Mention of bird hunting might conjure up images of hunters and their dogs huddling in freezing duck blinds or pounding the brush in hopes of kicking up pheasants. But crow hunting is a thing in Wyoming too.

“It’s about the sport of it,” Dan Kinneman of Riverton told Cowboy State Daily.

He started crow hunting when he was 14 and is about to turn 85. He’s never tried cooking and eating crows or known anybody who has.

Instead, shooting crows is essentially nuisance bird control, as they’re known to wreak havoc on agricultural crops.

“All the ranchers will let you hunt crows. I’ve never been refused access to hunt crows. They all hate them,” he said.

In Wyoming, crow hunting season runs from Nov. 1 to Feb. 28. No license is required, and there’s no bag limit. Hunters can shoot all the crows they want to.

It’s a ball for hunting dogs too, Kinneman said.

“My yellow Labrador retriever, he doesn’t care whether it’s a crow or duck. In fact, he likes crow hunting more than duck hunting, because there’s more action,” he said.

Don’t Expect It To Be Easy

Kinneman said that in the days of his youth, crow hunting was as simple as driving around and “shooting them out of trees with rifles.”

However, as the number of people and buildings potentially in the paths of bullets grew, such practices fell out of favor. Crow hunting became more regulated.

And it evolved to resemble hunting other birds, such as waterfowl.

Meaning, hunters started setting out decoys, hiding in blinds and using calls to tempt crows to within shotgun range.

Kinneman is no stranger to hunting of all types. He’s taken numerous species of big game in Wyoming and elsewhere. And in July 2005, he shot a prairie dog near Rock Springs from well over a mile away.

He hit the prairie dog from 2,157 yards away. A mile is 1,760 yards. 

But bird hunting has always been his favorite.

“It’s my life,” he said.

He has a huge collection of duck, goose and dove decoys. And two tubs full of crow decoys.

The uninitiated might think that going out and blasting crows would be a slam dunk.

That isn’t so, Kinneman said. He likes crow hunting for the challenge of it.

“Hunting crows is hard. They are a lot smarter than ducks and geese,” he said.

Pick Up After Yourself

Even though he doesn’t eat crows, Kinneman said he never just left them littering the ground where he shot them.

“I never let them lay out there. I always picked them up and disposed of the carcasses,” he said.

That’s good ethics and it shows respect for the ranchers, he said.

“Leaving them (dead crows) out there would be no different than just leaving all of your empty shotgun shells out there,” he said.

“You have to pick up after yourself, or the ranchers won’t let you back onto their land,” he added.

Slow Year

At his age, Kinneman isn’t sure how much longer he’ll be able to get out crow hunting. And this year has been a total bust.

“I love doing it. But this year there are no crows,” he said.

The Riverton area is along major crow migration routes.  

Picking a good hunting spot is a matter of “finding a flyway” that the crows are on and then setting up a spread of decoys and a blind along the route.

But with an unusually warm winter, the crow flyways have been practically empty, he said.

Migrations Are Off Everywhere

Avid birdwatcher Lucas Fralick of Laramie said that warm, dry conditions much of this winter have knocked bird migrations out of whack.

“I do know that because of the weather, migrations are off all over the place,” he said.

One of his favorite species is the dark-eyed junco, a “small, sparrow-like bird,” he said.

They usually winter in the Laramie area and leave right around March. This year, they were gone by November, he said.

“They’re a cold-weather bird,” he said.

Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.

If the Wyoming House and Senate approve its budget changes, then the chambers’ Joint Conference Committee will have helped the University of Wyoming dodge a $40 million cut, while also limiting the Wyoming Business Council to one year’s funding instead of the standard two. 

The Joint Conference Committee adopted numerous changes to the state’s two-year budget draft, but didn’t formally advance the document to the House and Senate chambers. The committee meets again Monday and may do so at that time.

Then, the House and Senate can vote on whether to adopt that draft by a simple majority.

First, UW

Starting in January, the Joint Appropriations Committee majority had sought to deny around $20 million in exception requests the University of Wyoming made, while imposing a $40 million cut to the university’s block grant.

That’s about 10% of the state’s grant to UW but a lesser proportion of the school’s overall operating budget.

The Senate sought to restore the $60 million.

The House sought to keep the denials and cuts, ultimately settling on a bargain to cut $20 million, and hinge UW’s retention of the remaining $20 million on its finding and reporting $5 million in savings.

