THE FIRST THING Ray Johnson introduced out once we began on our crow hunt was a worn and battered cowbell. I stared on the noisy contraption, for the one Ohio crow looking I’d executed in Ray’s firm was of the stop-and-go selection: cease at a likely-looking little bit of timber, name in and kill as lots of the answering crows as potential, after which drift on down the street for a repeat efficiency on the subsequent great place.
Ray gave the bell an additional jangle as he tossed it into the automotive. Then he stowed away his gun, shells, a few burlap sacks, and a few lengths of stout wire. All these had been commonplace objects of crow-hunting gear. But that cowbell was one thing else!
“What’s the idea?” I demanded, shuddering on the brassy clamor that broke out anew as I hefted it.
Ray grinned. “The crows around here are mighty leery of men walking through the brush, especially now that the gamebird season is over. But they’re used to cattle, so they relax when they hear a cowbell.”
I choked on that one, and Ray took me up quick.
“Wait until you see it in action. If it doesn’t work, then you can have your laugh.”
Ray drove till we neared the Indiana state line, turned off on a black-top street, and went alongside the sting of a flat valley that held the grey flood of the Miami River. The extensive, muddy flats regarded good, for it’s in simply such spots that crows congregate for a spot of squabbling, and a last snack, earlier than setting out on the final lap of flight towards their roost. I authorized the spot and mentioned so.
“The best part of it is that their roost is at the far edge of that strip of timber, right on the edge of the river,” Ray advised me. “You can’t see the channel now, with all this flood water, but I’ll bet there are 25,000 crows using that roost.”
“Fine,” I agreed. “But how are you going to get there? And after you do, how will you build a blind on that muddy footing? Crow shooting calls for mighty quick turns.”
“Oh, we’re not hunting there today. These crows don’t like to roost over water any more than the crows in the corn-belt regions where you’ve been hunting—especially with this cold wind crossing the water. Today we’ll hunt them in the ridges. From there we’ll be able to keep an eye on them as they come in. Later, when the water goes down, we’ll set up right at the edge of the roost.”
That made sense to me. What might be nicer than having one crow-shooting session whereas maintaining a tally of the location of a later one, and on the birds that had been to furnish the fireworks?
We unloaded on the foot of the ridge and Ray took the automotive on some 200 yards, right into a farmyard the place it could be much less conspicuous. We packed about 100 kilos of varied gear up that steep slope and in about an hour had a grapevine-and-weed blind snugged into the lee of the ridge.
Mighty Natural Decoys
It was none too quickly, for a pair of crows got here wheeling in whereas I used to be snicking masses into my pet Ithaca. We dropped to our knees, I lower free with the decision, and people two birds slanted down towards us as if tied to strings. When they had been thirty yards away we rose of their faces, and each birds tumbled in a tremendous flurry of their very own feathers.
“All with nary a cowbell,” I crowed. “Now I’ll show you something.”
I tied that pair of crows with slipknots on the ends of a two-foot size of wire after which secured the tip of a spool of skinny black wire to certainly one of them. On the third throw I lodged them within the prime of a twenty-foot elm. There the useless birds swung to the thrust of the breeze that leaked excessive of the ridge, essentially the most pure decoys we might discover.
The subsequent pair of crows got here in cautiously till I tugged on the black line resulting in our decoys, concurrently chopping free with the decision. One of the carcasses jerked crazily, and people incomers might actually see, and listen to, that it was a pal in hassle. Their suspicions allayed, they folded their wings and got here diving down. So all-out was their descent that we needed to bounce up of their startled faces. If we hadn’t, they’d have dropped in so shut that our shotguns must be aimed with rifle accuracy to attain clear kills. Even so, it took three pictures earlier than we had the supplies for one more pair of decoys. We hung these in the identical tree as the primary pair.
“Wouldn’t it be better if we scattered them?” Ray wished to know.
