Minnesota’s Startribune.com reminds us that today marks the start of crow hunting season. The author making the announcement is full of shit. Well, he was covered with it; as a boy; hunting crows. “In late winter when the first migrating crows would arrive from the South, they often gathered in fields where farmers had spread a winter’s worth of manure,” Bill Marchel writes. “There the hungry crows would find undigested corn and other scrumptious items to feed on. Often the manure fields were large, flat and featureless, with no cover in which to hide or build blinds. But if the snow was deep and the farmer had recently made a pass pulling his spreader behind, the big tractor tires formed trenches. First we’d put out a dozen-or-so decoys near the tractor tire trenches, usually in the pre-dawn after having scouted the location the day prior. Then we would snuggle into a trench like a cadaver in a coffin so that our torsos were below snow-top level.” Ah the power of the pen. Then the shotgun. Oh, and don’t worry too much about the time limits. “Crows may be taken without a license in season or at any time when they are doing or are about to do damage” As if.
