A nature lover or hunter normally have a binocular close by – usually a good one. Of course, here is always a debate which product or reinforcement is the best, but for the following purpose any make will be good enough.

Apart from the obvious uses such as watching animals, birds and stars, the binocular can also be adapted for the following:

• Make a fire: If you have a lens, sunlight or even one of those new 1500 candlelight spot lights, then you can start a fire. A binocular, directed to the sun, will collect sunlight on its lenses and focus the energy on the point where the eye usually will be. The heat there gets enormously high and will easily light tinder. That is why a person must never look at the sun directly through the binocular

• Microscope: A microscope is very handy in the veld especially if you want to investigate something small, want to see a thorn in your finger or a small crack on the cartridge case. An upsidedown binocular works excellently for this. You look through the big lens and bring the object to the focus point at the bottom lens and see, your binocular is doing the work of a microscope.

• Dr Wallace Vosloo is an Engineer and Scientist by profession. His family has lived in Africa since 1696 and he has a deep love for the continent. He is a practical outdoorsman and loves traditional hunting, axe and knife throwing, longbow shooting, black powder rifle- and cannon shooting, salt and fresh water fly fishing and tracking. The art of survival is Wallace’s main field of interest and his passion is to transfer these old forgotten skills to young hunters.

  Zoom lens for a camera: Maybe there is a zebra that you want to photograph with your digital camera but he is far away and the function that allows you to zoom in is not enough.
  Take your binocular, focus on the object and then place the lens of the camera carefully just at the back of the eyepiece of the binocular. Hold the two together, aim on the zebra, look in the display and take your photo with the camera that is looking through the binocular. If your hands are steady, it will work fine though picture quality might be poor