“Not while we’re jerking one decoy to make it look like a bird in trouble,” I answered. “Crows are such gangsters that when something is bothering one of them the rest all huddle around. So it’s bad strategy to put the other decoys too far away from the one that’s being jerked, because then it looks as if they were afraid of whatever is causing the trouble.”
For higher than an hour we had our enjoyable with incoming pairs and small household teams. After that the birds began arriving in bigger flocks, and that’s when Ray’s cowbell strutted its stuff. While I referred to as, and intermittently gave the black string a tug, he labored the cowbell in a easy, rhythmic swing—giving it the lazy, measured cadence of a well-fed and contented bossy plodding house from pasture.
When birds got here in, we’d give the raucous yell of a crow in misery—as if some crow behind us had all of the sudden stumble upon crowdom’s dread enemy, a terrific horned owl. Those newcomers couldn’t pour on the coal quick sufficient of their effort to affix within the gang assault!
The flight line had been veering away from our half-dozen pairs of decoys, however now it turned again to cross over our blind and the noisy cowbell. Out of this flight we saved chopping pairs and threes; as soon as we caught a small flock excellent and every of us acquired a double.
“I stumbled on the idea when some of the local farmers asked me out for a moonlight shoot,” Ray advised me later. “There was snow on the ground, and the moon was bright enough so the crows could see us coming. But one farmer carried a cowbell. Those birds thought we were cattle and let us walk right into them.”
“And the next day the roost had moved elsewhere,” I commented dryly. “One session like that and your roost is burned out.”
“It sure was, and it cured me of night shooting. I’d rather set up a blind and get them in one of the flyways over these ridges, or on the leeward side of the roost, up to a quarter of a mile away.”
It was almost two weeks later that Ray referred to as me for a shoot within the river bottoms. The flood waters had receded into the Miami’s channel, and a chilly snap had frozen a stable crust on the silt deposited on the encompassing cornfields.
“You ought to see the crows in that flat,” Ray advised me, his voice excessive. “They cover those fields like a blanket. They’re feeding on the waste corn that was softened by that flood water. There’s a cold snap predicted for tonight. That, with this rising wind, ought to bring them in early.”
“That’s fine, but don’t bring the cowbell,” I warned. “We won’t be flyway shooting this time. Besides, crows are smart enough to know that no sensible cattle would be wandering around that soft river bottom. Just have a boat ready to take us across the channel to the roost. I’ll do the rest.”
“What do you have in mind?” requested Ray. But I simply mumbled that I’d deliver alongside the necessities, and hung up on him.
A few hours later three of us had been out on the river backside: Ray Johnson, Ray Weesner, and I. One lone crow sat atop a cottonwood and watched us, from a wholesome 200 yards away. That is, he watched us fastidiously till I chambered a single shell and fired it. Then he lifted off his perch and winged lazily away to the far facet of the flat, half a mile away.
“What did you waste that shell for?” Johnson demanded.
“That bird’s an old settler, and a smart one. If we’d let him watch us go into the roost and build our blinds, he’d gossip about it until half the crows would know all about us.”
We piled our gear into the boat and pulled into the sluggish present, letting it carry us downstream some 200 yards to land within the lee of the roost. After we unloaded there, Johnson took the boat again upstream and pulled it ashore into the comb whereas Weesner and I prospected the roost intimately.
Sure sufficient, it was spattered in every single place with the whitewashy “spit” that characterizes the birds’ nocturnal hangout. There had been, too, dozens of the pellets the birds solid up, a lot as an owl coughs up small balls of indigestible fur, feathers, and bones from its prey. In the case of the crows, these pellets had been shaped of the hulls of kernels of corn and weed seeds. Here and there was one with a distinctly reddish tinge, indicating a meat weight-reduction plan. Probably some traffic-killed gamebird or bunny that the birds had scavenged.
