandchildren.

Many years ago, having bought a rifle and paired it with a budget scope, I found myself in a tower in deepest West Sussex, having paid a not inconsiderable sum to be there, waiting for what would be my first fallow buck. Said buck duly obliged, emerging out of the trees in the half-light as fallow are prone to do. I eased the rifle to my shoulder for what should have been an easy shot, only to be confronted by blackness.

What followed was some serious head bobbing; I could look over the scope and see him with my naked eye but could not make out a thing through the scope. The lucky fallow continued to browse, totally unaware of the drama being played out in the shed on legs above him. He did finally run off at the none-too-subtle tirade of expletives that came from the heavens.

Lesson well and truly learned, I now only ever use high-quality optics in both scope and binoculars. Good lenses are an essential, particularly so in commercial forestry blocks when I am working on my winter doe and hind cull. Deer in this environment are often quite hard-pressed, especially on new replant and in forest creation schemes and — while I am against the general demonisation of deer that seems to be fashionable in many quarters just now — I do have a responsibility to owners to monitor and control deer numbers in these areas carefully.

Impenetrable