I’m a believer, that in a competitive, pubic land hunting situation, especially for bull hunting. Having good enough glass on a scope that will let you see horns before, or at least at the same time another hunter who is running alpha bins. Can give you an advantage on making a good shot before another hunter touches off.
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PS
I’ve also been the hunter who had elk shot out from under me, because I didn’t have good enough optics to spot animals.
I learned up real quick.
I consider myself a pretty good shooter, but not a very good hunter. That said, I have spent enough time hunting to realize that use cases are different for different people. Someone that hunts a corn field, sage brush, farmland, rolling hills, SW desert, or alfalfa may have a different set of needs than someone that hunts deep, dark, hellholes.
I'm sure Beav knows this, but "dark timber" out here in the PNW and elsewhere is something that you literally have to see with your own eyes to believe. I don't know where he hunts, but the "hills" can be dang near vertical and they aren't tiny. I'm not talking rolling hills of the NE or SE portions of the US. More like straight up and down, and jagged. Not mountains per se, but a thousand or more in elevation. It gets "dark" well before legal sunset in those holes and only gets worse. And it's literally a rainforest. Luckily, shooting distances are short.
In contrast, you can get out of a hole and hunt clearcuts that are literally lit up by moonlight, just like a crop field, or desert landscape. I've seen a lot more hunters lurking those areas, but there are plenty of tough bastards out here that dive down into those hellholes after deer and elk.
So will a scope that works well in sage brush or crop fields, +/- 30 minutes of sunset, be good for dark timber? I don't know, we'd have the try them. But it's funny how people assume their open field use case applies to someone that is in near darkness well before legal sunset.
I had one experience in Eastern Oregon near the breaks of the Snake River where I assumed that it would be more open country hunting, compared to the coastrange that I am used to. And it was, in terms of the landscape. But the deer and elk still bed in the ribbons of timber. Those ribbons are in the crevasses of the landscape. That timber can be as thick, or thicker than anything in the coastal rainforest of OR. In other words, you aren't making much progress on foot.
That hunt turned into cat and mouse in dark timber right around legal shooting hours, which is +30 minutes of legal sunset. I had a Viper 2-7x on my rifle. I found mule deer in the timber at dusk, but I couldn't confirm antlers. I had to use my $300 binos which were plenty for the conditions. Then raise my rifle. Then not be sure it was a buck. Sling the rifle, and look through the binos again. Then shoulder the rifle. The deer were milling around in the timber.
I think everyone gets the point. After that I experience, I was really interested in Mule Deer's scope tests. Especially his low light tests. Based on that, I bought a few Leupo 6x42, just for the performance in lowlight, but I don't know how much better that scope would be in that situation, as I don't know how the Viper 2-7x compared. All I knew was that the Viper wasn't nearly as good as $300 binos.
The best general purpose scope that I have used in low light was a Kahles 2-7x.
