Mulak Reader - The Corvis Addiction

Another one that I couldn’t get published. A story about crow shooting is one thing, but one involving the rutting season at the piggery, a prisoner crow, and throwing the dead ones in the bushes pretty much disqualifies itself. But I still like it. And, no, you can’t borrow my crow decoys, so don’t bother asking.

THE CORVUS ADDICTION

"Youk'n hide de fier, but w'at

you gwine do wid de smoke?"

Uncle Remus Proverb

Joel Chandler Harris

          Back in the good old days when I had hair and arches and the children that have since become my teenage daughters were still children, I was a crow hunter. (I'm not pretending that there is anything wrong with crow hunting, but at the outset of this story I should point out that everything here happened at least seven years ago, and the statute of limitation has long since run out.)
          My brothers and I are bird hunters and waterfowlers for as much time as the hunting season permits. The rest of the year is spent waiting for the next opening day. During the off season there were often times when everything was right for a sortie afield, but the calendar and game laws conspired against a hunter, because nothing is open.
          "Crows." My brother said at one such juncture.
          "Where?"
          "They're legal game to licensed hunters from one half-hour before sunrise to sunset daily except Sunday." He was reading the fish & game laws. "No limits." He added.
          "So?"
          "So, let's go crow hunting."
          We went.
          Proof of the fact that beginners luck actually exists is that without any idea of what we were doing, we managed to stumble into several chances. That we shot a grand total of one crow is beside the point: We were bitten by the off-season disease that has come to be known as Popowskitis: Addiction to crow shooting.
          That was back then. Crows have since been classified as quasi-legitimate "migratory game birds" due to a cockamamie quirk in an international treaty, and have been assigned hunting seasons. Although I can't imagine a game warden pinching anyone for plinking crows "out of season", (Unless it was being done in a school yard,) I feel obliged to mention those facts here. As I said earlier, all this took place back in the good old days.
          Back then, we always had several Herter's catalogs kicking around the cellar. Mostly, we used them as doorstops or for weighing down things we were gluing together. (Charles Atlas may have been able to tear a New York City phone book in half, but I noticed he never fooled with the Herter's catalog.) In that monumental book was an ad for crow decoys.
          Now, anyone who remembers the Herter's company knows that they never just offered an item for sale. No. Each section carried a propaganda blitz that attempted to make a case not just for the item being offered, but for the way of life that the item served. In the case of crow decoys, Herter's offered several editorial pages of proof that crows were indeed evil creatures that wantonly killed game birds and waterfowl, and actually deserved to be hunted to extinction. "LET'S GANG UP ON KILLER CROW!" the ad's headlines shouted.
         That headline became our battle cry, in a campy sort of way. We ordered two dozen crow decoys, the "Herter's Guide to Successful Crow Shooting", three types of crow calls, two great horned owl decoys, and even an instruction record on calling. In retrospect, our order may have single-handedly postponed the company's bankruptcy for several months.
           The afternoon that all that stuff arrived, we set up one of the Styrofoam owls on a pole at the far end of a cow pasture across from my brother's house. We hid in the bushes and blew on our brand new crow calls until a few crows showed up. They stayed out of gun range until one of them spotted the owl and broke formation in a reckless dive, followed closely by the rest of the flock.
          "Get ready... Be careful not to shoot the owl," We whispered to each other, and hunkered lower on our folding stools. We were about to gang up on killer crow.
          The first of the kamikaze crows swooped in and on his first pass knocked the Styrofoam owl's head clean off. He rejoined his squadron and together they flew off in search of worthier opponents.
          Neither of us had fired a shot. We picked up the pieces and went home.
          While the glue was setting on the first owl repair, (I think we used "Herter's world-famous decoy-repair cement".) we took the second owl and used a similar tactic on another farm. This time we put the owl in among the branches of a dead tree so that the attackers couldn't get a running start at him.
          What happened seemed to be the story of just about all our crow shooting: We called in a flock of crows and blasted away. The flock, once shot at, retreated. That much we had figured on. But instead of flying over the horizon, the surviving crows hung around, keeping an eye on us from well beyond shotgun range and actively warning off any other crows that answered our called summons. Since they stayed as long as we did, there was no further shooting.
          This sort of thing happened with predictable regularity. Each locality had its own Corvus clan, and we could only fool them once in any given day. Although my father thinks his boys are fairly intelligent, ("I could have done worse," He says. "None are in jail, and only one went to sea.") that particular lesson took several dozen outings over a period of months for us to figure out.           When we finally came to terms with the idea, our crow hunts became highly mobile excursions featuring a fast set-up, some noisy calling, occasionally a shot or two, then a jump back into the truck and a drive on to the next spot, which was always at least one town away.
          I'd like to make the following statement so that it might serve as an answer to any of several questions that might have cropped up regarding the ethics of shooting—on purpose—something that you have no intention of eating. Here's the statement: "When we were done, we threw the dead ones in the bushes."
          Got that?

