How good can a call be

[bbcoach]

IMO most calls have turkey in them.  Most callmakers build a quality call.  But 2 other things have to happen in order for a call to be as good as it can be.  1. The turkeys have to like the sound and respond to that call from the caller  2.  That caller needs to have a GREAT Deal of Confidence in the call.  To me, it's a combination of ALL these things.

For me as a caller, it's about how much CONFIDENCE I have in the call and the reaction I receive when I play it.

[wvmntnhick]

Yep. I've more than once heard someone scraping on a box call and then saw the hen actually making the awful racket. Would not have believed it if I'd not seen it.

I agree. I was laughing to myself once at how horrible someone was calling and out stepped a hen. Couldn't hardly believe it.

Couple years ago I was about to yell at a buddy of mine to stop with his calling (he sounds awful) and just as I was getting ready to spout off, I saw the hen. We were about 50 yards apart and she was only about 10 feet from him.


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[Spitten and drummen]

Most experienced turkey hunters sound better than a real hen. We get caught up on calls that we think sound awesome when in reality emotion and cadence outweighs the pitch. Granted if you listen to hens there seems to always be a certain one gobblers just hammer at. If I can identify that hen , I will run a call that sounds as close to her as I can. I also listen to her sequence and emotion and use the same in my sequences. I have taken several birds doing this.

[randy6471]

Yep. I've more than once heard someone scraping on a box call and then saw the hen actually making the awful racket. Would not have believed it if I'd not seen it.

I agree. I was laughing to myself once at how horrible someone was calling and out stepped a hen. Couldn't hardly believe it.

Like others, I've also had more than one occasion where I've heard some "clown" comin through the woods cranking away on an old crappy sounding box call only to find out it's a hen.

[randy6471]

Most experienced turkey hunters sound better than a real hen. We get caught up on calls that we think sound awesome when in reality emotion and cadence outweighs the pitch. Granted if you listen to hens there seems to always be a certain one gobblers just hammer at. If I can identify that hen , I will run a call that sounds as close to her as I can. I also listen to her sequence and emotion and use the same in my sequences. I have taken several birds doing this.

I also feel that cadence is the key and I often use spitten and drummen's strategy, especially on a "henned up" gobbler. I use whichever call I have to match the pitch of the dominant hen and match her emotion as best I can. Sometimes it's just enough to get the gobbler to come in for a look and other times it challenges the hen and she comes in to let the challenger know that she's the boss.....and he will follow. Even if he doesn't follow, it's always fun to get into a pissin match with an old dominant hen.

[ozarktroutbum]

Most experienced turkey hunters sound better than a real hen. We get caught up on calls that we think sound awesome when in reality emotion and cadence outweighs the pitch. Granted if you listen to hens there seems to always be a certain one gobblers just hammer at. If I can identify that hen , I will run a call that sounds as close to her as I can. I also listen to her sequence and emotion and use the same in my sequences. I have taken several birds doing this.

Good statement. Hunters have been taught that they need to sound exactly like the competition caller or other "expert" callers. Same goes with duck hunters. It's funny hearing people critique calls or callers saying things like "needs a little higher pitch on the front", or "call sounds to hollow at the end of the Yelp" like they have advanced degrees from the wild turkey sounds institute. Don't get me wrong, I have heard in my opinion some downright sorry sounding calls. But some of the criticism I have heard at times as well as praise for certain calls dumbfounds me.

[LaLongbeard]

Yep. I've more than once heard someone scraping on a box call and then saw the hen actually making the awful racket. Would not have believed it if I'd not seen it.

I agree. I was laughing to myself once at how horrible someone was calling and out stepped a hen. Couldn't hardly believe it.

I'm always amazed at how often these and similar statements are made but yet, I've never heard a "bad sounding hen" in real life or on someone's video. One would think, in this day and age of smart phones, there would at least be a recording of it somewhere. 

I guess everyone doesn't spend their time in the woods with a phone or camera in front of their face.
The old Primos videos, don't remember which year, they had a hen on camera that sounded pretty rough, the Primos boys remarked about the calling. Another possibility is the camera jockeys don't recognize poor calling and don't have their camera running lol

[simpzenith]

Yep. I've more than once heard someone scraping on a box call and then saw the hen actually making the awful racket. Would not have believed it if I'd not seen it.

I agree. I was laughing to myself once at how horrible someone was calling and out stepped a hen. Couldn't hardly believe it.

I'm always amazed at how often these and similar statements are made but yet, I've never heard a "bad sounding hen" in real life or on someone's video. One would think, in this day and age of smart phones, there would at least be a recording of it somewhere. 

I guess everyone doesn't spend their time in the woods with a phone or camera in front of their face.
The old Primos videos, don't remember which year, they had a hen on camera that sounded pretty rough, the Primos boys remarked about the calling. Another possibility is the camera jockeys don't recognize poor calling and don't have their camera running lol

Maybe, but as commonplace as many make it out to be, you'd think it wouldn't be as elusive as bigfoot to get an example or two of it. 

[LaLongbeard]

Do you normally see every hen in the woods that's calling? Does every hunter in the areas you hunt sound like NWTF calling competition finalists? If not....do you see every hunter in the woods you've heard calling?

[Gooserbat]

Most turkey calls will play better than the person playing it.

[GobbleNut]

Truth is, there ain't no turkey in the woods that could win a "human judged" turkey calling contest.  I have heard thousands of hen turkeys over the decades,...and they are consistently inconsistent.  For every hen turkey I've heard that sounds like a champion contest turkey caller, there are twenty that call with some variation of that sound.

