The other aspect of last year's hunt was night vision binoculars. I own a Yukon Ranger Pro 5x42 Digital Night Vision Binocular (below) and they retail brand new for £600 or so (I got mine second hand). The "5" refers to the magnification and the "42" to the size of the objective lens in mm. This item is not like an ordinary pair of binoculars as it uses CCD technology to capture and boost the image to the eyepiece. Now night vision scopes are nothing new and indeed have been used at Loch Ness before. However, they are becoming cheaper and come with more features.
The range of viewing is up to 600m with a pixel resolution of 510x492 but the image quality very much depends on ambient conditions. The one feature that mainly motivated me to buy this was the composite video output port. In other words, what you see through the eyepiece is also sent to this port and a simple cable allows this to be attached to a recording device. That device can be a laptop with a composite to USB converter or a mini-DVR (which is more portable in the field).
Now the reason for the night vision scope is due to my belief that the Loch Ness Monster is mainly a nocturnal creature. This stands to reason as the beast lives practically all its life in dark, cold conditions. Therefore, excursions to the surface (and land) are IMO more likely at night time. This idea has indeed led to some night time experiments in the past. I think particularly of the searchlight experiments of the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau in the 1960s.
However, my main aspiration lies in the ultimate target - a photograph of the Loch Ness Monster on land. That kind of picture would be more decisive than something taken in the water - if the right equipment and conditions are fulfilled. It is my own belief that the creature comes onto the shore (and beyond) more frequently that we think. I say this because of the creature's sensitivity to light and sound. It is nocturnal and it also retreats at overt levels of noise. When it comes to terrestrial sightings, that means it prefers night time and quiet roads. That may still make land visitations very infrequent and so I am planning a strategy that maximises the chances of getting that "ultimate" shot.
It may takes years to get that picture, but then again I might get lucky. On the other hand, surface water and underwater surveillance have proved useless due to the murkiness of the water, the huge size of the loch and the fact that the creature unsurprisingly does not show enough of itself for proper study and identification. These techniques have had a go for almost 80 years, time for some lateral thinking and a new approach.
But going back to the night vision binoculars, I did a trial run back in October at a quiet spot near Dores Bay at about 7pm when it was pretty dark. I must admit it was a bit creepy walking about a dark beach alone in the belief that the loch holds one or more 40 foot carnivores that have been known to go on land. Obviously I survived to tell the tale!
I set up the binoculars on a tripod and fed the video output to a laptop which was running some video capture software. I then camouflaged it, pointed it at the loch and went away for a few hours. A short clip of the video capture is show below.
The first point is that it is dark and that leads to a loss of clarity if something did pass by. There was however a main source of infrared/light across the loch at the Clansman Hotel whose presence made me somewhat ambivalent. The advantage was that any object passing in front of the lights would have a more discernible outline. The disadvantage was my concern that dark objects would appear darker with these lights behind them. However, if something had come on shore in front of my setup, I am sure (based on me standing in front of the binoculars) it would have some reasonable clarity.
But light levels are a problem compared to daylight. In mitigation of this, Yukon add what they call an IR laser illuminator to the binoculars. This is essentially a high powered infra-red laser that helps light up the field of view in the infra-red spectrum. The advantage is obvious as IR light reflected back to the binoculars makes for a clearer scene. It does have two drawbacks. The first is that the illuminator consumes more power and eats into the batteries (battery lifetime reduces from 10 to 3 hours). The second is that its range is limited which is not much use further out on the loch.
In that respect, I invested in a separate and more powerful 45mW IR scope (below) which can fit neatly onto the top of the binoculars and gives a claimed 12 battery lifetime. The stated range is 450 meters with a light spot size of 10-70 minutes of arc. If one looks through the binocular eyepiece, the laser beam appears as a diffuse spot illuminating a certain area (as does the inbuilt illuminator). But we must remember all devices will give a diminishing return proportional to the inverse square of an object's distance. So like daylight sightings, one is still dependent on the creature putting in a relatively close appearance for better results.
The second issue was battery life as connections to the National Grid were not exactly in abundance on the shoreline. I had the binoculars, its IR illuminator and the recording device all on rechargeable batteries and the binoculars proved to be the weakest link as they ran out first. The binoculars lasted a maximum of three to four hours while the laptop could last up to eight hours. So it looks like the illuminator indeed limits binocular life. One help is to attach the aforementioned laser scope and turn off the binocular's internal one to save battery time. Secondly, use the longest life batteries available (I would note the trap cameras have no problem with battery life as the Wildgame Innovations was still active after 25 days and 674 snaps).
As it happens, I am still working through the three hours or so of binocular video, it is pretty boring and hard on the eyes. The video capture file for this length of recording comes in at about 8Gb because it was a continuous recording.
What I hope to use for the first time on this trip is my Secumate mini-DVR. Laptops are fine but a bit cumbersome and fragile for this kind of work. The mini-DVR is compact, rugged and can fit into your pocket. Our Bigfoot hunters love these things as you can plug it into the video out port, put it in your pocket and start roaming around the forest on foot. That is a night time scenario I might have a go at but the whole point of the exercise just now is to set something up and let it run automatically while you sleep.
