Winter may well be almost over, although the flooded rivers, freezing temperatures and ankle-deep mud might indicate otherwise, but long, dark nights will still be with us for a while longer.
To some that means a ceasefire when it comes to hunting. For them the pursuit of airgun quarry is perhaps a pastime, a hobby that loses its appeal when the sun takes a breather and the thermometer plummets.
Quarry species, on the other hand, don’t have the luxury of taking a few months off. So, if your focus is pest control and you have a year-round obligation to your permission holders, you will be as busy as ever, whatever the weather.
Whilst I enjoy hunting with my air rifle as much as the next man, most of my time in the field is spent doing pest control. And this time of year is as busy as any other, more so in fact.
There’s something elemental and primaeval about shooting at night. With sight, our most potent of natural senses, compromised, everything else gets dialled up to 11. In the pitch black I can hear better, even smell better and I feel more alive than at any other time. Every step demands the utmost concentration.
However, no matter how much I like to fantasise that I am some kind of airgunning ninja, there’s no getting away from the fact that when it comes to instinct, I am woefully outgunned by my quarry. For them, it’s a game of life and death played out every night of their lives.
To bridge the gap, we rely on technology. And there’s no getting away from the fact we are better equipped to overcome the disadvantages of shooting in the dark thanks to innovations like infrared and thermal night vision scopes that are further enhanced with laser rangefinders and ballistic calculators. And, thanks to thermal spotters, there really is no hiding place for the creatures we set out to shoot.
Below: Digital optics like the Hikmicro Alpex 4K Lite Scope and Habrok binoculars give Rich an edge against wary rabbits
My fruit farm permission is a wonderful place to be during the warmer months when the strawberries, raspberries and blueberries fill the air with an intoxicating aroma, and swarms of pollinating bees and other insects provide a constant audio backdrop.
I shoot hundreds of rabbits during the days of spring, summer and autumn, not to mention plenty of crop-raiding woodpigeon and corvids too. But when winter comes around and the plants are stripped away and the polytunnels are taken down for repair, I shoot many more.
If you have an image of me creeping around the place like some kind of dark bunny avenger, I should stop you there because in winter, most of my pest control is done from the comfort of my truck. Shooting on foot in the dark is more of a challenge, but it’s hard to ignore the allure of heated seats and the blower on maximum.
To maintain the permission, I am committed to a bunny quota each month – it’s a price I’m happy to pay for what is an excellent permission that many others would like to take off me.
Numbers-wise, I’d had a few good months and had smashed my quota. So, with the pressure off, I decided to put on a few extra layers and forgo the heated luxury of the truck to pursue a few more rabbits on foot.
Old habits die hard though, and because I’m fortunate enough to have a firearms certificate and own several high-powerful air rifles, I took one with me – a Rat Works tuned 30 ft/lbs .22 calibre FX DRS. The fruit farm is vast and, with the cover afforded by many of the plants and polytunnels removed, getting close to rabbits with a sub-12 air rifle is doable, but much more difficult.
Below: Rich's high-power FX DRS makes life easier when culling rabbits over an extensive permission
The extended range of the DRS counts for nothing if I can’t see what I’m shooting at in the dark. Fortunately, my Hikmicro Alpex 4K Lite A40EL LRF takes care of that problem, and being so light and compact, it’s ideally suited to the rifle.
With the addition of an external IR illuminator – I use a Solaris SRX – the Alpex Lite delivers a crystal-clear monochrome picture in the dark. And to make life even harder for the bunnies, it has a laser range finder and ballistic calculator as well.
But the biggest benefit to me is the Alpex Lite’s simplicity. The trickiest part, and it’s really not that hard, is setting up the ballistic calculator function in one of the menus. You’ll need a chrono to input pellet velocity, but the rest is self-explanatory – pellet weight, height between the middle of the scope lens and middle of the barrel and you’re all set. Unlike most other similar scopes, you don’t even need to enter a ballistic coefficient for your pellets.
Below: The Hikmicro Alpex 4K Lite gives Rich accurate range readings and precise aim-off at the press of a button
Operating the range finder is a simple matter of placing a small box reticle on your target and pushing the rear of three buttons on top of the scope. The laser range finder then reads how far away the shot is and the ballistic calculator imprints a revised aiming point having worked out the holdover.
I realise that all this sounds too good to be true. And to an extent it is. On other similarly equipped scopes I have, on occasion, dialled in a perfect zero at 30 metres only to find the ballistic calculator groups shots high or low at 40 or 50 metres.
Addressing the problem is a question of adjusting the data in one of the fields in the menu. I find it easiest to tweak the pellet velocity entry; if my groups are too high, then increasing the pellet speed entry reduces the amount of holdover the scope wants to give you. Too low and you’ll need to decrease the velocity to give you more hold over.
Trust me – it’s not that hard. I’ve just spent five hours trying to get a new printer to work whereas setting up the Alpex took minutes.
Anyway, back to my winter bunny expedition.