Don't get me wrong. Great turkey callers have one thing in common,...they have the ability to change the sounds of their calling to match the conditions at hand.  Sometimes those conditions call for searching through your calling repertoire to find the sound a gobbler wants to hear,...and there are often times that sound is nothing like what you think it should be.  In addition, there are regularly times when even slight variations in calling will make the difference between a gobbler coming,...or going. 

Having said all of that, each of us eventually gravitates towards those calling sounds that most consistently have worked for us in the past.  That is a great advantage we have over the newbies.  However, even those of us with a lot of experience should understand that when our "go to" sounds aren't working, sometimes sounding like the worst contest caller in the woods might.  ...I have seen that happen way too many times over the years to think it is all that unusual.

Bottom line,...to answer the question raised as to "how good can a call be?"  The answer is that it is only as good as the turkey that is being called-to thinks it is!

[Hobbes]

This idea of a terrible sounding hen is based on a false impression of what a turkey should sound like.  I've heard a lot of variations from hens, but have yet to hear one that I thought sounded bad.  A big flock of Merriam's hens can be some of the loudest most obnoxious sounding turkeys there is.  That's probably the case with any big flock.  Ive heard sounds that I knew that I could not duplicate on my best days (and that's just variations in a Yelp).  It's often those scratchy, off key and tempo yelps that assures me it is a real hen.  But....that's not what I'd call bad sounding...that just sounds like a real hen going about her usual business being a turkey.

If YouTube is any indication of the skill level of most callers.....most folks suck.  In fact I'd say considering the kind of calling that a lot of folks are willing to share, they don't know the first thing about how they or a turkey sounds.  It obviously doesn't matter on some days, but it's painful to listen to.

As far as competition calling.  I've not listened to a lot of it, but at the highest level those guys can make any sound a turkey makes.  Other than some of the cackles, I've not noticed them making unrealistic sounds.  The cackles aren't unrealistic, but I think it's a rare turkey that actually cackles.  Rare doesn't equate to unrealistic.  Competitive duck calling is another story.  I've never heard a duck highball like some of that stuff.  Maybe I've not listened hard enough.

I probably don't want a critique of my own calling.  I know for most Eastern hunters, I call way too much and way too loud and its probably too predictable a sound to be anything but a hunter.

[Bowguy]

Yep. I've more than once heard someone scraping on a box call and then saw the hen actually making the awful racket. Would not have believed it if I'd not seen it.

I've had the same thing happen more than once. One time I actually backed out cause I thought I was too close to someone. From afar watched a Tom n hen fly down. I'd have sworn it was a bad box caller

[GobbleNut]

This idea of a terrible sounding hen is based on a false impression of what a turkey should sound like.  I've heard a lot of variations from hens, but have yet to hear one that I thought sounded bad.  A big flock of Merriam's hens can be some of the loudest most obnoxious sounding turkeys there is.  That's probably the case with any big flock.  Ive heard sounds that I knew that I could not duplicate on my best days (and that's just variations in a Yelp).  It's often those scratchy, off key and tempo yelps that assures me it is a real hen.  But....that's not what I'd call bad sounding...that just sounds like a real hen going about her usual business being a turkey.
If YouTube is any indication of the skill level of most callers.....most folks suck.  In fact I'd say considering the kind of calling that a lot of folks are willing to share, they don't know the first thing about how they or a turkey sounds.  It obviously doesn't matter on some days, but it's painful to listen to.

Good little chat we got going on here....
The fact is that if every one of us based our calling on heading to the turkey woods, listening to the turkeys in our areas, and then trying to sound like them, I believe we would find an awful lot of variation in what each of us defined as good turkey calling.  Another fact is that, listening to the highest level contest callers (and don't get me wrong, those guys are amazing), I often hear them replicating sounds that, in all honesty, I have never (or extremely rarely) heard from a wild turkey in the areas I have hunted (i.e....fly-down cackling et. al.)

Again, the bottom line is that we humans,...especially in the contest-calling world,...have defined what is good turkey calling,...and what is not. Wild turkeys do not adhere to those definitions. It really doesn't matter if I think some guys calling sucks (which, like you Hobbes, I often do), the "proof is in the pudding",...that is, whether that calling does the job or not. 

As you say, some of the calling in YouTube videos, I consider atrocious (and also like you, Hobbes, I would not dare to post "samples" of my calling on YT). In those very same YouTube videos, those what-we-call horrible callers are calling-in and killing gobblers! ...And it ain't necessarily because they are hunting Turkey Utopia! 

Another thing we will never know in actual turkey hunting/calling:  Each of us uses whatever calling combinations we favor in our hunting,...out of dozens (or more) of possible combinations.  We either succeed or fail in each encounter,...but the fact is, in the successes, we don't really know if anybody else's tactics,...perhaps completely different than ours,...would have worked or not.  And on the other hand, we don't really know if the gobblers we failed on would have come running to the calling of one of those "sucky" guys!  And finally, to be totally honest, we don't know whether a gobbler we called and killed with our "average" calling would not have been runt-off into the next county by the so-called "world champ"!  (But granted, I will put my money on the world champ every time....) 

[ol bob]

How many have ever seen a turkey judge a calling contest? 99.9 percent of the custom calls will kill a turkey.  The best turkey call in the world is one that someone standing in front of your table wants to buy.