My friends love to go flea marketing on the weekends, looking for treasures among the vendors.

I tell them I'd go, but I have enough fleas.

My mother used to tell us when we were young that one person's trash was another person's treasure. I believe that to be true, as I have found items that I care about in the most out-of-the-way places.

For example, I was walking down the street one day and I saw a teenager wearing a denim jacket. Tacked on to that jacket was an assortment of patches, and, to my amazement, there was a Pennsylvania Game Commission patch that I needed for my collection.

I asked about the patch, and the teen said he found it with some other patches and liked it, so he put it on the jacket.

When I offered to buy the patch, we agreed upon $10 and we were both happy!

The world of sports collections can be both an outrageously expensive market and a harmless way to start a collection.

I have seen some interesting arrays of outdoors collectibles. As I mentioned before about the PGC patch being sought after by some collectors, I've seen the going prices range from $5 to $1,000.

Once in a while, a patch will catch the fancy of a certain group of people, and that will drive up the price and availability.

Many collectors look at pocket knives from Case, Queen, Buck, Remington and Winchester, among others, as very valuable. Regions have preferences for certain brands. Queen knives are big in northwestern Pennsylvania but hold little interest in New Jersey.

Collectors are always looking for prints, decoys and lures. An old hand-carved duck decoy recently went for $25,000 at an auction.

What makes it so valuable? One indicator is if it has a history of being made or owned by a renowned craftsman. It might be part of a historical collection or region in that market, or it just might be a rare item.

The booming fishing industry has caused interest in lures and reel collections to skyrocket. Wooden plugs are sought after, and if you have the original box and instructions that came with the lure, your price will be higher.

Even the old plugs in grandpa's tackle box in the attic might be what someone needs to complete a collection.

My friend Jason Michaels collects hunting licenses from Pennsylvania. Hunting and fishing license collections can be interesting historically as well. The original licenses were made of stamped and painted metal that was stitched to your Woolrich or Filsons hunting coat.

Many of the licenses also had county numbers designated on them. For example, Butler County had the number 10 on it, as it is the 10th county in the state alphabetically.

Fishing licenses were metal buttons with individual serial numbers printed on them. How the fish wardens kept track of them still eludes me, as they could have been passed around rather readily by scofflaws.

The progression of licenses then went from metal to cardstock to plastic and computer generated.

Jay E. Hewitt is an outdoors columnist for the Butler Eagle.