In the first chart you will see a noticeable dip in 1990 that is because that was the last year the crows were in the Hutchinson area. They have never returned! Then in 2001 there was another big dip, that was the year I made the video "The Art of Crow Hunting" and I did not hunt much that season because I was more focused in getting the video in to production.
Proof positive right here why it's a very good idea to keep roost locations a huge secret. However living in a crow rich area helps to without necessarily knowing the roost area. For years I shot near a roost without disturbing it. This meant a respectful distance. The only reason I have one so to speak is because my competitors cannot get at it!
Your case is far different of course. All that midwest mud sure keeps people away from the best shooting if they even found the location to begin with.
And 6,ooo crows is nothing short of phenomenal...it makes this area boring by comparison. I always thought you did 3,000 average so this comes as a big surprise,Bob!
Around the area I frequented the anti-hunters ran the length and breadth of the river system getting more and more signs up. So unless you have a boat for water fowl hunting at least then you are done in this area.
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Top Cat Statutes never replaced or rewrote the constitution!
Every picture tells a story, if you go to the line chart on the far left you can see that between 1974 and 1976 the numbers were low by comparison to the rest of the years because I was learning the territory and that was the learning curve. From 1977 to 1989 were very consistent years because I was picking the best days to hunt because I lived in the area in those days. I worked night shift in those days so I hunted a lot in the mornings from early morning on up to 11:00 a.m. or noon time. Then went to work at 4:30 p.m.
In the middle and far right line charts represent the years from 1991 to 2014 which were all out of state hunts in different states. Kansas was finished by 1990. By the early to mid 1990's I was working for myself by then and after Christmas (because I had a retail business) I was a free man so to speak and I would hit the road by myself before Dick and I teamed up together. Dick & I started gunning together in 2002.
I was on a hunt in Oklahoma years ago with Drew Moore from this site and we ran in to Dick, this was in 2001 and 2002. Before Dick & I got together we ran in to one another in different states during the late 1990's. I remember it like yesterday that he and his wife Penny were backing up his pickup by the front door to his fleabag motel he was staying in. I would stay at the same motel and did for years before I found out that Dick also knew about this area. I knocked on his door and when he opened the door I said "I'm here" and Dick almost fainted dead away and he says to me "don't you ever work" and I said "don't you" and we both had a good laugh over that.
At this same motel I was staying there with Bob Cooke from Mississippi whom I met in a goose pit in Argentina two years prior. This was in 1993 or 1994 and the both of us shot over 300 crows three blocks from this fleabag motel, we were in the town limits but nobody cared because the whole town looked like a town somewhere in Venezuela! Bob Cooke even made mention of this when he said to me "here we are driving all around the country only to come back to town and get a good shoot 3 blocks from our motel" I was with Bob Cooke on another hunt where we ran in to Dick for the first time. Dick heard the shooting which was not very much because I was in the wrong spot. Dick came over and was eyeballing my decoys in the trees and he says to me "you are serious about this" and I said "as serious as you can get" so we all talked at length since we all hunted in Argentina we had something in common with each other besides the crow hunting. Jim Lundquist and I stayed at this motel as well, there was a big feed yard 5 miles west of town that Jim & I hunted near and it was a great spot for an afternoon shoot. Every crow in the country stopped at this feed yard in the afternoon to get a bite to eat before heading towards the roost! I found this spot in 1991 right after the end of Hutchinson Kansas. Boyd Robeson and I had some memorable hunts in this area as well before his health went south in 1994.
