If you have considered reevaluating your personal finance practices at any time in the last 20 years you have undoubtedly heard the name Dave Ramsey before. If you haven’t, stop reading this blog post and immediately find a friend with his Financial Peace University program and borrow it. Ramsey has helped numerous people free themselves from debt and like many young couples my significant other and I are in the process of going through the program. While listening to a lecture today on the topic of personal finance, I was struck when Dave explained the concept of opportunity costs. Simply put, opportunity costs are tradeoffs that occur when you choose to spend your money or time on one thing instead of another. For example, if I invest my disposable income in an IRA, I can’t also use it to do home improvements. Assuming that most people act rationally, we tend to choose the option which we perceive gives us the greatest return.
Now, the concept of an opportunity cost is not new to me. However, what if I considered it in light of hunting? I know this sounds crazy, but hear me out. How we spend our time outdoors ultimately determines what benefit we yield from such time. Because we cannot be in two places at once, there are opportunity costs associated with each outdoor activity. A number of different variables affect the result of a hunt (and the associated opportunity costs):
-Game
pursued
-Located
hunted
-Time of day
-Weapon used
-Hunting
party size
-Hunting technique
Consider the
following scenario:
What do you
pursue?
Every
decision we make is a trade-off and I’ve been in this scenario a hundred times.
The decision is never easy. Because gun season for whitetail is often short
(two weeks or less) there is a huge pressure to hunt deer. However, unless you’ve
considered the need to accommodate two people with a ground blind, multiple
stands, or a two-person stand then you either have to leave your buddy out of
the hunt or risk being unsuccessful. Conversely, if you want to hunt small game
or birds the likelihood of you harvesting a deer is slim. Furthermore, you’ll
need to be wearing blaze orange which makes waterfowl hunting extremely
difficult. Finally, if you do decide to take waterfowl you’ll also need to pack
only non-toxic shot, which is expensive and ineffective at extended distances.
Can you see
how this turns into a big puzzle? Oft times when faced with such decisions I
tend to hedge my bets—I pursue a mixed bag (small game and birds) with
non-toxic shot and a partner. This increases the fun factor of the hunt because the day is varied and can be spent
with a companion in the field. Yes, you’ll have to wear blaze orange and you’ll
spook a number of ducks. You’ll also be forced to limit your shots to
relatively close range. However, the associated opportunity costs are less than
what I perceive to be the benefit of going afield with a buddy and pursuing one
of my favorite quarries (waterfowl).
Where
opportunity costs really come into play is in choosing a weapon. If you’ve read
my prior blog post “Dynamic” Bird Watching (http://piouspatriot.blogspot.com/2014/05/dynamic-bird-watching.html)
you’ll recall that I was forced to pass on a really, really big tom turkey this
year because I opted to take a shotgun along that had a limited range. I’m
tickled to have gotten a turkey despite this, but I still can’t help but slightly
wonder if things would have not been different had I been actually been packing
my shotgun that is set up to shoot turkeys at long range. This is a perfect example
of taking odd weapons afield and paying for it—yet for me it is a trend that I
don’t see ending anytime soon.
I have a
nostalgic streak a mile wide, which is why I’m set on trying to take a deer
this year with a single-action revolver. There is just something undeniably
cool about forcing yourself to get close to the quarry and making the shot that
most people can’t. This is also why I often let my compound bow sit in the
closet and why I pick up my lithe (but decidedly less efficient) longbow. The
downside to this is that there is an associated opportunity cost and frequently
you come home empty-handed. Now, as a hunter you have to accept from the beginning
that you won’t be successful on every outing. However, there is such a thing as
a glutton for punishment.
About four
years ago I was at the zenith of my duck hunting fervor. I loved it. Mallards.
Gadwalls. Wigeons. Heck, I’d even shoot a Ringneck. There was great joy in
sneaking over a pond dam and seeing a veritable array of different duck species
on the other side. To boot, I had gotten really good at shooting ducks. In
fact, on a number of occasions I would empty my gun (limited to three shells by
law), kill three ducks, reload, and kill three more ducks on a single rise.
Despite having killed hundreds of ducks in my life, I had not (and still haven’t)
shot a duck with a band. This failure ate at me and gnawed my very core as a
duck hunter. Where could all of these mythical banded ducks be!? Despite this,
I still loved duck hunting and wanted to combine it with another one of my
passions: shooting a longbow. So, for about two months’ time I duck hunted with
a quiver of arrows on my back and a longbow in my hand. Talk about failure. I
buzzed ducks with arrow fletchings. I spooked ducks trying to get close. I
lobbed arrows at ducks on the other side of the pond. I belly-crawled up to
ducks and spent countless time glassing ducks with binoculars. Pretty much the
only thing I didn’t do was kill a duck with a longbow. Eventually, reality set
in and I realized that the opportunity
cost was just too high. Each time a red-leg mallard sprung from the
cattails and each time a white-capped wigeon whistled away I could not help but
think, “Was that the banded duck I’ve been waiting on?”
However, not
all nostalgia-fueled escapades are such abysmal failures. Last year I managed
to do two novelty method hunts that were so rewarding that I’ll be back to
hunting ducks with a longbow before long. You see, I actually managed to take a
public land whitetail with an iron-sighted rifle designed in 1878 and I managed
to harvest a cottontail rabbit with a revolver. Though neither animal would be
going into a record book, each of these hunts left an indelible mark on my
hunting mindset and have led me to hunger for more challenging adventures. So,
in the end when you consider how you’ll go afield next fall perhaps the
greatest reward might be to still-hunt instead of freeze to death in a deer
stand, or to take your grandfather’s shotgun afield instead of your new
Benelli. Antler and meat count for a lot to a hunter, but they don’t count
quite as much as memories do.
