Bob, in the first article where it is talking about the first crow season. I am curious about the link with Mexico and that being the reason for there being a crow season in the first place. If anyone would know it would be you.
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"If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be wise enough to be crows." Thoreau.
Dale it is my understanding that it's all political. I used to shoot fish crows in Mexico right in front of there Game Warden because they were a pest and the Warden looked the other way. This is when I was on a White Winged Dove hunt back in the 80's and 90's.
Hawaii had a crow that was on the endangered species list in the mid 1970's so our brilliant politicians lumped Fish crows, common crows and northwestern crows in to the same basket and put a season on them to make it appear as they were doing something good at the time! That is how the crow season came about.
Camo, did you read the first news clipping about Ft. Cobb ?
Yes, I read every one. Fort Cobb was before my time but i would have loved to have seen that. A friend of mine said when he was younger his dad would take him there and he would shoot wounded crows with his BB gun. Apparently so many got winged that you could find cripples all over.
I had mentioned before that almost everyone i talk with about crow hunting here in Oklahoma tells me i need to go hunt at Fort Cobb. It was such a big deal here that most people think the crows are still there.
Bob, If a large roost is not disturbed to much & an adequate food source is abundant, how long will the roost remain at the same location ? What is the longest you have seen a roost at the same place ?
In more recent times ( the last 50 years ) I have seen roosts stay in the same place for over 20 years. Now before my time the old timers said that the roost here in Medora Kansas lasted from the late 1920's to 1990 which is roughly 62 years. I got in on the last 22 years!
In St. John Kansas ( another huge roost ) west of my home 37 miles I got in on the last 10 years, the farmers got sick of the crows and took a bulldozer to the roost in 1984. That roost was the last roost to get bombed with dynamite in 1952 where they killed upwards of 15,000 crows with two blasts!
There was another big roost on the old Yaggy Plantation west of Hutchinson ( 6 miles ) which was bombed back in the 1940's where many thousands were blown up in one blast. The crows never used that roost again the survivors moved over to Medora Kansas after that happened.
They had another roost ( small one of perhaps 75 to 100 thousand crows ) down at Harper Kansas southwest of Wichita back in the early 1960's. That was before my time but my old crow hunting partner used to hunt them down there years before we got together in the early 1970's.
That's amazing, I had no idea a roost could remain at the same location so long. That's many generations of crows. Upward's of 15,000 crows with two blast's !!
WOW, I bet that was some powerful ordnance !
They used a half a stick of dynamite with a blasting cap per tin ( about the size of a 5 gallon bucket ) and lined the trees with them days before they touched off the charges because it was a lot of work getting the charges set. They used chat ( similar to gravel ) for the fragmentation. One set of charges went off first, the ones fastened to the trunks of the trees and the second set of charges was designed to wipe them out once they took flight after the first blast! The second blast came from the ground and went upwards in a 180 degree arc!
