Butch: What fine photos!!!! Looks like most of your success was in and around pecan orchards! Pecans, like peanute, are opium for crows as you clearly know!! Tell me what ammo, chokes, guns you and your buddies use? And are you a mouth caller or electronic kind of guy? I have shot bunches of crows in Alabama all within 100 miles of Birmingham and always found "green" birds no matter where we went. We did run and gun vs. your feeding set-ups as we did not have knowledge of pecan orchards in our area of operations!
Don't be a stranger.. any crow report especially of their demise, brings a smile!!!
The pecans are a lot of fun and I think we learned a lot this past year, we should have killed way more crows on some of the hunts. We will see if we can do better this fall. I've been scouting and after a lot of miles and time have picked up several more orchards and 300 acres of peanuts. So hopefully we can put it all together and have some mornings to remember.
My son shoots a 12ga. Rem. Versamax and I shoot a 12ga.Win. 1400 and as far as chokes , conditions dictate what we use, mostly improved cylinder and full. It's strange that both of these guns the modified chokes don't pattern well. We use #6 mostly and 7 1/2 and load a lot of what we use but we will not pass up a good buy on shells. As far as calls, we do both, and from what little experience We have the mouth calling with the E-caller seems to sell the feeding set up with the decoy's.
Thanks to the knowledge we gained from you Crow killers on this site, it saved us a lot of trial and error. But as we have found out these Crow's can put it on you.
Butch: Why do you think "we should have killed way more crows on some of the hunts"? Was there something giving your position away to the birds, insufficient chamo, too much movement, taking poor shots, etc....? Fine tuning your approach to ambushing these smart birds is the key to larger numbers on the ground!!! Am always interested in what crow hunters do in that regard. I need to see some pictures with THREE digits in the number pattern!!!!
Peanuts: 300 acres will draw in large numbers of crows IF they find the field. I suggest you contact the farmer ask him to call you if and when birds start using his field or visually check the field as often as you can as once the birds start using a peanut field, they will be there for a long time! The most crows I ever killed were ambushed feeding on peanuts!!!
One orchard we picked up 62 on we were shown it the night before with headlights and went and set up before daylight, had we been able to scout and set up better it could have been a lot better. Also we made mistakes on our blinds, poor shooting but above all the blinds and sets could have been done a lot better. If we can clean up a few things we should fair better this year if we have the crows.
