Bushnell Binos & BackTrack D-Tour
It was a lovely morning this morning, so I took the opportunity to get out with some cool kit I am trialling. A few weeks ago I mentioned that I was trialling some kit for Bushnell… some binoculars and a GPS bit of kit called the Bushnell BackTrack D-Tour. I will be doing a full review on these products on my website in the next month or so.
Armed with these and my camera we went for a walk on the edges of Cannock Chase… a part called Cannock Forest. As soon as I got there, I turned on the DTour and it picked up the satellite signal. You then select the ‘trip’ function. Simple as that! Slip it in your pocket and forget about it!
The weather was wonderful… warm sunshine and autumnal colours beginning to emerge. There was plenty of bird life around for me to test the Bushnell binoculars which are performing brilliantly…great clarity and comfortable to hold with their rubbery coating. A large area of the forest was felled about two years ago and they left about 6 dead trees… I presume for wildlife. These prove popular with the woodpeckers as I saw two great spotted on one of these. Also, today, the tops of the trees were full of flocks of finches twittering in flocks of 30 -40 individuals. They stayed really near the top of the trees, feeding from the cones. I am pretty sure they were a mixed flock of redpoll, siskin and some other… very streaky and I thought they might be twite, but not sure they were behaving as twite should!
Quite a lot of fungi around, I must return in a few weeks and try and get some pictures. Quite a few jays flitting few the trees and I was delighted to get some great views of a beautiful pair of goldcrest feeding on cones. Sadly, too deep in the shade to get a photo.
On returning to the car, I pressed the trip button again on the DTour so it stopped recording my route. When I got home, it was simply a case of plugging the DTour into the PC using the USB cable. Straight away it uploads my route onto a google map…
Once uploaded, you can use the google map as you would normally… zoom in, display it as satellite or terrain or map. I am amazed at the detail that this bit of kit picks up…. These screen shots show me zooming in on the map and you can see my precise route. One ‘detour’ shows me walking round a pool where my dog had a swim and then me walking around watching the flocks of finches!
You can then save this map to your PC and rename it. You can display the distance, altitude , speed and temperature values at the base of the map, in a graph. I think it is great and a good way to keep a track of walks you do.
A lovely morning and early autumn at its best.
I quite often walk our dog , near the pools you went past. We come from the Hazel Slade end though. On the other side of the road to where your walk began was my best place for Sparrow Hawks ( i’ve not been to this part for a couple of years), and closer to Stile cop I remember there being a big badger sett. The Bushnell sounds like a great way of recording wildlife locations.