Hi-tech Heroes Give Rats Nowhere to Hide

Farms tend to see an influx of rats as harvest time gathers momentum towards the latter part of the summer. This is when the hungry rodents move off the fields and on to places where they can find easy pickings as crops are gathered in.

Now is the time to crack down on these unwelcome, disease-spreading pests before cold weather and diminishing natural food reserves push yet more of them away from the open countryside and on to the farmyard. An air rifle is the perfect tool for poison-free control of rats around farm buildings, especially if you pair it with a modern digital night-vision sight.

Night-vision optics have revolutionised after-dark rat shooting over recent years. Go back a decade or so and these sighting devices were generally too expensive, too heavy and too complicated to use to be a viable option for nailing rats around the farm. Things have changed for the better now, though, and you can buy a good night-vision optic that produces a full-colour image by day and gives sharp lamp-free night-vision viewing after darkness closes in for well under £1,000.

Prices for the HIKMICRO Cheetah digital day and night scope start at less than £500 and you can pick up the model shown on these pages — which features an integral laser rangefinder and infrared illuminator — for under £600. Of course, that sort of outlay still makes for a considered purchase, but it’s a lot less than we would have been paying for inferior devices only a couple of years ago.

The greatest advantage of night-vision optics is that they don’t need any light — not in the usual sense, anyway — for you to see your target. Instead, they have an infrared designator, which provides illumination that is almost impossible to see with the naked eye. This lamp-free approach provides a huge degree of stealth by enabling us to snipe rats from the cover of darkness  with no shining light to alert them to our presence. Larger, more powerful illuminators can increase detection range but a small integral unit, such as the onboard illuminator on the HIKMICRO Cheetah, are more than powerful enough for targeting rats and rabbits with an air rifle.

Optics such as the Cheetah are very easy to operate. I don’t like to have my shooting hampered by complicated electronic equipment and that is certainly not a problem with this unit. Set-up is done via an easy-to-navigate menu and, although it has the capability to capture video, you don’t actually have to use anything other than the power button when you’re out shooting with it.

AIMPOINT

A couple of features worth taking advantage of, though, are its laser rangefinder and ballistic calculator. They work together to automatically adjust the aimpoint to compensate for the rise and fall of the pellet as it travels downrange. 

Shooters who don’t often use airguns may think this sort of optical technology is over the top for such a 
simple gun, but an airgun pellet has a distinctly curved trajectory. It can be particularly tricky to accurately work out holdover at close ranges before the pellet has converged with the line of sight.

If you want to give your rat shooting even more of a technological boost, a thermal spotter will put more rodents in the bag. Being able to spot a rats’ heat signatures, even when they are partially obscured by cover, makes it almost impossible to miss your quarry, whether you’re out in broad daylight or in total darkness. Being a bit of a technophobe, I was a little late to the thermal party, but after using spotters very frequently over the past two or three years, I really don’t know how I would get by without one now.

SIMPLE CONTROLS

Like night-vision sights, thermal spotters aren’t cheap, but they are a lot less expensive than they used to be. Prices for HIKMICRO’s Lynx 2.0, which is currently my go-to thermal monocular, start at under £900 and you can pick up the tiny Explorer for just £329.99. This little thermal camera plugs into a phone or tablet via a USB-C connection and converts it into a handheld thermal spotter.

If you can justify the outlay, the Lynx isn’t only useful for ratting but also serves as an effective spotter for rabbit, fox, deer and boar shooting. It is small enough to stash in a jacket pocket and it took me very little time to master its simple controls. This spotter enables viewing in white hot, red hot, black hot and fusion colour palettes. Flicking through them usually reveals one which works best in any given situation.

My usual approach when shooting rats at night is to start with a stroll around the holding, during which I will use the spotter to identify the areas where rats are most active. Rather than wandering about and stopping to shoot rats as and when I spot them, I usually adopt a more methodical approach by targeting the busy areas one at a time. This enables me to set up on a stool and shoot from the support of a tripod, which makes for very precise shot placement.

FIELD OF VIEW

Once I’ve settled into a spot — usually between 15m and 20m from where I expect the rats to be moving — I’ll then use my thermal monocular to scan for rats. For this I like to have the device set on its lowest magnification setting to give me the widest possible field of view. Having located a rat in a shootable position, I then move over to my infrared night-vision scope, which will usually be set at between 6x and 10x magnification. 

Infrared optics tend to produce a clearer image than thermal units with a lot more detail of not only the target but also what is in front of and behind it. This enhanced clarity facilities safe and humane shot placement.

With so much cutting-edge kit at our disposal, it’s easy to overlook the low-tech items that can also make a difference. If I was to recommend one further key piece of equipment to add to your nighttime ratting arsenal it would be a decent head lamp. 

It is all very well being able to spot heat profiles then shoot through a super-sharp night-vision scope, but these optics aren’t so good when you need to find your way safely around the farm. A good head lamp with an adjustable beam provides light wherever you need it, which is a real asset when you want to see where you’re putting your feet, or need to reload a magazine with tiny pellets in the middle of the night. It will also prove very useful when you need to gather up shot rats for disposal at the end of your nocturnal farmyard foray.

If you’ll permit me two more relatively cheap accessories, I would suggest keeping some hand wipes  and hand sanitiser in your car. Rats can carry some horrible infections, including Weil’s disease, and you don’t have to handle rodents to contract them. Giving your hands a proper scrub at the end of the night is a simple task and doing it with the right stuff can make a big difference.

*Before purchasing any thermal or digital day & night vision device, please make sure you adhere to the local ledislation and only use it when it is allowed. Our ambassadors come from various countries and travel a lot, which allows them to test different devices. We do not encourage or support the illegal use of our devices in any events.