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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kevin Purcell" data-source="post: 1487943" data-attributes="member: 68323">Another way of looking at this is trying to come up with a SWAG for the number of high end bins sold to birders in the US.First you need an estimate of the number of birders. This part of a UK document "Birding in the United States: a demographic and economic analysis"<a href="http://www.jncc.gov.uk/PDF/pub07_waterbirds_part6.2.5.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.jncc.gov.uk/PDF/pub07_waterbirds_part6.2.5.pdf</a>is an extract of the full document Boere, G.C., Galbraith, C.A. & Stroud, D.A. (eds).  2006. Waterbirds around the world.   The Stationery Office, Edinburgh, UK.  960 pp.from<a href="http://www.jncc.gov.uk/worldwaterbirds" target="_blank">http://www.jncc.gov.uk/worldwaterbirds</a>and summarizes the results of the 2001 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife-Related Recreation (FHWAR) by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Not the most recent one (there was another in 2006) but it has all the data nicely summarized.This is just the birder bits but the full report could be used to answer the question about how many hunters are there to each birder.So how many birders are there in 2001?Still that's a huge number (about 15% of the total US population).Still huge!Or perhaps you need a definition of a serious birder. They have oneSo I'd say a intermediate birder could identify more than 41 species. So now I think were getting into the sort of birders with might bump into on the "local patch". So that's about 1.8 million. Or if you think away from home listers are more serious 0.9 million. No wonder "Montlake Fill" in Seattle is so crowded.So lets say 1 million serious birders. That's still a big number. That completes the Scientific bit. Now we get the Wild-Assed Guess bit.What fraction of these typical affluent white, middle-class, birders will spend real money on their bins. Well, typically people are price sensitive in some sort of power law fashion. Fraction spending $N is k/(N**a)I have no idea what the exponent a might be but lets just guess it's 1 like Zipf's Law for the occurrence of town sizes or word lengths. It might be something larger in which case people are less likely to spend more in a much stronger manner. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf_Law" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf_Law</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rank-size_distribution" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rank-size_distribution</a>And I'd guess too that average serious birders spend $200 or less on a bin given the number of compacts I've seen. You might be able to guess this from the average price over all the bins you see too. I've seen quite a few cheap compacts and few porros. Perhaps this could be $150 but I doubt it's above $200.So 0.5 = k/(200**1) so k = 100.So the fraction having an $N bin is 100/N. A 30% might have Monarchs or Rangers. 6% might have $1500 bins.So that's about 66,000 "Top Four" bin owners in the USA.Lets say people buy a new bin every 10 years or so. That's perhaps 6,600 Top Four bin sales per year.Fell free to mess about with the numbers to get whatever answer you want. <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite2" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=";)" />But I think the total number of "Top Four" bins sold per year to birders is in this order of magnitude (around 10,000).The calculation for hunters is left as an exercise for the reader.Another number is in the report but I only noticed it after doing the above calculation in Table 10Table 10. Birders’ expenditures for wildlife-watching: 2001. (Population 16 years of age and older; numbers in thousands of US dollars).Binoculars, spotting scopes $471,264So that's $471 million on all optics (bins and scopes) for 46 million birders. That's an average of $10ish per birder in 2001. Which if you believe the $100 average bin purchase with a 10 year lifetime is not too  far from my assumptions above though it includes all birders not the "hard core" 2% I identify. Make of that what you will.</blockquote>

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