All-time crow-buster Bob Aronsohn relies on a well-brushed blind that blends into the surroundings, as well as a handful of strategically positioned decoys.
117,868 ... 173,750 ... and counting. Crows.
One by one, Bob Aronsohn has tallied these mind-boggling figures, faithfully recording the results of 32 hunting seasons in detailed logbooks. The first number accounts for the crows that have fallen to his shotgun; the second represents the total killed by Bob and his partners.
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| After the setup is complete, it’s time to slip into the blind. When you’re hunting with a man who has accounted for around 175,000 crows in his days afield, you can’t wait to get started. |
Soon he will be at it again, setting up his well-worn, homemade blind in locales he insists we must not divulge. Invariably, a river of dark birds will form above it, drawn by calling and the decoys he has perched onto low-hanging branches. With purpose, Bob will single out targets from the streaming bunch, his shotgun will bark and he will thumb a new count onto a stainless steel clicker.
Two autumns back I joined Bob and our mutual friend Gordon Krause for a hunt in a crow-migration hotspot in one of our central states. To say the least, I was anxious to meet the man Gordon kept insisting is “the greatest crow hunter who’s ever lived.” As founder/webmaster for Crowbusters.com, Gordon has united America’s dedicated, if scattered, crow hunters, and as such possesses a unique overview of his sport.
Bob had arrived a couple days ahead, and he greeted us with the news that more than a million crows were massed in the neighborhood. We tend to throw around the million concept often enough nowadays that we think we know what it means. But when such a number manifests itself as individual birds spread out and moving across the sky, million becomes awe-inspiring and unknowable. And just how many really didn’t matter as the man ushered us from one front-row seat to another beneath an unending airborne parade.
The fellow I met was young and fit for nearly 60, and in his sunglasses resembled square-jawed Gen. MacArthur. He was cordial but clearly anxious to get out in the field. His old pickup was stuffed with gear, and Bob barked out instructions to Gordon and me to help him set it up. The blind consisted of fence-like squares that fit together in a modular design as dictated by the number of shooters. There were adjoining “cells,” each about 4 feet square and 4 feet high, one for each of us. While Gordon and I retrieved lengths of fresh-cut cedar for brushing the structure, Bob wired up “Screaming Mimi,” his amplified electronic caller complete with 10-inch woofers and powered by a car battery. After that he slung a dozen plastic decoys in the low trees flanking our blind and we were ready to begin. The elaborate setup had obviously been polished for maximum efficiency.
As far as the eye could see crows swarmed overhead, all of them traveling in the same general direction. We appeared to be centered under the busiest concentration, and when Bob fired up the caller even more of the dusky varmints veered our direction. From that moment until dusk the shooting was practically nonstop. Even though we rotated the shot, it was difficult to reload fast enough to keep pace with the birds wheeling in response to Mimi’s shrieking come-on. Soon I noticed that regardless of the direction of approach, as often as not the birds would bank up in a zone just out from the blind, almost hovering for a moment, and that made the shooting relatively easy. I would learn that this was no accident, but rather the result of Bob expertly gauging the wind when determining the exact blind position.
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| Expert crow shooter Bob Aronsohn says hunters don’t need to use a lot of decoys, but that they must be placed correctly in respect to wind direction and the birds’ flight path. |
In less than two hours we added a few hundred more to the Aronsohn life count. He pronounced it a good outing, though not exceptional, and I knew the only things that could have made it better were more time and better shooting. I had hit almost 50 percent efficiency and Gordon was a bit better than that. Bob, meanwhile, dropped better than two birds for every three shells fired, which is right on the mark with the lifetime average denoted in his logbooks. He proudly showed me the shotguns he shoots so well, a set of Remington 870s (12- and 20-gauge) that had been custom-stocked some years back by Reinhart Fajen. I’d seen a few fancy-grade pump guns, but none with such spectacular wood, all dressed up like a pair of bastard Purdeys.
High-volume shotgunning isn’t for everyone, but I have never seen anyone try it who didn’t walk away wildly enthusiastic. Since boyhood I’ve poked around the edges of crow hunting, but this first truly big-time shoot was an epiphany. Gordon has done enough to appreciate just how exceptional it is to be where so many birds are congregated. And contrary to what you might expect from a man who dedicated himself to the sport for four decades, our host was crowing joyfully. “Doesn’t matter how many times he’s been there and done it,” says Krause, “when Mimi starts up and the crows come flying, Bob’s eyes light up.”
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Bob Aronsohn’s crow obsession didn’t develop in a vacuum of opportunity. While there were plenty of activities around his home on Long Island, N.Y., it was still sufficiently rural in the 1950s that local farmers would welcome young hunters to help rid cropfields of avian freeloaders. Bob’s dad was both a successful businessman and a keen hunter who passed on the thrill of the chase. In addition to sharing his own zeal for crows, the senior Aronsohn saw to it his progeny experienced a variety of small game, big game and varmints. Before he was 11 years old Bob had journeyed to Alaska with his dad and became one of the youngest visiting hunters to kill a huge brown bear. A few years later the pair was off to Zambia for a storybook safari.
By the time he was 15, Bob had mastered crow calling and as often as possible convinced older buddies to drive him places where there were more crows, even when that meant sleeping in the car waiting for the sun to come up.
