The TPH Podcast | Episode 15 | "Team Crow Fight"

we're just going to get going then that's all you get so today we have team crowfight [Music] we have i'm not their last names all messed up casey jeffrey and then off camera we have justin he's the door guy and not here colby correct coming with a k so in february crow fight won the most fox side point with a total of 87 fox which is pretty pretty phenomenal night yes sir but before we get into that let's get to what was the hunt that got you fired up by predator hunting i guess it all started with me my dad i couldn't have been more than probably five years old my dad loaded me up one day we went across the fence behind our house and i sat down on a creek he had an old tape collar with a speaker taped to it put in a burnham brothers yellowhammer woodpecker hit play came back sat down in the bush in 30 seconds there was a coyote came barreling in and he shot it with a shotgun and from that day it's just yeah i've been hooked what about you i guess i was probably seven or eight and went to sonora and shot my first fox with a shotgun at five yards and i've been hooked yeah everything especially fox country how do you guy how did you guys get hooked up together why are you our team why are y'all team crow fight well actually this is probably this is the first contest that we've all three hunted together before i've hunted with jeffrey a couple times jeffrey's hunting with justin but we've never hunted together but we all grew up together we all grew up in mason and just it all happened just right yeah it was an interesting uh pairing never been on the ranch before just showed up and shot a bunch i mean that's and to me and anybody that contest hunts knows that uh usually when you have a thrown together team it doesn't work out at all so that makes to me it makes it even more even better i mean you are able to pull off 87 fox and for those who don't know west texas big bobcat 24 24-hour contest which technically isn't really a 24-hour contest because you depending on where you're hunting you could end up driving 20 hours 20 hours and i would assume that's getting after pretty good on 87. did y'all start at noon 12 30. was it on the entire time or was it slow in the beginning how'd the day started off with a double 12 30 then a triple spot after that then a single that casey missed then it was blanks for four hours we probably had 20 straight blanks and then immediately just turned back on triple double quad our first three sets after dark first set we killed seven the next set we killed eight the next set we killed nine killed more than that that's what we found right yeah when it gets that busy you're not depending on what the topography looks like you're not gonna find everything yeah i mean it's just impossible so what's y'all's standard procedure like how long are your stands uh do y'all send someone out picking up animals before you even quit or how do y'all do y'all's set up we've never made a call over probably eight minutes and most of the time by the time we had five and six down on the ground the guy with the shotgun was out picking them up and the guys with the rifles were still in the rack calling i'm assuming you are using some sort of fox sound standard rabbit yeah start off with a rabbit go to a bird back to a rabbit we ended up quitting playing bird yeah after dark because there's we're trying to shorten stands we started making five minute calls did y'all just at that point were y'all kind of in a routine like they're all showing up at this time frame we're just gonna cut it down yeah we had 17 fox at dark and that's when we decided that we probably had a pretty good chance at the pot so we kicked turned it into high gear then decided we were going to shorten our stance to five to six minutes and just put as many in the truck as we could what type of firearms were y'all running i was shooting at 22 250. bolt 223. he was shooting a bolt 223 and a 22 hornet and a shotgun you know what kind of ranges were were they just running over the pickup i'm assuming some of them were i think our longest shot was 250 or so but primarily it was mostly inside 100 yards i'd say we killed 30 to 40 with a shotgun that's a pretty good night 30-40 with a shotgun you can't complain about that gets expensive whenever it was expensive for him yeah because it took like five shots for him to kill one of them if i start shooting one with a shotgun it's getting three or four rounds my shoulder was blue by the end of the night i can't shoot you running 12-gauge yeah y'all ever mess with the 20-gauge no no man we used to run a lot of 20 and well when we used to have all that fox country a lot of 20 we run heavy shot three inch number two it's way cheaper than any kind of heavy shot other stuff because it's a mixture between the lead shot and the tungsten yeah we were mainly shooting three inch four shot three inch four shot three number four buck yeah what was the uh distance you are traveling in between each stand 500 yards to half a mile at most find the next opening five the next open spot stop and make a call that's what i was doing some of the country was pretty thick like you'd have to drive a mile or two that's where knowing the country would