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Reminds me of a story. Pull up a stump, boys.
Back in the summer of '78 I was stationed at Ft. Knox, KY. A buddy of mine had been out prospecting for hunting areas and had found a farmer with a field of sweet corn on the banks of the Ohio river. The farmer told my buddy that the crows were in his corn and told him that he'd pay for crow eradication, 4 crows - one bushel of sweet corn at harvest. The farmer thought that my buddy would come in with a shotgun, drive off the crows and collect a bushel of corn. My buddy had a different plan.
My buddy called me, asked if I had any .22 rifles, and brought me along as a partner. That next bright, Saturday morning, he came to my house before daylight and picked me up. He had a bag full of rat traps and an electronic crow call. We set up in the corner of the field. My buddy tied those rat traps to the fence and put the trap on top of the fence posts. He had about a dozen set up. Then we got into the blind and he turned on an owl-fight record.
The first crow sailed in about ten minutes later. I started to sight on him, but my buddy stopped me. "Not yet. I'll tell you when to start firing." We waited and another couple of crows sailed in. One lighted on a fence post and got caught in the rat trap. That poor old crow was dangling in the wire, his leg caught in that trap, and another landed on an adjacent post and got caught. They began raising hell as only crows can, and over the next fifteen minutes we had hundreds of crows milling around, landing in trees, landing on the ground, lots of noise and crow cacophony. Then, my buddy raised his rifle and went to work.
We shot steadily for about twenty minutes and when the crows figured out what was happening and high-tailed it out, we had 84 crows on the ground.
My share of the sweet corn was 10 bushels.
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