Record Crow Day!

[Chris B]

After a few week break I decided to take a vacation day yesterday and go do some crow hunting at the farm we picked up this year. Let me tell you, this was one for the books! Got set up by sunrise and as soon as we heard the first crow sound off, we had a constant wave of singles and doubles dropping in to check us out. We stayed quiet, just responding w some light hand calls as needed. I ended up going 8 for 8 in the first hour! We didn’t even use the foxpro caller until noon, which by then we figured we had around 17. Of course we had some that hopped away and a couple that we hit and watched fly a few hundred yards before falling but we were on fire! The wind picked up for a few hours but playing two foxpro’s on high volume running crow fight (10 minutes on, 15 minutes quiet) helped us call in a handful in crappy conditions. The shooting definitely got tough in the high wind. From 4 to 5 o’clock the wind calmed a lot and we caught the groups heading back towards their roost and the shooting was hot again. We knocked down about 9 in that last bit of time just running dueling crow fights w the foxpros. Shattered our previous record of 18! One thing worth mentioning was that as we killed a few crows, we’d go out and set them up and incorporate them into our decoy set. We have about 9 decoys and 1 scout that we start w but we found that the more dead crows we used in our setup, the easier it was to get them to drop in...even in the high winds

 

 

 

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[RangerClay]

Nice.  You should come up to Watertown, that number would be 3900 easily.

[greybeard]

congrats on your success..

[ny hunter]

Very nice....Congrats

[Pygmy]

Good shooting boys !!  There are are few things more fun than a good crow shoot...

[Pygmy]

Decoy setups work great when you get a steady pick of singles and doubles, because you can kill most of the crows that come in.

If you get 20 crows into the spread at once, you may kill 2 or 3, but you educate the rest of them.. The slow pick makes for much more efficient hunting..

Back in the  daywhen I hunted them a lot in feeding setups, we always kept calling to a minimum ( hand calls)  and let the decoys do most of the work.. Works well when you are fortunate enough to have a steady stream of " customers" passing within sight of the decoy spread...We also used to set up the dead crows as decoys to increase the size and drawing power of our spread...Thanks for sharing..Brings back memories..  I used to kill lots of crows, but now I feed them table scraps in my back yard...Hehehe...

[grampy]

Nice! Way to go! And what fun too! Haven't done this in years. Need to get out again and do some crow hunting again soon! Maybe take a couple young guns with me to get them in on it too.

[Arcade Hunter]

looks like a ton of fun!

[Chris B]

Decoy setups work great when you get a steady pick of singles and doubles, because you can kill most of the crows that come in.
If you get 20 crows into the spread at once, you may kill 2 or 3, but you educate the rest of them.. The slow pick makes for much more efficient hunting..
Back in the  daywhen I hunted them a lot in feeding setups, we always kept calling to a minimum ( hand calls)  and let the decoys do most of the work.. Works well when you are fortunate enough to have a steady stream of " customers" passing within sight of the decoy spread...We also used to set up the dead crows as decoys to increase the size and drawing power of our spread...Thanks for sharing..Brings back memories..  I used to kill lots of crows, but now I feed them table scraps in my back yard...Hehehe...

Pygmy agree 100%! What we found to work really well is to use hand calls as needed in the morning, and after the first couple hours we might just turn the foxpro on to standard crow sounds and just let it run in intervals, while using hand calls to respond to crows we hear close by. Then once the shooting slows down after middday we will start hitting them w a lot of crow fights. But.... every hunt is a little different. We adjust slightly depending on what’s working. We are actually really conservative with our shooting too. We won’t shoot unless they are dropping in. One thing I learned about the large groups is that if we roll the crow fight on the foxpro once they all start circling, we can get a couple shots and then just keep playing the fight sound and most of the time we can pull the others back in for another shot.


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[GreenDrake]

Great shooting!!!  I too am a crow hunting addict. I was hoping to get out this weekend but the snow will keep me away.  My best morning this winter was 32 killed. I am hunting alone this year as my nephew and hunting partner is on his first year of law school at SU. (I remember that dreadful year myself)

Aside from upland hunting with my setters, nothing compares to that first distant crow call as the sun is coming up. I may be able to help out a large dairy farmer close by with his pigeon problem this weekend!!