Fish Crows have always been a big challenge for me. In addition to being smaller and having a different call, they are extremely wary, in part because they usually travel in large groups (typically from 25 to 100) in order to have more eyes looking for danger.At the slightest sign of trouble they go for altitude, which quickly puts them outside of normal shotgun range.On most hunts they are a minor nuisance as common crows make up at least 90% of the birds we see... until late winter when their migration happens.
Pete, AKA “Tonto,” my hunting buddy and crow scout, called me last week with a report of an infestation of crows in a nearby dove field. He said in addition to the crows in the field, there was a large number of them flying over, particularly in the afternoon. I surmised they were fish crows heading back to a roost.We planned to hunt Saturday morning, so I set up the blind the night before. It was raining, and our blind faced a newly plowed field, so we would be hunting over a sea of mud!
The morning hunt was productive but hard due to a high number of fish crows coupled with the deep mud everywhere. The crows quit flying by 11:00 and we had a count of 41 down. Amazingly, all but one were fish crows…the only common crow was the very first bird we shot!Pete insisted they would be flying again in the afternoon, so we took a midday break and decided to pick it up again at 2:00.
Arriving for the afternoon hunt, I could quickly see we were getting a late start. Birds we’re already checking out our decoys. Walking from our trucks to the blind, we killed 3 crows. Once inside the blind, the numbers elevated dramatically!
They flew until about 5:00 and our final count was an amazing 173 crows!!Of those, we only shot one lone common Crow!In addition to crows, we bagged 2 pigeons and 4 nuisance geese!This was a great hunt for us, not only because it set a new TBC record, but we had to take most of them down from the stratosphere, resulting in some very gratifying shooting.This will be a hunt both of us will remember for a very long time.
Demi
Picture # 1
A hawk (in background) dining on one of our downed crows.
Picture # 2
Our decoy spread (swimming in mud), blind, sentry decoys (halfway up the tree) and a dead crow sentry bird at treetop level.
Picture # 3
“Tonto” waiting for the next group of fish crows.
Picture # 4
A typical high-flying group of fish crows.
Picture # 5
This shows the lowest most groups would come down. Still a very looong shot!
Picture # 6
Final lineup of the day’s work.
-- Edited by Island Shooter on Monday 12th of February 2018 08:00:48 PM
I honestly thought fish crows were a lost cause, plus just plain aggravating son of a guns! Well Done. I've never heard of that kind of success on those rascals.
Congrats
Butch
