By Glen Wunderlich Outdoor Columnist Member Professional Outdoor Media Association
No matter how good any hunting show is, getting outdoors and making memories afield beats them all – even if the harvest is down or non-existent. This year’s annual crow hunt held plenty of promise, as Matt, Shawn, and I piled into the front seat of the pickup to play tricks on the wariest critters alive. With our new custom-grade, magnum 9-shot loads, we were ready for action. And, the black beasts never disappoint in that regard.
Beyond the 3-inch magnum shotshells, I had experimented with a new Undertaker choke tube in my Browning BPS and found some improvement in pattern density over my Mossberg turkey gun. The Mossberg is completely camouflaged and sports an extra-full choke and had done a fair job of dropping the crafty crows from the clouds. But, its 2-shot magazine was nearly impossible to reload in the heat of action. The Browning would give me a little more firepower capacity, but I wasn’t going to tote it afield without first checking the new choke’s pattern.
At 40 yards it peppered 743 pellets in a 30-inch circle or about 67 percent of the total payload. The catalog description for the Undertaker choke said it would produce “up to” 90-percent patterns but in my short-barreled rig, it fell substantially short. Still it was an improvement over the 676 pellets from the same load in my Mossberg. I then field-tested the firearm on some local black marauders, and although I dropped a couple, I missed many more. That got me thinking.
I read online that a common mistake is that some crow hunters are over-choked. So, before the annual hunt with the boys, I inserted a modified choke tube. Who knows? Certainly not I.
Off the three of us went to a picked cornfield, where the crows were already buzzing atop mature conifers in the distance. We set out a battery-powered Crowbusters flapping-wing decoy just above the snow and snuck into the fence row. The FoxPro caller screamed its fight song and I quickly switched the remote transmitter to the crow distress call. The shotguns sprayed lead east and west and our first victim plummeted unceremoniously to earth. Then another and another. Matt and Shawn were warming up their barrels, as I remained maybe a bit too concealed, while never firing a shot. I followed another potential target along the ventilated rib of the Browning, when it took a hit from Shawn. The crow quickly regained momentum and turned my way. The maneuver became its last mistake.
Shawn had gone 3 for 3 with his venerable Browning Auto 5, while I added one for good measure. Matt struggled to get on the board but he was not to be denied a bit later. We were all hiding amid some relatively short white pines between two stands of hardwoods when Matt punched one out of the cold, gray sky.
I’d rather not say how many shots we took during the hunt; heck, nobody really wanted to know anyway.
Suffice it to say that the furious action cured our collective case of cabin fever – even if there’s enormous room for improvement.
