Valley Life: Hunter sees conservation benefits in pursuing crows

Feb. 18—Dusk dimmed the sky above a remote, wooded area west of the Wabash River on the last day of January.

Boot prints dotted a dusting of snow along a path into the forest. The wind was still, but the air packed a wintry bite. The temperature was in the teens.

Mark Grayless stood quietly beside a tree. Decoy birds uttered recorded squawks, the only sounds heard.

Grayless, a 68-year-old retired pastor from Riley, waited patiently in the freezing minutes before sundown for a circling overhead of corvus brachyrhynchos — the scientific name for American crows, which amass a roost of tens of thousands around Terre Haute every winter. Grayless hunts crows.

"I enjoy the exercise, the challenge and the conservation side of crow hunting," Grayless said, "but I still feel like I am doing a service for my community by eliminating a few."

Indeed, the impact of Terre Haute's annual crow influx can be seen on sidewalks, outdoor public amenities, shop canopies and parked cars. Crows also eat the eggs and nestlings of songbirds, which can adversely affect the population of those birds, according to the highly regarded Cornell University Lab of Ornithology, overseen by expert Kevin J. McGowan.

Grayless cites those impacts in describing why he endures cold, wet weather of December, January and February to hunt crows. The hunts help control the crow population, he said.

Grayless participates in Indiana's crow hunting season, as outlined in the state code. Crows can be hunted from July 1 to Aug. 15, and again from Dec. 13 to March 1, according to the Indiana Department of Natural Resources. "The March-through-June break excludes peak breeding season for crows," Marty Benson, assistant director of communications for the DNR said in an email this month.

Crows can be taken out of the hunting season if they are damaging trees, crops, livestock or wildlife, or creating a public health hazard, Benson added.

"Crow hunting regulations in Indiana and other states are set using a framework provided by the Code of Federal Regulations," Benson said.

For Grayless, crow hunting is an extension of hunting experiences that date back to his youth, when he learned wing-shooting — the hunting of game birds or shooting at targets in flight — by watching his dad and older brother hunt quail. Eventually, Grayless began wing-shooting quail, before his brother introduced him to duck and goose hunting after the quail population dwindled. A loss of quail habitat was responsible for that decline over a half-century, according to Purdue University Forestry and National Resources.

Grayless continued to hunt geese and ducks until two of his hunting buddies passed away.

"It was never the same, and I became intrigued with the booming local crow population about 15 years ago," Grayless recalled.

"That, and I came out of Moggers [a downtown Terre Haute restaurant] one night and had to go to the carwash," he added.

The number of crows roosting every October through February in Terre Haute exploded in the 1990s. By the early 2000s, counts by Indiana State University ecology students showed an estimated 90,000 spending winter in Terre Haute. Those numbers fluctuated to 30,000 or 60,000 in other years, a trend that has continued. A University of Vermont study in 2010 placed Terre Haute's roost among the seven largest in the U.S.

The website for Crow Busters, an organization of crow hunters, says that crow populations "have reached epidemic proportions," and that interest in "varmint hunting" has increased, as a result.

Efforts by the city of Terre Haute, businesses, public entities and the bygone volunteer "Crow Patrol" to shoo crows away from downtown into the countryside — using pyrotechnics, noise makers and "wavy guy" inflatables — have risen and waned through the years.

Grayless continues to hunt. Retirement as a full-time pastor — including 21 years as an Indiana State Police chaplain — allows Grayless time to hunt crows three days a week in season. He continues to serve as a part-time pastor at First Christian Church in his hometown of Brazil and serves as chaplain for the Indiana DNR District 5. During one week last month, he visited a widow and a church member in a hospital emergency room, attended an All-Pro Dads fatherhood program in Brazil schools, and officiated a funeral.

He was still able to work in time for crow hunts.

"This is my wintertime hobby," Grayless said.

He's downed more than 775 crows this year, and more than 5,000 since he started the sport.

Grayless' Jan. 31 hunt started slowly, after he set up a blind, positioned decoy crows on tree limbs and in bushes in the wooded area and watched the sky, holding a 12-gauge shotgun. He sounded a hand-held crow call, joining the cacophony of recorded decoy sounds. His first shots didn't bring down any crows, but his second round got one. Grayless wound up downing 13 by sundown.

He gathers up the dead crows, so that eagles along the Wabash River front don't eat birds containing shotgun pellets, and disposes of them elsewhere.

"It's keeping the population under control. It's keeping Terre Haute clean, one crow at a time. And it's good for conservation," Grayless said.

Mark Bennett can be reached at 812-231-4377 or mark.bennett@tribstar.com.