Hunting going high-tech

PITTSBURGH — Raising a rifle scope to his eye, Dan Tracey squints and takes aim at an imaginary target. Then, he twists a knob and the device's cross-hairs light up like a Christmas tree.

"If it's pitch black (outside), you can see everything," said the 25-year-old hunter, placing the $1,400 accessory back in a display case at the Sportsman's Warehouse store he manages on Pittsburgh's outskirts. The chain is based in Salt Lake City.

Electronic scopes are among an array of high-tech gadgets and premium quality products that have hit the market in recent years and contributed to unprecedented spending among hunters, even as the number of people taking up the sport continues to decline.

The hunting business — guns, accessories and trip expenses — is a roughly $21 billion industry, according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's most recent figures.

Spending among individual hunters has jumped 11 percent annually over the past decade, with current spending estimated at $1,638 yearly per hunter, said Steve Wagner, a spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a firearms industry trade group.

Also fueling spending are soaring costs for permits and trips to increasingly rarified hunting preserves — a trend hunters say has shifted the sport away from its blue-collar base.

"The number of participants is shrinking, but collectively, hunters are spending more than they ever have on their sport," Wagner said. "Part of it is because of the technology."

Among the gizmos enticing hunters: a $200 pair of headphones that block the clatter of gunfire but allow lower-decibel sounds such as the voice of a fellow hunter; $500 binoculars that digitally compensate for shaky hands; and a variety of $100 to $450 color-screen Global Positioning System devices that display topographical maps.

Other products pushing up the market include shotguns with rare hardwood stocks and detailed metalwork that fetch upward of $6,000, goose decoys for $120 apiece and shotgun shells filled with tungsten pellets that set back hunters $2 each time they pull the trigger.

"Before it was just plain (shotguns) — really just wood and metal," said Tracey, the Sportsman's Warehouse manager. "Now they're inlaying gold in them and engraving them. Every year, we see higher- and higher-end guns of that type. But people are buying them. It's kind of like the SUV of guns."