Crow hunting! Tips, tricks, tactics, stories!

TheCoachZed

TheCoachZed

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Southern NB, aka "Canada's Bible Belt"
Hey guys,

I can't be the only one on here who likes hunting crows!

The last couple weeks I've started to get into it again, now that a lot of the snow is gone from the woods and duck season is over. I've been calling them and using a decoy spread made from a plastic owl and crow and a few homemade crow dekes (carved foam inside a black sock, works pretty good).

Anybody have any tactics that work good for them? I like to drive around until I spot some, then hide the truck, lay out some dekes to look like a crow/owl fight, then hide in an evergreen and hit the call. I try to get the decoys in a clearing so I can get a clear shot - hiding in the woods works pretty good, but makes it a lot harder to hit the crows when they fly overhead. I also try to shoot from a hill or cliff over the decoys, so if the crows are reluctant to come down low to the spread, I still have a closer shot.

Also, if I have an area that I know holds a lot of crows, I'll try the same routine, even if I can't see them. Something will usually come in.

I've also done a fair bit of crow hunting on the coastal flats. There's a spot locally where dozens (maybe hundreds) of crows winter, and if you get the perfect weather (low visibility rain/snow) and a favourable tide, you can sneak out in the rocks and pass shoot at a ton of crows. This is a lot of fun, but not always possible, because of the tides. Also, the crows get wise pretty quick, because they sit in trees over the flats and can spot you half a mile away.

But since crows are a target of opportunity, I also just plain shoot a lot of them off the highway. If I see one on the side of the highway, I'll pull over and see what he does. If he stays in the trees beside the road, I'll slip out the driver's side door so he can't see me and crawl around the car with the single shot and shoot him off the tree tops. If he's looking to fly off, I'll hit the call to keep him interested in hanging around. Sometimes this will bring other crows in, too. R:d:

We call this method the "car blind," because you hide behind the car (but you don't shoot from inside, cuz that's illegal! ;)) I expect I'll take some flack for this and guys will say it's unsporting, but I doubt anyone here would have a problem with shooting coyotes from the side of the road, and as far as I'm concerned, crows are the coyotes of the bird world.
 
"We call this method the "car blind," because you hide behind the car (but you don't shoot from inside, cuz that's illegal! )" LOL
 
we used to tie black strips of garbage bags to the decoys to look like wings or atleast a bit of movement. Hang a couple from the trees with fishing line so they fly. We found that the best way, crows would bomb-dive the set-up and it would be some fast quick shooting. We also used to almost kill the entire flock that would come in, less escapee's and less educated birds.

I also would bring the .223 for the one watchout bird, he'd sit about 200 yards away at the tree line watching and letting his buddies know when he'd see us. Smart bastards


we usually would just hunt them in the fall/winter. Stand in the standing corn was the best. But Spring/summer is a lot of fun too, get the young stupid ones that come in at full force :D
 
shooting from the side of the road is illegal and so is tresspassing, here in southern ontario getting out of your car and shooting onto private property without permission is against the law...I think you must be at least 30' from the road....

you are lucky if you can do that legally where you live....:onCrack:


That being said, I like crow hunting as well and usually set up on a tree or bush line with a few decoys and wait them out using an electric call. I usually don't stand next to the decoys but 30 yds or more, the crows have a tendancy to circle away from the decoys and that puts them into shotgun range easier...
 
fratri said:
shooting from the side of the road is illegal and so is tresspassing, here in southern ontario getting out of your car and shooting onto private property without permission is against the law...I think you must be at least 30' from the road....

you are lucky if you can do that legally where you live....:onCrack:


That being said, I like crow hunting as well and usually set up on a tree or bush line with a few decoys and wait them out using an electric call. I usually don't stand next to the decoys but 30 yds or more, the crows have a tendancy to circle away from the decoys and that puts them into shotgun range easier...
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Most of Southern Ontario is subject to the 8m/10 yard rule whereby one must be at least that far off the road before they load up and start hunting. In some other parts of the province the rule only applies to deer season. Randomly stopping the car whenever you see game to get out and shoot it wouldn't go over too well the locals either, but that's on account of the fact that 99% of the land down here is private.

In other parts of the province, driving logging roads is the favoured way of hunting grouse, and I can think of a couple of sections of Southern Ontario (predominantly forested, largely Crown land and not agricultural), where such a method could work, keeping to the regulations that govern the area.

Back to crows, one thing I discovered after having wisened up the local birds around the cottage is that going wild with the call, treating it more like the wailing cries of a predator call can re-ignite the birds interest in a big way. Sadly, I happened to only have my .22 on me the day I first tried that, and had to just watch as tons of crows circled in the trees directly above me. My calling probably sounded like an injured crow calling for help.
 
HIDE SUPER WELL, you will always get a couple but damn they get smart fast, you have to vanish. They get wise to your hunting area too. We had hundreds fly around us on our last day out... they knew where were and it was beside a pile of grain.

We built this blind this year, the crows were already wise to us at this point but the ones we did shoot were as close as 7 yards.

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I generally don't hunt the secondary roads because while there are tons of crows there, they are all sitting on people's lawns.

The limited access highways are pretty good because there are a lot less houses to worry about. Passing cars will call your plates in from time to time when they see you walking into the woods with guns, but the game wardens don't care, since you aren't breaking any laws.

Nice blind, billc68! That'd work really well! The biggest reason I don't get more crows is that I usually call under heavy tree cover, so you only get a clear shot at two or three before they clear out. A blind in an open field would be a big step up.
 
I use an electronic call and flocked decoys (probably why your socks work well, no glare)

Our best day was 75 birds, our worst was 3. Next year I plan to get 100 on our first shoot.
I use 3 different calls depending on their mood, a crow fight, dying crow and a crow gathering which is much more tame than the other two.
 
You're making me jealous! We've never shot close to 75 crows, but there's only one spot we could get that number in around here - the tidal flats. That spot tends to die down in the summer, too - I think it's a winter nesting spot.

The local landfill has lots of crows, but way more seagulls.

I wish we had more farmland around Saint John because grain fields and orchards are the real crow magnets!
 
saskcop said:
A predator call and an 870 has done me quite well. Works on magpies too. They are usually the first to come.
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x2, if you find that nothing comes in with the crow call or their simply uninterested a couple of goes on the dying rabbit call can sometimes get their attention.

I've brought some in calling for fox with a predator call too. I guess they figure they can get a free meal ..... wrong lol.
 
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i agree an 870 and some decoys
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always have a rifle , never know who may stop by . makes a great additin to a dying crow set up !
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camo everything
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add more camo
at times i let off the calling as they get wise real fast . have had 40 bird days with out touching a call .
 
i know a farmer who used to take old bread , break it into chunks , then start "starting fluid "...... aka ether , and soak the bread with it , then throw the bread out for the crows .

the crows would eat it then pass out .

every so often you'd see a orange crow , one of his kids would have gotten bored and use orange buckermans paint on the passed out crows .
 
Although we were never classed as "professional" crow hunters, we used to use an old duck call to attract crows, especially in the spring near their nests. We just blew really hard and the sound came out, I guess, something like a baby crow in distress. Well....it worked!!:p
 
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