have helped yeah we'd hunted the thick stuff in the day and other stuff at night but right we did make a couple stands where we couldn't see more than 10 yards from the truck and it i mean when the foxes came out they were right there most of your really good fox country that's typically how it is or it's been my experience with it it's generally thick as crap and you're you're either shooting them on top of pickup or you're fighting you're struggling to find a spot that's a little bit more open fox are pretty small target you know and they generally don't stand still very long if they even stop you said you started the night time with 17 in the pickup and you're like okay let's go yar's just stopping wherever you can did it pretty much roll on full more until y'all left or we didn't have our first blanket night until 2 a.m so it's just it's it's slowed down we went from having quads and triples to we might get a double a single it slowed down but it never really quit did y'all ever call any other animals any bobcats or anything like that we called in one cat right after dark and we actually didn't even see him until justin and kobe were out picking up foxes you saw him coming in while they were picking up foxes and we never got a shot at him is that primarily what y'all do for big cat you'll go after the fox all the time or no no just it sort of happened that way we had a lot of other country lined up in case this didn't work out for either heavy fox or heavy cat we had a lot of stuff and mason lined up but it worked out so yeah we stayed there ran with it yes sir i mean like i said it's pretty impressive when you're on a ranch you don't know and team you don't know i mean i'm sure it was a great time yeah it's a once-in-a-lifetime night oh yeah i think of all the the trips we made to fox country there was maybe two times where it was not like that i think the most favorite kill was hundred something in the night which i mean we also hunted started way early in the day and hunted past daylight we weren't hunting contests that's a pretty serious night 87 fox it's pretty impressive what kind of optics are y'all running on your rifles i run a meopta optica 6 three to eighteen by fifty six on mine primarily what power range are you making most of your shots on six six x about eight six sierra four and a half to i don't even remember do you know about what power you're primarily i put the scope on the day before the contest so wasn't even [Laughter] sighted it in and went with it as far as most your shots taken what power are you on i keep it on lowest and if i need to turn it up for a long shot i'll turn it up pay attention going in the weigh-in y'all pretty much gear like you're probably like yeah we got one we had a we had a scare we did uh i had texted my chat i had texted my wife at about oh right before daylight saying that we had 83 and we were going to weigh in we were gonna keep hunting until about eight and she had texted me back saying that she heard some guys that i knew out of ozone i had 78 yeah before like two or three hours prior to this so we said holy crap we're gonna have to kill as many as we can yeah i think everybody the mood changed yeah everybody got like serious oh we might not win and then ended up right before we decided we were gonna leave i called one of the guys that was on that team and they're like no we only killed like seven or eight [Laughter] we're not even going to weigh in i was like okay good 78 to seven or eight yeah yeah there was some teams in february that put up 50 and i mean in january austin friday austin frye killed i think 57 in february another kill 57 and there was two teams that killed 57 in february did y'all place over their ballinger with anything no they were all we didn't even squirrels we didn't weigh a single fox yeah just wasn't even worth it no they don't do anything like most of side parts over ballinger no it's just heavy it's heavy y'all over preparers or very feel bad for the people in the back seat i mean i always take two rifles and a shotgun and at least this time i actually took the least amount of ammo that i've ever taken on a contest and i ended up nearly running out but i usually try to take 100 rounds for each rifle that i take and i only took 50 a piece and i was down to my last five with my 250 that night so yeah as far as e calls i'm assuming y'all's running fox pro probably a truck pro or what y'all's hunting rack like y'all running super high rack or just above the cab or you know running chairs or shooting adventure run shooting chairs we got trees in that part of the country yeah my racket we hunted out on my rack and it's actually i do a lot of hunting out west and don't really care about a rack that's high but when we hunt around mason it's it's almost too high yeah but the platform doesn't sit above the cab the rails are probably a foot above the cab of the pickup when y'all get ready i'm just being y'all had four people i'm assuming someone was probably driving and then you probably had white two in the rack and one on the ground with shot all four of us in the truck two guys running lights all right one guy the guy shooting a shotgun had a light another guy running another spotlight and then two guys