A very busy businessman (lives out of town) who owns several properties near me has had crows on three of his parcels and for months I have been trying to coordinate with him to hunt crows. Two of the three sites with crows are peanut fields (1-2 miles from my house) and one is a dove field. Once the peanuts were pulled I watched with tears in my eyes as hundreds if not thousands of crows tore up the fields! I couldn't get him to commit so I never got a crack at them . I've never met this owner, but a friend recommended he let me hunt these fields... Lots of phone calls, texts and voice mails, but no action...Until this week.
He called me on Monday and said it was OK to hunt his dove field (season has ended), so I immediately mobilized and lined up a hunt for this morning. I took a friend who wanted to hunt and the two of us met at sunup. The crows came in well, mostly in small numbers. They were generally quite high due to some very tall trees all around us, but we managed to connect with a few. We were hampered by some poor shooting (mostly me) and hardware...my buddy's automatic was in the shop so he brought his side-by-side.
The morning ended with a TBC of 65 crows. All but two were common crows. Now that the ice is broken, it should be much easier to talk him into allowing access in the future. I guess the takeaway is to never give up when trying to arrange for hunting sites. Persistence pays!
A funny incident happened while hunting this morning. It had to do with our blind location, which was right on the very edge of a dirt road running to the equipment shed. Our blind was blended into the ground-level branches of a large live oak tree. The decoy spread was on the other side of the road. We were well brushed and in the shade.
Mid-morning we looked up to see a pickup truck towing a large trailer loaded with a farm tractor heading our way. A repaired tractor was being returned to the equipment shed. As the driver approached, he saw the decoys & about 40 dead birds so he stopped to study the carnage. He sat there in the pickup, windows open, for awile to take in the sight. Where he paused was about five feet from where I was standing in the blind...but he never saw me! Instead of scaring him to death, I let him go on to the shed and stepped out on the road to speak to him when he returned a little later.
Our blind not only worked for this driver, but for the crows as well. We had very few crows find our hiding place!
Demi
Update: Photos Added. First one is what the driver missed on his left. Next is some of what he saw on his right.
-- Edited by Island Shooter on Thursday 2nd of February 2017 03:35:40 PM
That's when you know you are very well hidden! I would have scared the crap out of the guy myself, it would have been funny at his expense. Years back I had two farmers sneak up on my crow blind and it looked a lot like the one in this photo. They thought it was a condor nest and were very leery as they approached it! I yelled and they both almost had a heart attack when they were with in 20 feet of the blind!
To be honest I have no clue where condors are located in the country. What I do know is that they thought that one very big bird was on there property! You should have seen the way they were sneaking up on my blind trying to be stealthy!
Demi, glad to see your season is going good and hopefully the new field will produce next season as well. Glad to see your having some luck in this part of the world, this year has been terrible hunting the few times I've managed to go.
