doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com OT - Any crow hunters here?

Back in the last sixties my dad purchased an electric crow caller. It was a record player with a speaker that ran on 12 volts. Lots of fun. We could only fool them the first day. After that they ignored the call.

Still in the late sixties - a civic club in one of the small towns around Amarillo used to have a crow shoot as a fund raiser. We would arrive in the late afternoon, pay, and get set up. They set everbody up at a roost and we would shoot them as they arrived. They scheduled it for a full moon and we would shoot for a couple of hours after Sunset. Lots of fun.

Best,

Mike

Might want to ask this bunch of HeeeeHaaaaaws........
I can tell ya there are too many starlings about, that's for sure and they offer more challenging target.

The crow population in southern Michigan and northern Indiana has declined so badly in the last few years that I hesitate to shoot them any more. The local DNR agent told me it was West Nile virus.

I sure hope they come back because they can be a real challenge.

Yeah, I'll have to agree on the population here in Southern Michigan. I can stand out on my buddy Jim's farm first thing in the morning and not hear a crow at all. We don't see them when we're out duck hunting, we barely see any over in Canada even. They've gotten mighty thin around here, which is fine with me.

Destry

What would a English Who-dunit be without a rook cawing in the background?

Here in Alabama there are more crows than ever. They have even taken the place of pidgons in town. You see them walking around the grass outside the banks like they own the place. Still fun to call and shoot but they are by far the smartest bird around.

I killed them when I was younger and understand the mess they make when they take over urban areas but I could not kill them now. It would be like killing a dog. Their aerial performances are special, and their nesting around our vineyard keeps smaller birds from nesting in the canopies and out of the fruit.

We kill them here by the hundreds each fall when pecans begin to open and we dig our peanut fields. They move in by the hundreds per drove and can decimate a field of freshly dug peanuts in a couple of days. Peanuts have to field dry several days in the sun before combining them and are very susceptible to predation. They particularly like pecans because they can alight on the tall tree linbs and feel safe as they pillage and plunder. They are only acting like crows and I understand that but there's no reason not to protect one's crop.

We use FoxPro callers, decoys and Mojo Crows at first light when they leave the roosts and come to the fields and orchards. Extra full chokes and 1 1/4 oz. no. 4's are our load. Not unusual to kill over a hundred in three hours after dawn. Not much use in going back to the same vicinity for awhile, they wise up quickly.

No noticable decline in the numbers around here after maybe twenty years of shooting them. Certain times of the year there will be flocks (murders) of crows numbering 4-5 hundred each.

we have hundreds if not thousands of them here on the north shore of lake washington. this evening when i came home there a few hundred in the cottonwood trees behind our house. i tried to take out a few with my gamo pellet gun but they are out of range as at the top of the trees they are at lease 20yds out if not more. Although they are not hunted here in the city limits they are still extremely wary.

Based on this limited survey, it seem as if crows are abundant south of a line extending from about Washington, DC west through mid-Ohio, Kansas City and on to central California, then up to the Seattle area. North of that line, not so many crows, although that could be due somewhat to southward migrations in winter.