The Great Outdoors
A time to hunt, and eat crow HOLDERNESS, N.H. (AP) – As the distressed cries of crows blare from a tape player, a group of hunters in training hunkers in the brush, waiting for the varmint to swoop.
Before them, a perched, plastic owl gazes over about a dozen crow decoys littering the ground, make-believe carnage intended to play on crows’ instinct to defend fellows in distress.
It’s easy to trash-talk crows – noise making, garbage pecking, egg thieving, roadkill eating, disease carrying, crop ruining nuisances that they are. But these wily birds are so smart and agile that they make first-class game birds.
“They’re very clever, they’re always on the lookout,” said Pete Lester, a crow hunter of some 30 years who arranged this huddle in the trees on a recent Saturday as part of a state Fish and Game Department workshop.
Lester sometimes clinches the deal in hunts by throwing a dead “tosser” crow in front of his wary prey.
“They are really going to put the moves on you once the shooting starts,” he said.
Crows have been known to work in pairs to raid other birds’ nests. As one crow approaches from the front, distracting the adult guarding the nest, the other crow sneaks up from behind to nab an egg or chick.
They also are a terror to farmers.
“I basically hate them,” said Phil Ferdinando, a farmer in Derry who loses corn, tomatoes and pumpkins to the pecking pests every year. “But you have to admire them for their intelligence.”
Crows are so smart that captive ones can be trained to speak, said Fish and Game biologist Ed Robinson.
The challenge made hunting them popular for generations, but the sport has been in decline since peaking around the middle of the last century. Sean Williamson, director of Fish and Game’s hunter education center in Holderness, hoped the workshop would stimulate interest in the fall crow season, which began Aug. 15 and ends Nov. 30.
The 20 or so people who attended included retired veterinarian Fred Allen, 70. “When they announced this I thought it might be fun to go out and do it again,” said Allen, who last hunted crow half a century ago on his family’s farm in Durham.
“It’s a forgotten pastime,” said Williamson, a second-generation crow hunter. “A lot of farms went away and the hunter numbers have gone down over the years, and your true die-hard crow hunters have just passed onto the great beyond.”
The crow’s unsavory reputation, and the popular distaste associated with “eating crow,” haven’t helped.
“To eat crow,” and its cousin, “to eat boiled crow,” began appearing in American newspapers during the 1870s. They mean being forced into humiliating and disagreeable acts that are “nearly equivalent” to eating dirt, according to the University of Chicago Press’ Dictionary of American English.
There is no definitive explanation for the origin of the phrase, but the most common one points to an encounter between a British officer and an American during a truce near the end of the War of 1812. After confiscating the trespassing American’s gun, the Brit forced him to eat a bite of fresh crow to get it back. Rearmed, the American ordered the Brit – on pain of death – to finish the bird.
Regardless, the idea that cooked crow tastes bad is simply wrong, according to some members of the crow-hunting community.
Jerry “the Crowman” Tomlin, who has been guiding hunts through pecan orchards in Georgia and South Carolina for more than 15 years, says the quickest path to eating crow is to marinate the breasts in steak sauce and grill them.
“I have always described it as tasting like a mallard duck,” he says.
He doesn’t mind that crows scavenge garbage and roadkill.
“Lobsters and crabs and shrimp, they’re all scavengers and people don’t seem to mind eating them, they just don’t see them on the bottom of the ocean, scouring over a dead whale carcass,” he says.
For more refined palates, retired Vermont game warden Eric Nuse offers crow breasts braised in wine. Nuse, whose recipe appears in the “Vermont Wildfoods Cookbook,” allows two crows per diner and recommends dark greens and cornbread as side dishes.
“I think if people actually did eat crow that phrase wouldn’t be as popularly used, ’cause it’s not bad,” he says.