in the chairs with gun luck gun light so y'all fire up the stand as soon as y'all start killing fox guy going retrieving guys getting down to go drive her no i mean we stopped and everybody got in the rack every time we could have saved time doing it that way but there's a few times we're running to get animals trying to save time but yeah people people don't understand you gotta do that yeah it's work when you go to shooting for potted most uh pot animals people don't realize the hustle is involved in something like that whatsoever you know i've talked to this i can't remember the guys names they they've put up big numbers before their thing was is they trolled the entire time they had one driver and they would literally put the vehicle in first gear and they would only shoot with shotguns and on the road so he would just step out of the pickup throw at the basket get back in the driver's seat and just go down these roads and do that all night nothing nothing off the road you're not allowed to shoot nothing off the road and they run 20 gauges the whole time i want to say they've put up 100 fox that won the contest at some point i can't remember which one i mean it's pretty especially a new team to put up 87 pretty impressive everybody did their job and we didn't miss very many times yeah no you ain't gonna go and you can go away with nothing like that missing no i mean we were talking last night we figured might have been 15 or 20 fox so we saw that didn't get killed i mean that's pretty good do y'all do how do y'all do how do y'all decide who's going to sit in the chairs and shoot don't just rotate i have a rotation you don't know the rule if you miss your out didn't really have that many misses everybody just on that night and everything everybody had like one miss that's good yeah that's really good so did y'all grow up kind of around that country everybody on the whole team yeah has there always been a lot of funks or no in that general area you don't have to say where is that i mean growing up used to probably a good night in mason was 10 fox if you could go out and kill 10 fox around mason you had a good night and it seems like slowly they're starting to get thicker around that area that's interesting it's usually the inverse coyotes start moving in hard we used to have a few fox out here it didn't help but when i first got here i killed my job but then when i realized there wasn't many out here because i thought this was going to be fox country because i hunted in this general area prior to moving out here about five years prior we weren't that far from this place and there's tons of fox the first time i hunted out here i killed a bunch of fox and they're like yeah that's probably like the last one so i left them alone after that and we just don't even see them anymore now now this could just be hearsay i hear it's quite impossible to kill coyotes over there it's not impossible but they are pretty educated it's getting getting easier kind of everybody called for them out there yes large cows go yeah is there a lot of sheep country over there not anymore mason used to be a lot of goat country but now it's mainly cattle i wonder what made the population boom like that yeah absentee landowners is a big part of it yeah nobody's because mason is just like everywhere else it's getting split up you know everybody's coming in buying 100 record places and they're living you know they live in austin dallas area and they're never there so nobody's controlling it so y'all just got on some good fresh country yes yes i mean obviously but have you always been hunting big cat or did y'all just decide to hunt in that one time or i've hunted big cat myself nearly every year for the last 15 years what about the same how did y'all get hitched up and put together this team uh actually justin called me is how i got on the team he called me and said hey are you hunting i was like no or asked if i had a team put together and i said no not yet and he asked if i wanted to hunt with him and his brother and i said yes and then the day before the contest jeffrey figured out that he was going to be off work so he jumped in with us but it was a spur of the moment yeah hey let's go hunt what rabbit sound was y'all using people going to ask so we might as well kg cottontail and baby cottontail yeah you meant to say screaming jackrabbit yeah or whatever lightning jack lightning jack and crow fight yeah we all kind of circling through sounds or anything like that or just sticking to that they're working so don't yeah don't change it don't mess with things that are working y'all just kind of roll through the night with safe sounds did y'all subtract the the bird because it was producing the least amount or just the one y'all cutting it was producing but i don't think it made a difference they were going to come in there would be yeah i mean we're we had a lot killed within 45 seconds immediate are y'all making any plans to go back out there next year i mean did you go back out there this season or no we hunted at that one time and had been back hopefully give it a year's rest yeah that takes a lot out of the population i'm sure it did but i mean you'd probably have a good year this next year but then after that