Pour yourself a drink and pull up a chair. I've got a pet story that has all of the great elements. The follies of youth, joy, pain, tragedy, and most importantly, a pet that nobody should have as a pet.
Growing up, I hunted a lot. I seldom ventured afield without my dad. We hunted deer and pheasants in the fall. We hunted rabbits all winter. We hunted turkeys in the spring. The only time we didn't hunt was summer, and then we fished. My dad had grown up hunting just about everything and is quite the woodsman. We spent a lot of time together and he taught me a lot. Even though he knew a lot before I ever showed up, he was still learning every time he went into the woods and that's one of the best things he passed on to me. When he was young there weren't any turkeys in Michigan to hunt, in fact, turkeys were extinct in Michigan by the early 1900's. They were re-introduced in 1954 and the population reached huntable levels by the early 1980's. It's quite a success story. The first year we turkey hunted was in 1988 when I was 12. My dad got some great instruction from some experienced turkey hunters and became quite a great turkey caller and hunter. What does this any of this have to do with pets you might be asking yourself. Well, let me explain in a very round about way. Turkey hunting is a little odd in that you have specific hours that you can hunt them. I'm not sure what they are now, but at the time of this story you had to be done hunting by about 2:00 in the afternoon, which left you with the whole rest of the day to kill time. Part of every turkey callers arsenal is a crow call. By blowing a crow call, you can sometimes 'shock' a tom turkey into gobbling and giving away his location. You can also call crows with it.
Click through to learn how a crow call can lead you down a path that you might never expect.
Crows are legal to hunt during the spring and the fall in Michigan. There's not much point in shooting them other than to shoot them, as you don't eat them, but they are a nuisance to farmers and some farmers appreciate having fewer crows around at planting time. On our first day of hunting, a Friday, when turkey hunting was done for the day, we decided to blow the crow calls a few times and see if we could get any answers. We not only got answers, we got a whole flock of crows, a response far beyond what we expected. We shot them. We called them again. We shot more of them. This was the first time we had done this, and after the initial excitement we realized that there was little point to shooting things just to shoot them. We put away the crow calls and chalked that experience up to something that was interesting, but probably not to be repeated. We continued to hunt turkeys on Saturday and Sunday, and noon on Sunday found us right back where we had shot the crows two days before. As we sat listening for turkeys we could hear an intermittent noise.....of some sort. Maybe a bird? Kind of a weak cawing? Every 3 to 5 seconds, over and over. It didn't take us too long to track the noise up to a nest. It took us even less time to make the connection between the nest, the dead adult crows, and the noise coming from the nest.
Now, here is where the complex nature of my dad starts to become apparent, and might explain a little about me. My dad is a veterinarian, and an avid hunter. Some people are confused that he goes out to shoot animals on the weekend, and works to save them during the week. It seems like a contridiction, but it's really not, and it's really who he is. That same inner self is what led us to shoot adult crows two days before, and today work very hard to save their chicks. The fact that I'm writing this story should make it obvious that we were successful in climbing half way up the tree and using a long series of tied together branches to knock the nest apart. We would have liked to get right up to the nest and lift the chicks carefully out, but that wasn't possible and the best we could do was to get them to fall. Four of the five chicks survived the fall and we were both quite somber about the fate of the last one. The four surviving chicks were loaded into a bucket lined with a shirt and rode home between my legs in the truck, making noise all the way. On the way home we discussed the fact that my mom wasn't going to like this one bit, but they were hungry and we needed to get them home to feed them. Keep them alive first, and then figure out what to do with them. That evening, four well fed baby crows moved into my bedroom.
I've realized that this story is too long to type out all at once. I won't give everything away, but all four birds lived and thrived in my bedroom. Next week I'll describe the process of hand raising a crow and why crows might be the worst, and best, pets in the world.
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