The A-Team gathers at our local meeting place for our 5th hunt together of the season. This was to be a special event for us. We were to be joined by our close friend Kim that had traveled from Weyburn Saskatchewan to hunt with us for a few days. As with any long distance travel it has it’s draw backs. He had his first flight delayed because of mechanical problems and when he did get to NY his connecting flight’s door would not close properly so they put him in a motel for the night and he misses the opportunity to hunt with us on Friday. We opted not to hunt on Friday just to save the birds we found last week for him to enjoy on Saturday. Enjoy he did! Going back to last Monday we had a phone call from a friend that told us he saw about 400 crows feeding in a field in front of his country home (his getaway house on his farm). Although we had great success last week with our 200 bird kill and could have gone back there we decided to hunt these new birds and let the others build until hunt #6 next weekend.
We arrived to the field fired up with our guest with the anticipation of seeing lots of birds in this field. There were about 25 birds milling around but we did not see or hear the big flock. We thought that because of the frozen ground they were just staying on roost a bit longer. We had to literally cut our way with our snipers, which we carry for our NC briars, to get to a place where we could set up along this field. After setting up we made our initial call sequence and we got a poor showing by our standards of birds. As with any guest of ours he got the first shots in for the day. This guy is a professional pheasant hunter and travels with the bird dog circuit and shoots for them. Needless to say he could hold his own. We gave it about two hours and still no large numbers of birds. We killed 23 and hit the road doing what we do best, R-N-G, our thinking was that the birds were afternoon birds in this field not morning. Our thinking was correct, we drove around in a 25 mile area and found a few pods feeding and managed to kill 46 more. We made our way back to the field where we started around 1:45 and there they were, my guess was there were around 300 birds in the field feeding in a frenzy. We had left our dead birds in the field from the morning hunt knowing we were going to try to end the day there and the birds were mobbing them as we drove up. We had already cut our path to the stand and everything was already set up for us. I will tell you there is nothing like using dead birds as your decoys. They will out perform any decoy made by 10X. With everything already setup we starting shooting immediately. We finished out the day with the field being littered with dead birds that stretched out for 100 yards. Our Canadian friend had a real treat, he got to see every shot, every angle that he could image. There was a couple of times where he could not load his gun fast enough to get shots off. We had fun with that one. The crows can really put on a show when things are right. He will take back a fond memory of watching 170 crows hit the ground in what seemed like a very short day to him with some fast action.