it's probably won't be very good for a few years so i think we're gonna let it rest a year maybe a lot of people will hear that number and they'll be like oh you killed everything inside oh no there's still a bunch out there well it's been my experience on places they have when you're having those kind of nights you're not i mean if you kept going kept going kept going you eventually have a dent on population but places where you're calling them like that you're just probably barely touching the edge like it's it's pretty crazy are y'all are y'all running primarily bolt action or ar platform bolt action have you ever given any thought to an ar after not like that just not your cup of tea i've tried it i hunted a couple times with a 6'5 grendel ar and i didn't like it at all yeah it was when we used to go a lot we'd have we'd take people we was got a lot more than and the guys who brought the ars they were terrible shots yes in the having that much ammo at your destination made it that much worse they would just shoot them all instead of shooting making that one count now there was a particular time where we were hunting this this weird contest this ranch contest and i don't even remember what was that was somewhere south of ozone i think i don't remember some big uh sheep branch we could not get the fox to come out of the brush and we tried shooting we don't we'd always carry like small calibers 17 rim stuff like that and shoot through brush don't really work out all the time on those so what we end up doing the play was we took an ar with some pretty hearty bullets i would just start shooting at the eyes in the brush and when it run out they would shoot it and that's what we used our ar for [Laughter] scare them out pretty much you know they'd bolt in but they'd get behind those little salt seeders and just lock it down okay y'all get ready let's run out that kill it uh what type of what type of boat guns are y'all running i was just running a savage axis i've got a remington 700 what about them justin was shooting uh ruger ranch 223 and kobe was shooting a savage 22 hornet yeah nothing fancy you don't need nothing fancy they shoot straight are y'all shooting suppressed yes thank god yes kobe actually does not own a suppressor yet i think he bought one after we won that contest but he was using my suppressor i told him you cannot know if you're shooting suppressed yeah yeah i mean all it takes is one night in fox country and you can sell someone on suppressor and heart race especially if they're used to their loud guns that's what that was the biggest selling point for me was my first night in fox country because i i'd been around one very few times a shot here and there and i was always away from them we're sitting up away from each other but my first night at fox country was one of those good nights and when we got there they were like you can run one of our guns i'm like i was carrying that one it was whenever that one was 22 to 50. i was like i don't shoot other people's guns i only shoot this one i'm used to this one so all night i think i shot about 70 times yeah all night they had to listen to that [ __ ] and they never said nothing they're completely nice about it the next thing out there like why don't you shoot this 223 and i was like yeah well after about 20 shells i was like god i'd have kicked me out of the wreck last night i bought a another suppressor for that reason yeah if we ever go hunting with somebody that doesn't have a suppressor i either have another gun that has a suppressor on it or you can use my spares yeah oh yeah 100 there's uh one of these days we're gonna do a full podcast about suppressors we're gonna get some of the guys in here but there's no comparison i mean especially when you're shooting that much at nine you know uh your ears will just be gone yes you want runs pressed what suppressors are y'all running i run a nomad and i have a texas silencer cove hunter yankee hill resonator i got a nomad l in jail the nomads are pretty good cans they are really good i've been really impressed with them as far especially you know we get the added benefit of testing a bunch of different suppressors as far as actually goes i tell everybody it's pretty hard to beat dead air uh and when if i want to if i want to shoot groups for you know to show off targets for social media it gets dead ever put on it and we you know we can run just about anything we want to are y'all giving much in fox country y'all giving much thought to the wind y'all just kind of keeping it back in mind y'all struggling with it don't scroll with it you don't care about those those fox don't care yeah when they're moving in that quick they don't i'm right they're not looking for the wind either i've never had an issue with cats or fox with winds yeah cats i've never seen one bugger off from being downwind i have seen some fox older fox big fox care about the wind they'll get out there and bark at you but in the contest when you're shooting most of you just go to hell with him yeah we're going to kill these easy ones it has been my experience they don't because we hunted a bunch of property over and over for a long time you can still get him he's way easier to get in than say a coyote's been