Mention of bird hunting might conjure up images of hunters and their dogs huddling in freezing duck blinds or pounding the brush in hopes of kicking up pheasants. But crow hunting is a thing in Wyoming too.
“It’s about the sport of it,” Dan Kinneman of Riverton told Cowboy State Daily.
He started crow hunting when he was 14 and is about to turn 85. He’s never tried cooking and eating crows or known anybody who has.
Instead, shooting crows is essentially nuisance bird control, as they’re known to wreak havoc on agricultural crops.
“All the ranchers will let you hunt crows. I’ve never been refused access to hunt crows. They all hate them,” he said.
In Wyoming, crow hunting season runs from Nov. 1 to Feb. 28. No license is required, and there’s no bag limit. Hunters can shoot all the crows they want to.
It’s a ball for hunting dogs too, Kinneman said.
“My yellow Labrador retriever, he doesn’t care whether it’s a crow or duck. In fact, he likes crow hunting more than duck hunting, because there’s more action,” he said.
Don’t Expect It To Be Easy
Kinneman said that in the days of his youth, crow hunting was as simple as driving around and “shooting them out of trees with rifles.”
However, as the number of people and buildings potentially in the paths of bullets grew, such practices fell out of favor. Crow hunting became more regulated.
And it evolved to resemble hunting other birds, such as waterfowl.
Meaning, hunters started setting out decoys, hiding in blinds and using calls to tempt crows to within shotgun range.
Kinneman is no stranger to hunting of all types. He’s taken numerous species of big game in Wyoming and elsewhere. And in July 2005, he shot a prairie dog near Rock Springs from well over a mile away.
He hit the prairie dog from 2,157 yards away. A mile is 1,760 yards.
But bird hunting has always been his favorite.
“It’s my life,” he said.
He has a huge collection of duck, goose and dove decoys. And two tubs full of crow decoys.
The uninitiated might think that going out and blasting crows would be a slam dunk.
That isn’t so, Kinneman said. He likes crow hunting for the challenge of it.
“Hunting crows is hard. They are a lot smarter than ducks and geese,” he said.
Pick Up After Yourself
Even though he doesn’t eat crows, Kinneman said he never just left them littering the ground where he shot them.
“I never let them lay out there. I always picked them up and disposed of the carcasses,” he said.
That’s good ethics and it shows respect for the ranchers, he said.
“Leaving them (dead crows) out there would be no different than just leaving all of your empty shotgun shells out there,” he said.
“You have to pick up after yourself, or the ranchers won’t let you back onto their land,” he added.
Slow Year
At his age, Kinneman isn’t sure how much longer he’ll be able to get out crow hunting. And this year has been a total bust.
“I love doing it. But this year there are no crows,” he said.
The Riverton area is along major crow migration routes.
Picking a good hunting spot is a matter of “finding a flyway” that the crows are on and then setting up a spread of decoys and a blind along the route.
But with an unusually warm winter, the crow flyways have been practically empty, he said.
Migrations Are Off Everywhere
Avid birdwatcher Lucas Fralick of Laramie said that warm, dry conditions much of this winter have knocked bird migrations out of whack.
“I do know that because of the weather, migrations are off all over the place,” he said.
One of his favorite species is the dark-eyed junco, a “small, sparrow-like bird,” he said.
They usually winter in the Laramie area and leave right around March. This year, they were gone by November, he said.
“They’re a cold-weather bird,” he said.
Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.