          Crow decoys work. Crows are gregarious, and while they won't join a bogus flock with the same reckless abandon shown by waterfowl in similar situations, called crows can be counted on to at least "swing by" for a close look. A few decoys on the ground and on fence posts make for an almost-convincing rig. I say "almost" because real flocks always have a lookout posted in a tree top. Without that sentry, a decoy rig isn't going to fool many crows. Getting a decoy aloft presented problems at first, but necessity is indeed the mother of invention. We came up with the gaucho recipe.
          "Add weight to crow decoy to make throwing more effective. Two pounds is about right. Attach heavy-duty fishing line to eye bolt inserted in decoy's back. (Use "Herter's top-quality brass plated screw-eyes" for best results.) Select properly dead tree. Whirl decoy around like gaucho with bolo and sling that sucker as high as possible into tree so that line catches on limb. Lift decoy by pulling line, now looped over branch, until realistic pose is attained. Tie off until smoke clears. When done, yank hard until decoy pulls free or tree breaks, whichever comes first."
          It took a while, but eventually we learned from our own experiences. Once we became somewhat proficient with a crow call, we found we needed nothing more than just an owl decoy (heavily reinforced) and two gaucho crows for our mobile hunts. For the sort of on-the-run shooting we did, this 3-bird rig proved to be an ideal combination.
          Live decoys are, of course, outlawed, so we never used them.
         Ahem.
          But my brother did keep a crippled crow as a pet for several years. The crow in mention was captured on one of our hunts when he managed to survive a direct hit with only a lost wing. My brother brought him home and put him in a cage and fed him table scraps. He got fat and sassy, and learned to use his beak as a third hand, as I've seen parrots do. But the prisoner crow was never really tame.
          We used to take the prisoner crow along on our hunts, just as a pet. Once we started calling, he would hop around and create a hell of a racket. The other crows would see him and fly in for a closer look. When, after two years, he finally passed on to the great rookery in the sky, he was sorely missed. In retrospect, if we had wanted to use him as a live decoy he would have been very effective. But of course we never did. Live decoys are illegal. The prisoner crow was just a pet we took along on our crow hunts.

          As important as decoys are to crow hunting, calling is indispensable. Crows have a vocabulary that has been estimated at 50 separate words and phrases. But hunters only need to tell crows one thing: "Come closer."
          To do that, there is no need to know any more than two phrases; The first is the staccato caw-caw-caw that you so often hear from crows as they fly away. That call is important because it is the one that you should NEVER use. Freely translated into crow lingo, it means "Watch out! There's a guy down there with a gun. Stay the hell away from here!"
          The other call, the one that you SHOULD use, is made by growling into the call to produce a long and drawn out "Crraaawwww!" To another crow, that call means, Hey, everybody! I need a hand beating-up this owl that I've found. Come quick!" In reality, just making a lot of noise often does the trick, so long as your noises do not contain the short danger call. And two callers making excited noises create a synergistic effect that is nearly irresistible to any crow within hearing distance.

What's the right ammo/gun/choke combination for crow hunting? In truth, we never tried very hard to find out. Mostly, we used whatever we had left over from last season. Or, barring that, whatever was cheapest. We shot and killed (and shot at and missed) crows with everything from 12-gauge goose loads to 20-gauge skeet shells. Like shad fishing or plinking rats at the dump, crow shooting is hardly serious fun. Nobody likes to miss, but missing is a lot less painful when the target is a crow rather than a green head mallard or a rooster pheasant.

          There are several books about crow shooting in the mid-west that describe elaborate hunts with blinds and big spreads of decoys and ammo by the case-lot. That’s the mid-west. We hunted in New England, and about the only place we had anything that approached that sort of shooting was at the piggery in Westford.
          Because of the garbage, crows hang around pig pens. They're sort of the crow equivalent of an avian drop-in center. So when we wanted to do some mid-west style crow shooting, we took to hanging around piggeries, too.
          The first thing we noticed was that pigs themselves don't smell too bad. Pig shit, though, is a different story: In August, it's just about virulent. Crow shooting lesson number one: Check the wind before setting out the decoys.
          We'd sit around, pretending to be invisible while we waited for unsuspecting crows, and listen to the pigs. They'd grunt and squeak and squeal and oink, making almost human noises. We used to joke that the ideal camouflage outfit would be a pig suit. But after hunting one day in what must have been the porcine rutting season, we didn't joke about pig suits any more.
          Pigs could also be frightening: Whenever a shot crow fell inside the fence, there would be a mad scramble among the residents to eat the bird. The pigs evidently had memorized the Herter's catalogue, and took that business about "ganging up on killer crow" seriously. At least we didn't have to be concerned about wounded crows suffering for very long.
          But, if we could put up with the stink and the pigs, the shooting at the piggery made it all worthwhile. There were times we felt like characters from the photos in Burt Powpowski's book: Standing and shooting amid a litter of fallen crows and empty shells. We seldom brought ammunition back out with us. When we'd get down to our last few rounds, we'd wait for chances to take two at once while they were criss-crossing in the air.

          We hunted crows during the off-season on snowshoes in the winter, on rainy days during the spring, and with a can of Yard-guard as part of our equipment in the summer. When it came to shooting crows, we never had any ulterior motives or needed excuses—we did it because it was fun. But along the way we learned a great deal about the tactics of hunting: Concealment and patience and timing—skills that require practice and that made us better waterfowlers. Crows are not easily fooled, and are every bit as challenging to a hunter's various skills as any other game bird you might name. And, of course, no one fools a crow twice.
          But in the process of ganging up on killer crow, we got to see him for what he really is: A plunderer and scavenger, to be sure, but also a member of a remarkably sophisticated and co-operative society; A bird resourceful enough to prosper in a winter world that most other birds flee; An admirably brave bird that confronts predators large and small, mostly just for the hell of it; And, most surprising of all, a bird with a well developed sense of fun.
         One thing is for sure, though: There is no cure for the Corvus addiction. Once you've been a crow hunter, watching them play Heckle and Jeckle in suburban back yards is never quite the same again, and when they caw out a challenge at 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning, there is no escaping the suspicion that it is directed at the sleeping crow hunter that is you.

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This site was last updated 09/21/06