downwind yeah and even sean just change sounds a lot of times they'll come out change sounds and we used to bark at them and that was like our last thing if they're standing out there barking at us and we're trying to get them killed because it's a population control situation somebody would bark and nine times out of ten it would come out there i mean which we've we've tried all kinds of sounds we'd be playing around messing with them uh pig distress all kinds of stuff you can always get them to come out if you're just patient enough crow fight does it i'm telling you you heard it here from team girlfriend if you take lightning jack and crowfight and you use that fox fusion and you put them together and you play it as loud as you can it works really good full volume yes blasting 40. during the day we used uh x24 during the day out of the rack or not not in we got out of the pickup and walked that's what i was gonna ask you during daytime do y'all always on out of the rack we didn't this contest a lot of times if it's more in oil field country we will yeah but not where we were at and you know y'all said would you did y'all ever shoot any while someone was out there picking them up i'm assuming so i'd shot some picking them up with a shotgun they would run but they yelled at me a few times get out of the way and i would take it off running that definitely seems like a good time that's for sure it was i'll probably get more questions from people in that area about how hard it is called coyotes and i know we touched on this when i got when i want to get back into it is it really that hard to call them in or just most people suck that really is it's pretty challenging sometimes if you know where they are they're easy to kill i kill a bunch in the summertime on locals yeah if you know where they're at they're pretty easy to get couch code yeah a lot of people in that area have not caught on to the vocal yet yeah and they're trying to call them in with a rabbit and you won't call them in with it you won't call them in with a rabbit not in jack 40. yeah that doesn't work out crow fight doesn't either so if if you were to answer someone asking about being more productive on the coyotes over there what advice would you give them don't try to hunt after dark they're pretty light yeah they are very light shy they will not it's very hard if you kill a coyote after dark he's just dumb yeah you got lucky yeah oh i don't even hunt them after dark yeah in the day that's what when i lived in northeast texas that's what i did because everybody and their dog would drive down the county roads at night time run spotlight and just blaring the fox pro and then i just moved straight to mouth calls and only daytime and my success rate just went skyrocket best advice i'd give is play the wind figure out where they live and try to get within six or 800 yards of their den and you'll kill them nine times or you'll see them nine times out of ten not everybody's going to kill them as far as the coyote country goes out there are y'all running the same caliber rifles primarily because it's is it pretty much primarily small openings or smaller oh it gets a little bit bigger i'll tell you you can have a couple hundred yard shots around a six creed for coyotes what same what about you 22 250 mainly 250. what about y'all i mean it's 22 250 is pretty tried and true i mean i shot one i shot that one a lot uh i mean out here i tend to grab for the bigger stuff because you know out here our tallest tree y'all saw it yes yeah about six foot so in the racks at night it's i mean we've killed coyotes out to five six hundred yards at night time which we'll run big big lots but so we we tend to well you see it there's kind of like a line from about cena's low this way 22 creeds six creeds or even people out here have really gotten in the 6284s and the slow twist barrels and they're running you know 70s and 90s at 4 000 feet per second you know it's name a game is flat shooting as far as possible but i've also spoken to a lot of people out here who think can't kill a coyote with 223. yeah there's a lot of those there's a lot of those my uh my belief is you just need to shoot better yes i mean out here there are nights where i was glad i took something like a sixth grade because some nights they'll just be you know hauling ass the entire time never stop so you know i shoot a lot but i'm not going to shoot perfectly every time so i may hit them in the body that's where you know sixth grade and stuff like that really takes over as opposed to 223 if you've got shoot one at 200 yards you may not be finding it so your your advice for that area would be just stop doing what you're doing pretty pretty much stop going out at night just blaring the call not paying attention to the wind yes well that was probably pretty good spot to wrap it up i mean unless there's more stuff y'all want to talk about well i guess that's pretty much it for this time we'll see you guys next time thanks thank you all for coming out appreciate us

Channel: The TPH Podcast with Wade Chandler

Views: 371

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Id: QF8RzOPd3Og

Length: 26min 57sec (1617 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 20 2022