Best Optics for Fox and Night Vermin Control

More British shooting happens after dark on a fox than on almost anything else. It is the everyday job: the farmer rings, the lambs are out, and you are sitting in a truck at two in the morning with a rifle across your knees. The kit that suits it is a genuinely different specification from a stalking rig — the optic has to work in no light at all, the light itself matters as much as the glass, and the whole assembly has to survive being carried across wet stubble in the dark. Here is how the pieces fit together, using stock we hold.

The scope: illumination is the whole argument

A black reticle against a black fox against a black hedge is nothing. That is the single thing that separates a night rifle scope from a day one, and it is why every serious foxing scope has an illuminated centre.

What you want from that illumination is a low enough bottom setting. Plenty of scopes give you a bright red cross that is superb at dusk and blinding at midnight. The Burris Veracity line runs 11 brightness settings with off positions between each, so you can step down to something that marks the aiming point without washing out the animal behind it. The Burris Veracity 2.5-12x42 with the illuminated Fiber Dot Plex reticle is the natural foxing scope in that family: a clean Plex with an illuminated Fiber Dot centre, 11.2 mm of exit pupil at the bottom of its range, and a 2.5x setting that lets you pick up a fox running the hedge line.

If you want holdovers as well, the Veracity 3-15x44 FFP with the illuminated RC-MOA reticle puts an 8-MOA illuminated centre cross with 1 MOA hashes in the first focal plane. And if you would rather the scope did the thinking, the SIG Sauer SIERRA6BDX 2-12x40 pairs over Bluetooth with a SIG BDX rangefinder and lights a holdover dot at the correct elevation for the ranged distance — useful when the range changes shot to shot and you have no time to count hashes in the dark.

The lamp: candela, not lumens

This is where most money gets spent in the wrong place. Lumens is total output. Candela is beam intensity, and it is candela that determines how far a beam usefully reaches. ANSI beam distance works out at roughly two times the square root of candela, in metres — so a light with modest lumens and high candela out-throws a much "brighter" flood.

For identifying a fox at 150 to 250 m you want throw, not spill. Here is what that looks like across the lights we stock, with the figures taken from each product's own specification.

Read the first two rows against each other and the point lands. The ProTac 2.0 Rail Mount is nearly twice the lumens of the VIR Pro and reaches about two-thirds as far, because its output is spread rather than focused. Our lumens vs candela chart works through the maths in full.

Lamping practice

Beyond the numbers, a few things decide whether a night set-up actually works on the ground.

• Scan with the edge of the beam. The corona around a focused hot spot picks up eyes at distance without lighting the animal up. Bring the hot spot on only to confirm and to shoot.
• Filters change behaviour, not legality. Red and amber filters are widely used on the basis that quarry reacts less to them. Whether one helps on your ground is an empirical question — try it before committing.
• Momentary switching matters more than output. A pressure pad you can pulse for half a second beats a click-on light you have to remember to kill. The ProTac VIR Pro ships with a remote pressure switch and its retaining clips in the box.
• Watch the water rating when the pad goes on. The VIR Pro is IPX7 with the push-button tailcap fitted and IPX4 with the remote switch fitted instead. That is typical of pressure-switch lights and worth knowing before a wet night. Our IP ratings explained guide covers what those numbers mean.
• Carry spare cells. The VIR Pro gives 1.5 hours on high from two CR123A cells, 2.75 hours on medium and 11 hours on low. Cold nights are not kind to batteries.

Where night vision and thermal sit

Two distinct things get lumped together. Night vision amplifies what light there is, and needs some — which is why NV devices are usually paired with an infrared illuminator that the device can see and the fox cannot. Thermal images heat rather than light and needs none at all, which is why it has taken over for finding quarry in cover.

We do not currently stock dedicated night vision or thermal scopes. What we do hold is the illuminator side of it: the Streamlight ProTac Rail Mount VIR Pro is a dual-spectrum unit with 2,300 mW of infrared output on high at 940 nm alongside its white light, with a head-mounted selector and a safety cut-off that stops you triggering white light by accident while in infrared mode. The USB version, part 88139, is the same light supplied with the SL-B26 rechargeable pack.

Note also that plenty of day optics will run behind a night vision device: the Primary Arms SLx 3X MicroPrism has three night-vision-compatible settings among its thirteen, and the Holosun HS510C has two of its twelve.

The legal position on night vision and thermal in Britain is a subject in its own right, and it changed in Scotland as recently as November 2023. We have set it out separately in is night vision legal in the UK rather than summarising it badly here, and do you need a licence for a rifle scope, red dot or torch covers where torches and optics sit.

Putting it on the rifle

A night rifle carries more hardware than a day one, and it has to hold zero through all of it. If the same rifle does daytime stalking, a quick-detach mount lets you strip the light and the optic for transport and put them back on zero — the American Defense AD-RECON cantilever mount uses ADM's Auto Lock lever, which self-adjusts to in-spec and out-of-spec Picatinny rails and returns to zero when refitted. The Warne Maxima 30mm quick-detach rings do the same job in ring form.

For the light, you need a rail or an M-LOK slot to hang it from and enough forward position that the beam clears the muzzle and the moderator. Mount it at three or nine o'clock rather than twelve if you can, so the beam does not throw shadow off the barrel.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best magnification for foxing?
Something starting at 2.5x or 3x and topping out around 12x. You need low power to find an animal moving in the dark and enough top end to identify it, but the exit pupil shrinks as you wind up, so the top of the range is less usable at night than it is at noon.

Do I need more lumens or more candela for lamping?
Candela. It is beam intensity, and it governs throw. A 2,000-lumen flood at 17,700 cd reaches about 266 m; a 650-lumen turbo light at 66,000 cd reaches about 514 m.

Will a weapon light work as a lamp?
A high-candela rifle light does the job for shot ranges, and a remote pressure switch makes it usable one-handed. For scanning wide ground, many shooters still prefer a separate hand-held lamp and use the rifle light only to confirm and shoot.

Can I use an infrared illuminator without night vision?
No. The infrared on the ProTac VIR Pro works at 940 nm, which is invisible to the naked eye and requires a night vision device to see anything at all.

Does an illuminated reticle drain the battery quickly?
Not on modern scopes. The Veracity line runs its illumination from a single CR2032, and most reflex sights hold state far longer than a season — the red dot sight battery chart lists what each optic takes.

Browse rifle scopes, weapon lights, tactical lighting and handheld flashlights, or start from the deer stalking scopes collection if the same rifle does both jobs — our guide to the best scopes for deer stalking covers the daylight half. For a deeper look at the lights themselves see best weapon lights and SureFire vs Streamlight. Everything is UK-stocked and dispatched tracked from our warehouse.