The Joint Conference Committee the House and Senate sent into a Friday meeting to negotiate those two stances chose to fund UW “fully,” Senate Majority Floor Leader Tara Nethercott, R-Cheyenne, told Cowboy State Daily in the state Capitol after the meeting. 

But, $10 million of UW’s $40 million block grant won’t reach it until the school charts a “road map” of how it could save $5 million, and reports that to the Joint Appropriations Committee, she added. 

“A healthy exercise, I think, for them to participate in, while the Legislature still allows them to receive full grant funding,” Nethercott said. 

“I’m hopeful people feel confident the University is fully funded,” she continued, as it’s “on the brink of receiving a new president, having the resources he or she may need to continue to steer the leadership of the University, our state’s flagship school into the future.”

Hours earlier in a press conference, House Speaker Chip Neiman, R-Hulett, said the Legislature has been clear that UW should avoid “diversity, equity, and inclusion” or DEI programming, and that it’s the position of the House majority that the school should tailor its programming to Wyoming’s true business needs – so UW graduates will stay in the state.

Within an earlier draft of the budget sat a footnote blocking money for Wyoming Public Media — a publicly funded media and radio entity funded through UW’s budget.

That footnote is gone from the JCC’s draft, said Nethercott. 

Wyoming Business Council

The Wyoming Business Council is set to receive roughly $14 million, confined to one year, for its internal operations, said Nethercott. 

“Both chambers have decided to only fund the operations,” Nethercott said, “not all the grant programs.” 

She said that’s to compel the Legislature to revisit the concerns it has with the agency, then return in the 2027 legislative session with a vision for its future. 

The Business Ready Communities program is “eliminated,” she said. 

JCC member Rep. Ken Pendergraft, R-Sheridan, elaborated further. 

Of the appropriation, $12 million is from the state’s checking account, plus the state is authorizing WBC to use $157,787 in federal funds and nearly $1 million from other sources. 

“We’re going to take it up as an interim topic in appropriations (committee) and how to rebuild it and make it work the way we think it should work,” said Pendergraft. But the JCC opted to fund the Small Business Development Center for two years, along with Economic Diversification Division for Manufacturing Works, and the Wyoming Women’s Business Center, Pendergraft noted, pointing to that language on his draft budget sheet. 

Pendergraft made headlines last year by saying he wanted to eliminate the Wyoming Business Council altogether. 

But Nethercott told the Senate earlier this month, legislators have complained of that agency her entire nine-year tenure. 

She attributed this to what she called communications shortfalls that may not be intentional. She cosponsored a now-stalled bill this year that had sought to adopt a task force to evaluate WBC. 

The Wyoming Business Council’s functions range from less controversial, like helping communities build infrastructure, to more controversial, like awarding tax-funded grants to certain businesses on a competitive application process. 

Wyoming Public Television

Wyoming Public Television, which is not the same as Wyoming Public Media, is slated to receive the $3 million it lost when Congress defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Nethercott said. 

It will also receive its usual $3 million from Wyoming. 

The entity will not receive another $3 million it had sought to upgrade its emergency-alert towers, said Nethercott, “because we received information from them… they have another source to pay for the replacement and maintenance of the towers.” 

Like the Wyoming Business Council, the Wyoming Public TV’s functions range from less controversial to more controversial.

The entity operates, maintains and staffs emergency alert towers throughout Wyoming. 

Wyoming Public TV also produces entertainment and informational movies. Its state grants run through the community colleges’ budget. 

State Employees

Nethercott noted that the JCC advanced to both chambers an agreement to pay $111 million from the state’s checking account to give state employees raises.

Those raises would bring them to 2024 market values for their work, she noted. 

Because that money is coming from the state’s checking account, or “general fund,” and not its severance tax pool as the House had envisioned, then $111 million won’t impact the $105 million investment another still-viable bill seeking to build an “energy dominance fund” envisions. 

That bill, sponsored by Senate President Bo Biteman, R-Ranchester, seeks to lend to large energy-sector projects. 

Biteman told Cowboy State Daily in an interview days before the session convened that its purpose is to counteract “green” compacts investors have adopted, and which have bottlenecked energy projects.

Wyoming’s executive branch is currently suing BlackRock and other investors on that same assertion. 

Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.