By the time Johnson acquired again we had the blind website picked—in a low stand of willows instantly in entrance of a few fat-trunked river-bottom cottonwoods. Vegetation was scarce within the space, however I hacked off a two-inch-thick sapling and tied it chest-high between the willow shrubs. That gave us the entrance ridgepole for our blind. While Johnson and Weesner scouted round for armloads of weeds and brush to lean in opposition to this help, I lower a pair of ten-foot willows and tied their butts to the ends of the primary sapling, with their tops pointing downwind at proper angles to it. This shaped a shallow, three-sided field, some eight toes lengthy and 6 toes deep.
Shoot Your Own Decoys!
Weathered burlap sacks greater than made up for the skinny partitions of the blind. Stretched taut between supporting saplings, they shaped a stable display screen that wanted solely a crisscrossing of weeds and branches to make our hide-out all however invisible from anyplace however instantly overhead. And crows that regarded into the blind from that route ought to shortly be “good” crows, if our marksmanship was equal to the event.
“Looks like it’ll be a tough job to get decoys into the tops of those cottonwoods,” mentioned Johnson, trying on the eighty-foot timber.
“All we need’s a couple of pairs halfway up,” I assured him. “The rest will be right out in front.”
“In that open, muddy stretch?” demanded Weesner.
“Yep. I’ve got the right medicine for them here,” I advised him, patting a bulging jacket pocket. “Down! Here come crows!”
And come they did—half a dozen huge, burly fellows, bulging with the tremendous fare from neighboring farms, their feathers gleaming with well being. They got here straight at us with a carelessness bred of lengthy immunity from gunfire. Even once we rose as one man they hung stupidly above us, till the weapons spoke. Three birds spun down within the first blast, then two extra. The survivor wobbled a bit, then slanted steeply into the Miami, elevating a three-foot splash because it hit.
“Get them in here,” I mentioned. “We need them for decoys.”
Using a pencil-thick elm twig like an ice decide, I punctured the chest of every chook, ran the twig contained in the free pores and skin of the neck, and jabbed it sharply into the cranium. Withdrawing it, I changed it with a willow shoot. Then I reached into my jacket pocket and got here up with some skinny rubber bands. Two of those went round every chook, holding the wings cosy to the physique.
“Stick these into the mud, to look like birds that are feeding and resting,” I advised the 2 Rays. “Scatter ’em about thirty yards out, right in front of the blind.”
They hadn’t been again however a minute or two earlier than extra crows came to visit the excessive ridge to our left. Spying our decoys, they folded their wings, falling fifty and sixty yards at a time, till they had been lower than a dozen toes off the bottom. That’s once I hit them with a combating name. Their lazy wings leaped into a brand new tempo, and in a dozen strokes they had been inside simple vary. Four stayed and had been set out with the opposite decoys to lure of their fellows.
Weesner goggled on the approach crows fell out of the sky to affix the steadily rising unfold of lifelike birds we planted. Two evenly winged cripples, staked out on a brief size of black fishline, gave the unfold all of the animation it wanted. All the decoys had been not less than three toes aside, and the common spacing was nearer to 9.
When birds got here in, we allow them to drop simply in need of the final swoop earlier than touchdown. Then we’d give the raucous yell of a crow in misery—simply as if some crow within the brush behind us had all of the sudden stumble upon crowdom’s dread enemy, a terrific horned owl. Those newcomers couldn’t pour on the coal quick sufficient of their effort to affix within the gang assault!
It lacked solely an hour of twilight earlier than I yielded to Johnson’s urging that we cling a few of our decoys within the cottonwoods behind us. By this time the birds had been extra thinking about going instantly into the roost than in swooping down on the muddy flats, so the useless birds introduced them extra squarely throughout our blind.
Darkness discovered us fumbling round for crow carcasses—not for decoys any extra, however as a result of their heads are price two bits apiece in Ohio bounty. At that charge, the black rascals do a pleasant job of paying for the shotgun shells that finish their thieving careers.
Read extra OL+ tales:
• This Is Why I Won’t Duck Hunt Alone Anymore, From the Archives
• Nightmare on Missinaibi Lake, a Survival Story From the Archives