A turning point came when 17-year-old Bob decided he was in love and wanted to get married. His father put a stop to that by sending him to live with a family friend who owned a gun shop in Chamberlain, S.D., and it was there Bob got his “first taste of real crow hunting.”
Bob had gone out for the football team when he spied a phenomenon that would set the tone for the rest of his life. “Every day at practice, I’d see hundreds and hundreds of crows flying over going in the same direction. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and I went to the coach: “Coach, I’d really like to be on the team, but I like shooting a lot more than playing football.’
“And he said, ‘What are you talking about? Son, you’re one of the best receivers we’ve got. You can hunt the rest of your life, but now’s the time to be playing sports.’
“I was already leaving. ‘Sorry coach,’ I said, ‘I just gotta go find out where those crows are going.’” What he found was a roost of 5,000 crows and a new way of hunting. “Back East, it was pretty much run-and-gun. Find a bunch and shoot 15 minutes or so and it’d be all over. Move on to another spot. But there in South Dakota, I discovered hunting out of a blind. A buddy and I’d go out and we’d regularly shoot 50 to 60 apiece. We thought that was just great.”
It was at that same roost Bob met a man he calls his “crow-hunting mentor.”
“The crows were flying out of the east that day and some guy using a hi-fi caller was set up a couple hundred yards away. We were shooting a few dozen, but he was simply raining ’em down out of the air,” Bob recalled. “Afterward I went over to talk and I noted that this fellow, Boyd Robeson, had two Mallardtone calls hanging from his neck. Ten years later while hunting in Kansas, I ran into another hunter and recognized those two calls.” The diehard crow men compared notes and soon struck up a friendship centered around high-intensity hunting that lasted for two decades, until Robeson’s death in the 1990s. After a hitch in the Navy and a few years working back East, Bob got married on March 3, 1974. “On March 4, 1974, I put [my new bride] Gail on a jet to the Midwest because that’s where the crows were. Our car and belongings were already there.” That fall Bob started keeping a meticulous, hand-written log, recording dates, times, locations, landowner names, number of birds killed, number of shells fired, weather and wind conditions and more.
Year after year Bob would head out on the backroads of middle America in search of the exceptional, giant roosts that could satisfy his itch for high-volume shooting. “I’ve gone on many wild-goose chases, and ended up at roosts where yes, you could shoot 80-100 crows. But why spend time on those, when there are better roosts to be found? You keep looking and looking, and once in a while you hit on something good.”
There are six detailed logbooks now, each crammed with a treasury of insight, a collection that embodies unparalleled crow-hunting expertise. Bob never intended the notebooks would serve as anything more than his personal record, nor that his exploits be known beyond of small circle of family and friends.
But along came the Internet and with it a website specifically for crow hunters. Marylanders Krause and Doug Wigfield figured they would enjoy reaching out to a small group of sportsmen who shared their passion for a type of hunting one seldom hears about in this day and age. The Crowbusters.com founders were happily surprised by the response, and perhaps the biggest surprise of all was a man who claimed his personal crow bag ran into the six figures.
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Says Krause: “When I first met Bob he was not at all well known and he was reluctant to get any kind of recognition at all. He had contacted me through the website and once I learned his story and determined he was for real, I realized what we had here. For many months I tried to talk him into becoming a staff advisor, no matter how low-profile. He was very guarded. Then somewhere along the line that thinking took a quick 180. He agreed to come on board and started answering questions and offering advice. Now he will help anyone who asks. He enjoys the little bit of limelight we give him, but more importantly he likes being appreciated for what he has done.”
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No matter how good you are at it, crow hunting won’t make you rich or famous. There are no TV shows that herald the wild anticipation when an enraged flock comes screaming murder over your blind, no product endorsement deals, no speaking engagements and only the quirkiest outdoor writer seems to think crow hunting is a topic his readers will embrace.
If life were fair Bob Aronsohn would be enjoying the notoriety conferred by all the above. In this age of celebrity hunters, he is as deserving as any of them based on his prowess and track record.
However, I think it is fitting that Bob goes about his amazing, lifelong pursuit in relative obscurity. He is the epitome of the American hunter—confident, self-reliant, extremely knowledgeable about his game and a crack shot—and for us hunting has never been a spectator sport. It is about getting out there and pitting one’s self against unpredictable wild animals for the sake of attaining some measure of private self-fulfillment. My guess is that there are other Bob Arohnsons haunting America’s forests and fields, men we’ve never heard about who are incomparably skilled at this or that kind of hunting. For sure they’re rare birds, and given recent trends will likely become even rarer.
For much of his adult life Bob Aronshon has devoted himself to mastering a type of hunting few hunters today hold in much regard. He is proud of what he has accomplished and doesn’t shy away from revealing numbers that make some people—even other hunters—cringe at what they consider excessive. Although he has always preferred to hunt solo, Bob has recently embraced the opportunity to share his vast knowledge. Thanks to Crowbusters.com any interested hunter can learn from the master. He has even produced an instructional DVD, The Art of Crow Hunting (available from crowbusters.com, click on “CrowMart Store”).
And if you’re really intrigued by all this, I can actually tell you where to meet a man considered by his peers to be a “living legend” and the “greatest of all time.” Find America’s biggest, rowdiest crow roost and I bet he’ll be there. Counting crows
