Anyone ever make their own crane silhouettes? How well do they work? We're usually covered up with cranes and I'm thinking about making some plywood decoys.

Hell, this thread is worthless without responses, but pics would be great!

Sandhills are very smart. I would rather setup where I know they were yesterday and no decoys than to try to use something other than full body stuffed cranes.

I have used old towels and sacks for sillhouettes before, but my success rate was less than 25%, and that was around Pratt, Kansas where they are THICK!

I plan on mounting my own "stuffers", but first I've got to get some volunteers using silhouettes! Got to walk before you can run!

x2 spot on.

Go "no decoy" to get your taxi mounts. More so than geese and ducks, cranes have astounding vision.

I have hunted over crane wind socks and had good success. They are expensive though. I think they were Sillosocks, about $125 a dozen.

I bought a dozen of these last year. They worked pretty good. They are blow up sandhill crane decoys.
http://www.cherokee-sports.com/images/PRODUCT/medium/73.jpg

I had some growing up they were plywood and looked ok. I am sure they would work
Fine if you are where the birds want to be. I think the main key is hiding the hunters. I usually hunt over 6 or 8 dozen windsocks and a couple of dozen fully body Canadas and we decoy birds.

If you can get stuffers you will Kill Cranes. Stuffers are alot more work to deal with, but you can slay them with stuffers.

Does anyone have some dimensions of a crane silhouette handy? I'm going to make some over the weekend, but I'm not too sure as to how big they need to be.

Check out www.workingdecoys.net. You have to be a member to see the patterns, but there was a guy on there the other week making goose sillouettes.

[img:left]http://[/img]


I whipped up 2 dozen feeder silhouettes in 2 different poses and I'm about to start on another dozen in a couple active postures. I don't have but maybe $50 in materials invested in the 2 dozen. I think they turned out ok and hopefully the cranes do too.

Those look great! I think if you had several dozen of those with a dozen silosocks mixed in for movement, you would definitly pull some cranes. Be sure and place the silhouettes at all different angles so they dont all dissapear when a group circles you.

Those are awesome looking!

Excellent work!

those look awesome!

Did you come up with the patterns yourself? Or did you find them somewhere? I was considering making some but have had a hard time finding any dimensions to use for them.

By the way they look awesome!

Thanks everyone. I am currently trying to find some grey Tyvek bags to make some crane silosocks out of, so hopefully that will work out as well as these silos have. I actually just googled a bunch of sandhill images until I found some with something in the picture to use as a size reference and then drew my own pattern. I'd be happy to measure mine for you if you'd like.

Look good...

When we hunted in corn stalks we used a few rags and geese decoys. We were camo'ed up well and had them coming in with hunters sitting up loading guns, the guide standing, and the dog dropped a retrieve to watch them come in. The guide did tell us you have to have a very hard charging dog that will hit them like a train, they had known of timid dogs losing an eye to wounded birds. It is kind of funny watching a full grown lab try to haul one of those big-a*% birds back to the spread.

Don"t ever take your lab on a crane hunt. A wounded crane will kick and peck at your dog. A crane feeds every day by picking seeds out of the dirt. A labs eyes are easy targets and will be gone in a second.

A wounded crane will face you and fight. Something you or your dog dont encounter hunting ducks.

Ducked up, check your messages.

they look great