In 1960 my college friend Larry and I wanted to be good crow hunters. This was going to be a challenge because the birds were very intelligent. We studied up on the creatures and drove to Waseca, MN (About 50 miles west of Rochester, MN) to the famous George Herter's Sports store (closed in 1981). We bought crow calls and a book detailing the crow language and a Raven carcass (from China). The carcass was not stuffed. It was what remained after the dead bird had been gutted and dried. We called it "Corvus" (The raven's scientific classification) and planned to use it as a decoy in a tree. We wanted to get a crow carcass but a raven was all Herter's had.Above is a nice photo of a raven in a tree. I purchased it from dreamstime.com for this blog [© Irina Bekulova| Dreamstime.com ] The raven looks like a crow except for its smaller size and longer beak. We figured that the crows we were hunting wouldn't see the difference until they had already approached the tree to perch. Then it would be too late because we would have nabbed one or two with our shotguns.
Below is a photo of my vintage 1960 crow call. Beneath it, a closeup of the "Herters Waseca, MINN" logo on the mouth piece.
Herters Crow Call
Logo on Mouth piece
Larry and I learned the crow language which consisted of variations of "Caw, Caw, Caw" depending on whether the crow(s) were searching for food, were coming to another crow's aid, were warning the flock of danger, or were were injured etc. The book was written by someone who had spent a good deal of time studying crows.
Prepared and ready for a crow shoot, Larry and I took our shotguns out into the woods near Rochester, MN. The time of year was autumn. The photo below shows Larry with his shotgun standing by my 48 Chevy we used for transportation.
Larry had a .410 shotgun and I had a double barrel 12 gauge shotgun. My shotgun had belonged to Grandpa Andrew and I got it after he died in 1955. It was dangerous because in order to get ready for a shot, one or both hammers needed to be manually cocked and there was no safety lock to prevent firing if one of the two triggers were accidentally squeezed!
We went into the woods. I climbed a tree and carefully placed our raven carcass high on a tree branch, propping it up to resemble a perching crow. We thought it looked quite real. The photo at the beginning of this blog is a good example of how I remember the scene.
We purposely walked away from our raven decoy, some distance into the woods. Then we started a series of crow calls to entice any neighboring crows to fly into the area and perch in the tree next to our raven decoy. If and when any crows did fly into woods, we planned to sneak near the tree and "bag" a couple.
After 15 minutes of blowing into our Herter crow calls we heard a shotgun blast. Apparently there was another hunter in the woods. We waited before we moved in any direction, being very cautious not to get into a line of fire. When we didn't hear any more shots after 10 minutes, we quickly moved toward the tree where we had perched our raven decoy. It was then we discovered a tattered raven carcass lying on the ground beneath the tree. It had been blasted off the branch by the other hunter!
All we could do was laugh as we imagined the surprise on the hunter's face after realizing what he had done. We never saw the other hunter probably too embarrassed to run into us. We never saw a crow that day either but we felt accomplished that we had created a realistic "crow scene" with our raven decoy and educated crow calls.
