regarding a successful crow hunt. You also could say crow hunters tended to be better than average game bird hunt- ers in terms of shooting skills when the fall of the year rolled around. When Joe Average takes up his scattergun from the storage area once a year, shoots a few clays, and then hits the corn field, I can tell you he is at a very major dis- advantage if he is hunting alongside a crow killing machine like those guys I have known for most of my life in the hot hunting Midwestern kill zones. For that reason alone, hunting crows makes a whole lot of sense to anyone who takes up the sport. ABOUT TO DO DAMAGE? There was a law established back east ( beyond the Mississippi river ) that dictated seasons for hunting crows, but if a crow was seen to be doing damage it could be eliminated. Well, folks, there never was a crow anyplace that was not about to do damage to something. With that rule, we, my mates and I, hunted crows year around back in those days. Crows are hard core killers of young turkey polts, bird eggs of all types, and live song birds still in the nest, to name a few examples. I have shot these black marauders out of the sky with the young of a nesting robin, duck, or other feathered critters still locked in their beak. All crows are subject to “open season” when the “doing damage” rule is in effect. In the area of crop damage, I have been taken into a field about ready for harvest and seen outer rows of corn cut open just enough to completely wreck the ear. Crows account for a good deal of a farmer’s production loss and we almost never have been turned down when it comes to setting up a hunt on agricultural land. Melon farmers have a special dislike for the black devils be- cause they pinhole a melon and that’s it for that product, as it will never see market. In the South, pecan orchards are crow magnets. Texas, to name one state that I have spent time hunting in as well as other southern states, makes a big deal out of setting up sophisti- cated crow shoots in orchard areas. BECOMING A BETTER HUNTER Even overlooking the problems crows cause farmers, another real im- portant factor is how a crow hunter can build on the ability to become a better shot, scout and tactician. Crow hunt-
ing is not easy. The common crow can see 10 times better than we can, think more like a smart human than a bird, and can count to at least five. Crows may make one mistake, but that’s it – no time for seconds here. Mess up a stand by being discovered and it’s over, and I mean over to the maximum. Think you can work crows in the same place by way of the call day after day? Wrong, my friends. These guys require hard scouting, good game plans to get ahead of the smart thinking super bird curve, and still pull in a pile of luck in the process.
You can’t wipe them out with a scattergun or rifle.
For anyone out there who may
think I am being a bit hard on the common American crow, well, you’re wrong. Even at my best, as in taking these birds on, there was, or never will be, any chance of me or any hunter wiping out the crow population. In general, disease tends to do more harm to them at times than we ever could do by hunting the birds. At one point the Mississippi flyway was decimated by a disease that killed just about every crow across Illinois. It was so bad I found crow hunters on airplanes I was on heading for southern states to take on the birds. In time, the birds have come back and that just seems to be the way of Mother Nature. She can be hard nosed sometimes, I guess.
It seems that when you have crow hunting in your blood, you’re hooked hard. I can remember hitting some areas twice a year, both summer and late fall, back in the day during the years I lived in Minnesota. The bird numbers never went down, and we (my partners and I) had the system flat out down to the exact tree or bush to use for cover year after year. What was the secret here? Hunting a given area very little, making the first hunt against very young birds of that season, then hunt migrating birds just before winter freeze up. However, a whole lot more on that subject a bit later on in another segment.
EXPENSIVE EQUIPMENT NOT NECESSARY HERE
While there are crow hunters who make use of every gadget known to modern man when taking on the birds, in general all that is required is good camo, a calling system of some
Todd Gifford, my Minnesota crow shooting partner and Blacky the wonder dog with a fresh decoyed crow. A few decoys, dog, and shotgun make up the complete deal in crow hunting equipment at times.
type, and your shells and gun. I hunted crows with both high power rifles and shotguns all the way through college and believe me, in those days I didn’t have a spare dime to my name. This illustrates another reason we hunt the bird … because it doesn’t involve a very high cash layout to get into the sport. A hunter can take on the birds just about any Saturday morning when the weather is right and there is a desire to get out into the fresh air and shoot. Crow hunting is so easy in terms of equipment required that back in the day when I thought I was so cool, I drove around with my midnight black MGB British sports car and a heavy target rifle, or used a hand call and shotgun, picking off crows from road ditches across the county. Later on I graduated to a Ford pickup 4x4 and got off road, then joined the real world as to the art of crow population reduction. RANCHERS AND FARMERS
CAN BECOME YOUR FRIENDS There has been only one occasion when hunting western Wisconsin that I ran across a farmer who liked crows enough to keep us off his land. He indicated that they ate grasshoppers,
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