"Eat'n Crow"
October 2005

I'm not going to take up your time with the new Crow Ka-bob recipe and I'm not going to bother you with the details of why stone ground flour works better when baking a Crow Pie. Instead, I'm going to discuss my views on the times in life when a person has to eat crow.

I certainly hope it's not just a southern saying, but southern or not … I've heard it all my life. Like many youngsters, especially those of us with Alpha personalities, I made a lot of statements I had to take back and when I made such a statement, my dad and uncles would tell me, "Be careful or you'll have to eat crow"! I don't know the origin of the saying, but wherever it got it's start I've heard it a lot over the years and I never learned my lesson, since I still do the same thing from time to time.

I've had to take a lot of things back over the years, especially when it comes to waterfowl hunting. When I first started guiding in the late 70's, we were hunting public timber, swamps and marshes. Rice just hadn't made it this far north at the time. It was simpler days. Days when you knew no one cared if you hunted their old swamp. We would find where the ducks were sitting, figure out how to get to them and since they had usually been there for several days without being disturbed … the hunting was fast and easy. Easy in the sense we didn't even use decoys. You just didn't need them. All we had to do was stir the water a bit with our feet and they would come right into the noise and ripples. That was when I knew it all. I can remember laughing at the guys we heard and read about that would carry decoys in with them. I even made the statement, "I'll never use decoys" … and that ended up being a big plate of crow I've had to eat over the years.

It's happened like that more times than I could ever list in this column, but spinning wing decoys are another recent example. When I first tried the Wonder Duck, years before the spinners came out, it amazed me at how well it worked. Spinners seemed to improve the effectiveness and of course I made the comment, "I'll always use a spinner". Yet again I found myself backing up on that statement, at least in Arkansas. Even before the recent ban on spinning wing decoys, I had all but stopped using them.

It never fails and you would think I would eventually learn, but the most recent plate of crow that's been handed to me happened this summer. While I'm not exactly sure on the year, I would venture to say it was six or maybe eight years ago when we first discovered the benefits of running the longtail style mud motors. My staff and I were all amazed where we could go with one of these motors. Not only did they impress us, our clients loved them as well. The longtail mud motor cut out a lot of walking and more importantly, it provided us with the ability to get to where the ducks wanted to be. How could anything work better … impossible, or so I thought and once again I opened my big mouth and ended up with a big plate of crow to eat.

It ends up it wasn't impossible to build a motor that would out perform the longtail mud motors. In fact, I've been using this new piece of equipment for just over a month now. We've hauled in blind parts, planted millet from it and jumped beaver dams that were two to three feet out of the water, with three and four people in the boat. Not only will it go anywhere a longtail would go, it will go a lot more places and get you there faster.

While it did dish me up another big plate of crow, this new Mud Buddy 35 H.P. Hyper Drive Sport is the most awesome piece of equipment I've used to date. With built in tilt and trim, you can run faster, jump larger logs, stumps and beaver dams like you've never witnessed before. On the open runs, I'm not sure it wouldn't do circles around the 27 H.P. longtails we had been running.

Innovations are an amazing thing and if you haven't given one of the Hyper Drive Mud Buddy Motors a test drive, you should. Thing is, I'm not going to say I've learned my lesson, but if you've been using a longtail style mud motor, be careful when you drive this new generation of mud motor or you may find yourself … "Eat'n Crow"!

For information on the Hyper Drive motor by Mud Buddy or to locate a dealer near you, check out their website www.mudbuddy.com

Charles "HammerTime" Snapp

Email: snapps@arkmo.com

Website: www.arkansaswaterfowl.com