"A New Call"
by Adam Watkowski

I would like to share a little secret of mine that will help increase your kills on the call-wise crows. Like you, I'm always looking for a new way to keep the crows off balance during hunting season. I came across a predator call made by Quaker Boy called the Screaming Predator call. How it works is based on an old waterfowl call which I owned years ago. One end has a rubber bellows with a distressed rabbit call inserted, and the other end has a pea-sized hole that allows air to enter the chamber with each squeeze of the bellows. Let me tell you how I came about all of this. Early in the season for crows, I had noticed a lot of young birds gathering in the trees throughout the course of the day. These mobile nurseries are also attended to by mature crows that cater to the young. The older birds act as sentries to warn the young, dumb birds of possible danger. I took note of the noises that the young birds made to get the attention of the older birds. When they would vocalize, a variety of sounds (which, by the way sounded nothing like a crow) brought the older birds in a hurry. The older birds would raise a fuss and swarm around the younger birds to assure them that everything was OK. The sounds that the young birds made varied between a cackle to a gurgle type of noise, none of which I could ever reproduce on any of the mouth calls that I own. Then it dawned on me how to make these calls myself. I inserted one of the best calls out there -- my long-range Gibson Custom Call -- into the altered predator call by Quaker Boy that I mentioned earlier. With a little finesse, I placed my crow call into the end of the bellows and began to wiggle the bellows so as to mimic the feeding call of a duck. Well, it worked beautifully. I cup the call in one hand and give it a quick wiggle, and open and close my fingers to vary the pitch. The older birds were totally fooled into thinking that there was a group of the young birds around who needed that reassurance.

The action was fast and furious. I placed my wind activated decoys out on an open meadow and got up under some trees. Things not only worked, they worked great! So, if you're looking for something different to use on some wise old birds, try this. It is one of the most effective calls you could use in the
early season when the young birds are in groups.