As the wind blew and light rain fell, getting my gear out of the truck and shutting the tailgate again was a bit of a wrench. In addition to my rifle, I took a set of Primos Gen 3 trigger sticks and my HikMicro Habok Pro HX60LS thermal binoculars. And because I intended targeting rabbits in some horse paddocks first, I grabbed my beanbag seat as it makes an excellent gun rest when taking shots from gates and fences.
As regular shooters will know, rabbits are an unwelcome visitor on any paddock; the holes and scrapes they dig on a nightly basis are a death sentence to a horse if it breaks a leg in one.
The horses on the landowner’s paddocks aren’t your typical plod-around-a-field nags but highly expensive eventing and showjumping horses. If he’s worried about his strawberry plants, the thought of losing one of his precious horses makes him go weak at the knees.
With the rain easing to a drizzle, I made my way slowly down the track alongside one of the paddocks, peering through the scrubby bushes with my Hikmicro Habrok thermal binoculars for sight of a rabbit.
It didn’t take long to spot a few that were too far for a shot, even with the FAC FX DRS. But I reckoned that creeping down the fence line another 50 or 60 metres would get me close enough.
Below: Rich’s Hikmicro Habrok multi spectrum binoculars leave the rabbits with nowhere to hide
After a few more minutes scanning with the thermal just in case I’d missed a closer rabbit, I picked up my sticks and set off. Stopping every few yards to peer through the Habrok, I spotted a rabbit that had appeared from the bushes and was much closer than my original target.
The rangefinder on the thermal indicated 73 metres. It was the other side of a fence to the next paddock. The fence immediately in front was around 20 metres away. I had a choice: I could either clamber over the fence to get closer or use it as a rest for a shot I estimated to be around 50 metres away.
Truth be told, it wasn’t much of a choice as I knew that crashing about trying the hurdle the fence would scare the rabbit off. So, I crept towards it instead and rested the rifle on my beanbag in a convenient gap in the bushes.
The Alpex Lite’s range finder indicated a shot closer to 60 metres. However, the gusty breeze had stopped for a few minutes, and the shooting position was a steady as a rock, so I slipped off the safety catch and, placing the revised green dot aimpoint provided by the ballistic calculator, let the shot fly.
Below top: A beanbag seat makes for a stable shooting platform that's easy to carry
Below bottom: The ballisitic calculator on the Alpex 4K Lite instantly shows Rich exactly where to aim
Caught in the infrared beam, I glimpsed the pellet as it arced towards the rabbit for a split second before it hit home with a thud. The rabbit simply rolled onto its side, kicked its legs a few times and lay still.
Rather than retrieving the rabbit and risk scaring others off, I left it where it was, hoping to collect it and any others I shot in the paddock later on.
It proved to be a good decision as I could see a couple more rabbits back behind me in the same paddock. I retraced my steps and went through the same process of placing the bean bag on the fence and settling the rifle into it.
Once again, the rabbit was on the other side of another fence but this time a little closer at 45 metres. The Alpex 4K Lite indicated just a touch of holdover from the 30 metre zero and, full of confidence, I let the shot go.
The pellet flew down the IR beam once again and found its mark, knocking the rabbit onto its side for another clean kill. I managed to add a third rabbit, a particularly clean headshot at 60-odd metres, before the rest of the colony caught on to the fact that something was up.
I spent another half an hour scanning with the Habrok binoculars before collecting the three rabbits I’d shot. I put them in large plastic bags ready to take to the falconry centre the next morning and loaded my gear back in the truck for the short drive to the blueberry section of the farm.
At this time of the year, of course, the bushes are devoid of any fruit. The farm replaces a portion of the bushes every two or three years, so parts of the 30-acre plot were bare. However, the section I was headed for still had plenty of large bushes.
They are planted in rows about 60 metres long and a metre apart. However, where they have grown unchecked, the bushes almost touch each other, which makes spotting a rabbit and lasering the distance tricky, not to mentioning threading a pellet through the foliage.
I made my way down the ends of the rows, pausing to look for a rabbit through the Habrok binoculars each time. After half an hour, as I peered down yet another row, I saw a rabbit barely 20 metres away and conveniently sat in a large gap between the blueberry plants.
Retreating behind the bushes, I set up my sticks and then inched back again. The rabbit hadn’t moved, so I lined up the shot and knocked it over. The blueberry field yielded no more rabbits, so I made my way to the polytunnels that had been laid out with new plants on stands a metre above the ground.
Resuming my routine of creeping along the rows and peering down them with the thermal, I managed another four rabbits with clean head shots at 36 and 56 metres before the light rain that had been an annoyance got heavier.
By then the temperature had dropped considerably and, satisfied I had proved my manliness by forgoing the comforts of the heated truck for the night, I decided to call it quits.
GUN: FX Airguns DRS .22 FAC Rat Works tuned
SCOPE: Hikmicro Alpex 4K Lite A40E LRF
AMMO: JTS Dead Center .22 18.13 grain
THERMAL: Hikmicro Habrok PRO HX60LS
JACKET: Jack Pyke Half Zip Sherpa Fleece
BACKPACK: Jack Pyke Rucksack 25L
Article first published February 10th 2026
