A lot of info on the site above. Lots of scouting is required to find the roost and the fields they are using. The fields can change during the season. The spring migration is better hunting than the fall migration. Good luck. Mod Edit: I deleted the link you posted
If you can find a sizable roost your golden. They fly in all directions at first light like the spokes on a wagon wheel. Get underneath one of those flight lines and bring lots of shells. More than you thought you would need.
I deleted the link for Crow Busters. No links allowed but you can google the name. I talked to Bob Aronsohn many times over the years. He even sent me a home video of a few of his crow hunts and a great one of him and his pals in South America hunting duck, geese, and pigeons. I was a member for almost 10 years. Best shooting here in SWPA was in the fall and winter. PA law, Friday, Saturday, Sunday only. From around Nov.1 to March 1st. We did 99% of our shooting in the afternoons as they gathered up and headed for the roost. As Dobyns told you, DON"T SHOOT IN THE ROOST. You can do it once, then they will move. Sometimes many miles from where you screwed up. 3 dram reloads in 7.5's is plenty out of a Mod or Full choke. I started killing them when I was 16, and quit chasing them when I was 58 so yeah, I've killed a "few". The roost around Brownsville PA had approximately 50,000 in it. That number came from the PA game commission. Back in the 70's the roost around Chambersburg PA had 250,000. I started with and still have the 12- battery, metal cased, "Call of the Wild" record player. Moved on to a 12-battery cassette, then an 8-battery cassette then a rechargeable cassette player. We would run two callers along with a half dozen mouth calls. Look up Turpin crow calls. They were the best. I had a topo map that showed 21 blinds I had around Brownsville. If you "Google Earth" Brownsville and West Brownsville PA. you will see all the hills around the area. The blinds were on the highest spot of each one of those hills or ridge lines. The birds roosted near the river in the winter, it was warmer near the water, so they would cross one of our blinds before diving down to be close to the water. The bitch was humping 10 boxes of shells, the gun(use a sling), the caller, decoys, and something to drink UP any of those hills. Some days the birds were a little spooky so we had to move to a different blind, sometimes only a quarter mile would make all the difference. Set up and kill 10 or 20 then they quit coming. Move to a different blind and kill 100. If you are not going to run-and-gun but hunt the same area around the roost, you can put up some decoy lines so you don't have to spend time doing it when you get to whichever blind you have to use. Get a slingshot and some sinkers. Mount a Zepco style reel filled with mono, 10 Lb. is enough, on a short piece of dowel rod. You only need one eye on the rod. Pick your spot, shoot a sinker up and over the highest limb you can and when you find it take off the sinker and tie on the end of some cheap braided line. Reel the mono back in until you have the braided line in hand and give yourself a lot of extra. Tie on a clip that fits the ring on the back of the deke and haul away. You can wrap the braided around a stick as you hoist the deke so it doesn't get tangles in all the underbrush. When you are finished for the night simply lower the deke, wrap the clip end to that stick and leave it there for the next time. Trust me, they won't remember which tree you hung it in the next time. You just have to make sure YOU remember which tree so you can find the stick with the line on it. Make at least two or more of these rigs for each blind and save yourself time when you get there the next hunt. I had both papier mâché and then plastic decoys. Paint them a flat Black to kill the glossy, shiny appearance Used an Owl a few times, but it wasn't worth it. Build the back of the blind higher than the front and make the front height to just below your breastbone. When they are coming and looking for what's making all the noise, DON'T MOVE. I mean be a statue, keep your face down and look up under the brim of your hat. I always wore a 'booney hat" to help hide my face. Wait until they are on top of you THEN make your move. We never shot at any of them beyond 40 yards. Sometimes they were right off the barrel. When we were 16-17 we did a lot of stupid things and would kill 40 on a good day. As we got older and wiser the numbers went up Best day I had by myself was the day after Thanksgiving one year. Killed 134. The best 2-man record, In December, from around 2:30 pm to 4:30 pm, was 286. The best 3 man shoot, the blind was a little too small for easy swinging, was 320. That day we laughed at one another more than we shot. You can take turns shooting first, or, like we did, shoot first until you miss. Of course, as soon as you shoot your buddy can try and pick one or two off before they bug out and the next bunch peels off the flyway to come to your set up. If you YouTube, "Crows on the Flyway" I posted a video from years ago of a few minutes of us in one of the blinds. We killed 125 that evening. Most shoots were in the 50-100 count. Sometimes the buggers just wouldn't co-operate, and we killed only 20-30. Strong windy days SUCK. They can't hear the caller and even if they do, they don't want to fight the wind to get to you. I was working back then so couldn't go Fridays. Most weekends we went either Sat. or Sun. and a few times we went both days. Ended up going around 16-20 times in those 4 months. We averaged right around 1,800 total each "season".
Watch Bob Aronsohn’s videos if you want to see some big numbers. And notice the color of the shells he is using. You can carry a lot more ammo into the blind with those shells. Anyone that tells you that you need heavy 12 ga. “Field” loads hasn’t killed that many crows.
Grandad always had crows feeding of the gain in his feed lot. As a kid I set up a blind, but the crows wouldn't come back. Grandads' words of wisdom was crows can count but can't divide. So, three of us would walk into the blind and one would leave. Shur enough crows came right back.
