Animal Eye Reflection

I am wondering about which lights pick up animal eye reflection the best. I am in Louisiana and like to pick alligator eyes far away to steer clear while in the boat for example.

In my experience regular old yellow lights will pick them up. But a bright xenon light like a e1e or e2e pick them up 70% better.

My big question is: Do LED lights pick up critters as well in the dark? The goal here would be to burn a smaller light to cause less of a disturbance in the woods, but still be aware of critters that might want to take a bite out of my leg.

I am thinking that LED's will not accomplish this. Anyone have experience with this?

As always, thanks for your thoughts on the matter. All responses are welcome. Sometimes the most off the wall responses can later reveal a great idea!

My 21 LED mini picks up eyes. The distance probably wasn't much over 50', but it's not a thrower to begin with.

my red/orange LuxIII work pretty well at this...
yet to try my Royle Blue LuxIII

LED's probably are better than incans. The reflective part of the animal eye is greenish in color, at least in species with the tapus ludicum (sp?). That's the "reflector" in the back of cats' eyes, that lets them see better in near-darkness. Dunno about gators.

I pick up coons from huge distances with a LuxIII Aleph with either the 2 or 3 head. It's important to me right now because my dog is in recovery from leg surgery, so don't want her stressing her knee yet by lunging at them, so I can see them well in advance and avoid them.

Little brother made me hack together a Lux 3 & a Mag reflector into a headlamp for frogging. He says that his similarly configured flashlight picks out frog eyes better than anything else he has tried. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon3.gif

snakes' eyes don't reflect back, from what I remember (would've made my life easier walking out at night...). I gotta luv the gators though, you go out on a boat and all these gleaming little eyes everywhere... cool stuff.

I suspect the main issue here would be throw, not color.

-john

I think both throw and flood would be useful. Throw alone would be limited in scope and would have to be moved around a lot to cover than a flood with enough range would.
What it would probably come down to is minimum distance required to see the eyes reflect. If this distance was out of the range of most LED based combinations they would be less effective, if distance is well within LED range they may be more effective than incans.

I would tend to think that there's several important points to consider. First, minimize the amount of light coming back at you. Mounting the lights would be a start - swinging the light back and forth would cause you to sooner or later illuminate something in the boat - causing your night vision to go down. A good reflector/deflector system so almost all the light goes out and doesn't scatter back would be important.

Got to wonder, though, whether less light would be better. You won't be killing your night vision and the reflection from all the surroundings would be dimmer resulting in the eye reflection being that much more contrasty. For that matter, dependent on the color of your surroundings (I'm assuming green water, green trees, green everywhere...) that maybe a color that naturally gets absorbed in green like red might be a good choice. Green leaves/trees/water... under red illumination looks black so any reflection is even more noticeable. Whether gator eyes reflect red back though??

My experience has been that LEDs work better for reflecting eyes. I haven't spotted a gator with one though. They are fairly rare up here.

Spider webs and spider's eyes too. I can see spider and some other insects eyes with a 3X3W white light at 50' to 100' depending.

From another thread:
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Icebreak said:
I took the 5W RB to an almost completely dark area last weekend. I've had it for a while but didn't realize the 30mm optic would throw the beam 100 yds in that environment. I was walking next to the river near the hydro plant and no one was around. I was enjoying my amazment of being able to see so clearly w/o glasses on. I could feel a presence in the area. Then I saw a pair of purple eyes staring back at me...then another and another and so on. Apparently there was a population of feral cats in the area. They were cautiously peeking out of their hidding places but not running away. Just staring. Some came closer. I could walk toward them and they wouldn't run. I turned on an incandecsent once and they scattered but stopped and returned to their curious observations after I turned it off. Odd to see twenty purple eyes shining back at you.

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- Jeff

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