“It’s kind of hard to camo yourself up and lay in a spread like you can hunting geese.”Īs for what to shoot from such hiding spots, Hamm uses the same set-up – a 12-gauge shotgun that shoots three-inch magnum loads of BBs – that he uses on Canada geese. “We normally hide in fence rows because cranes have got such good eyes,” said Hamm. What about blinds? Hamm has found that the lay-out style blinds so common to goose hunting these days often don’t work very well on wary-eyed cranes. “We normally set out 35 to 60 crane decoys.” “We hunt them just like you would geese, but we use crane decoys,” said Hamm. That fact might help to at least partially explain the low harvest totals in the state since hunters need to have a specialized decoy spread consisting of plastic sandhill crane decoys, wind socks, or even mounted birds. “When do they get here? Well, that sort of depends on northers (strong cold fronts), but they typically begin to show up around the start of goose season and their numbers peak sometime in December.”Īnother fact hunters must accept is that while some sandhill cranes are taken as incidental game harvested on duck and goose hunts, most are bagged on outings where sandhills are the primary targets. “We can get them in here pretty good,” said Hamm.

One of the better spots in the Sooner State is in the southwestern region in the red dirt country not far from Frederick. “There is really not anything like sandhill crane hunting, and we have some great opportunities for hunters in this state.” “I consider sandhill cranes one of the top game birds anywhere,” said Mike O’Meilia, retired migratory game bird biologist for the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation, in a previous agency news release. In contrast to those figures, in recent years the retrieved harvest total in Oklahoma has been much smaller, including 808 sandhill cranes in 2011 940 birds in 2010 and 737 sandhills in 2009.That said, there is still plenty of sandhill crane hunting opportunity out there to the west of Interstate 35 where the migratory species can legally be hunted in Oklahoma. Especially when compared to Texas and North Dakota where several thousand birds are harvested by hunters each year.

Backyard cranes in the sky