Scott Ellis
Prostaff
Woodhaven Custom Calls
Tru-Glo Fiber Optics
Therma-Cell
Ol’ Tom Technical Gear
Member:Florida Outdoor Writer’s Assoc.

The Red Zone three pack is a must have for any serious turkey hunter. After testing these calls I new they would be an addition to my call case this spring. Mike Pentecost(founder and owner of Woodhaven) hit a home run with this addition to the already proven mouth call line.

The Red Vyper is a modified split V. This call produces a raspy yelp and sharp cutts. It will be great for running and gunning being used as a locator call. But you can tone it down for the softer side, clucks and purrs and soft yelping, if needed. I was highly impressed with it’s tonal qualities.

The Red Scorpion is a combo cut. It produces sweet kee kee runs, as well as beautiful yelps with a clear sweet front end. It will cluck and purr with the best of them. Another Woodhaven great that will give you an added advantage in the spring woods.

The Red Ghost is indicative of its name. A ghost cut, this call also had great results. It produced a medium rasp yelp with a sweet front end of each note. It will produce an awesome kee kee run, as well mid range cutts and cackles. I particularly loved it’s ability to cluck and purr. It produced melodious purrs worthy of putting on the stage to call competition or to fool a love sick gobbler.

Scott Ellis
Prostaff
Woodhaven Custom Calls
Tru-Glo Fiber Optics
Therma-Cell
Ol’ Tom Technical Gear
Member:Florida Outdoor Writer’s Assoc.

Scott Ellis
Prostaff
Woodhaven Custom Calls
Tru-Glo Fiber Optics
Therma-Cell
Ol’ Tom Technical Gear
Member:Florida Outdoor Writer’s Assoc.

The wild turkey can offer the hunter one of the greatest challenges of any of the North American game species. Consistently bagging turkeys every season entails putting forth your best hunting efforts, embodying stealthy movement and putting yourself in a predatory mode. Luck has its place in every hunter’s endeavors but it is impossible to be consistently lucky. Placing your mind in a constant defensive posture will enable you to heighten your awareness and your woods skills. Letting your guard down for one minute can be the difference between filling your tag and heading home empty handed.

Movement and Noise:

The average hunter lumbers through the wood with no regard to the animals he is spooking, trudging onward snapping limbs and twigs with every step. The hunter himself is often his own worst enemy. The hunt is very frequently over before it ever begins due to the carelessness exhibited on his trek through the forest.

When deploying the run and gun method of hunting turkeys, one should constantly be monitoring his noise and movement levels. Before I go on, one alternative the hunter could adopt is the slipping and calling method. It is the same basic tactic but moving slower and more deliberately taking great effort to walk softer and quieter yet still covering as much ground as possible. If proper care is taken, you will often be within gun range of a gobbler when he answers your calls. Envision a cougar stalking a flock of turkeys. It moves at a snails pace in a prone position. It covers little ground in rapid fashion, using available cover to mask its movement. Throughout the years of my turkey hunting endeavors I have moved on turkeys in the same manner, even when just to reposition and try calling from a different angle. Allow yourself more time to move from point A to point B. Using available cover to conceal your movement will also put you on the path to success. When making your way through the timber pick the path that will offer the most concealment and the least amount of noise.

Patience:

One of the most overlooked factors in the triumph of consistently successful turkey hunters is the ability to sit still for extended periods of time. We all know there are two basic methods to hunt turkeys, blind calling and slipping & calling. The key is that both methods are directly affected by having the patience to remain stationary when needed. Exhibiting the ability to wait out that old gobbler will have turkeys riding in your vest on a regular basis.

An older method of hunting turkeys, blind calling consists of setting up and calling in a stationary position, with hopes a gobbler will come within earshot of your lusty turkey hen vernacular. When all the hens have been bred and the toms are on the move, it is common to have locate gobblers that are still in a heightened state of breeding. It requires more patience than physical endurance, although it can prove to be productive. At a point when turkeys become less vocal and the breeding season is winding down setting up on a food source and waiting, can also pay dividends. The gobblers will frequent these areas because it will hold hens and he may ultimately find a breeding partner that has been overlooked.

Patience does not apply to slipping and calling directly, but once you have engaged in a conversation with a gobbler, moving too hastily can prove to be detrimental in your quest of a long beard. Once you start working a gobbler, do not change your position unless absolutely necessary. Each year many gobblers would have been harvested had the hunter remained still. When a gobbler goes silent there is a very good possibility he is closing in quietly. If the gobbler is continuing to answer you but making an obvious about face from your position, only then should you reposition and approach him from either another angle or get around in front of his route and engage him. A simple rule of thumb to add to this thought is when you have decided to get up and move, wait thirty more minutes. This tactic will eventually pay off.

Awareness/Keeping Up Your Guard:

Heightening your overall woods awareness and always being on the defense is one factor to consider. Learn to decipher certain turkey sounds and vocabulary while on your hunt. Listen for scratching, soft deliberate foot steps in brittle leaves or the long distance sound of a yelp or a single cluck. The key here is tuning your senses to pick up on these turkey identifiers. Often times hunters overlook these simple tell tale signs that there are turkeys in their area. When you are in turkey rich environment always feel there are turkeys within eyesight of your position. Taking care when any movement is involved will allow you to view more game, turkey or otherwise. Scan your field of view only cutting your eyes from left to right. Use your peripheral vision to it’s maximum potential before any head movement. When you decide to move your head or shift your body for a better view, use slow deliberate movement.

Turkey Behavior:

The wild turkey has certain behavioral patterns they adhere to. Take the time to verse yourself on which patterns will affect you during the spring. Plan as many scouting trips to the areas you will frequent during the upcoming spring season. This will allow you to gauge those particular turkeys. Learn their habits and whereabouts, ranging from just after fly down, mid morning, mid and late afternoon. Having the ability to locate turkeys during these time frames will give you an added advantage. Placing yourself strategically in areas that consistently hold turkeys will increase your odds of success.

Also learn as much as possible about the wild turkey from a biological standpoint. For example, social structure, breeding and feeding habits, nesting and roosting areas. Patterning turkeys and identifying which part of the breeding cycle the turkeys are in will help you modify your tactics throughout the spring season. Each year will present a new set of challenges. The season could start off with the gobbler already having assembled his harem and roosting with them or you may encounter an early breeding scenario where the tom is more vocal on the roost as he begins to assemble his hens. Identifying which phase of their spring courtship is occurring will aid in you choice of tactics. Whether calling to the hens if the gobbler is actively breeding or calling aggressively if the gobblers are on the move searching for hens not yet bred, it will make your decision easier.

Concealment:

Mother nature designed her predators well. They utilize their fur color or plumage for their concealment. They also exploit the terrain and the available cover to cloak their attacks. The turkey hunter can apply these same tactics to his hunting. Use any available natural cover to disguise your position. Although the advent of pop up blinds has become wildly popular as of late, I prefer to use what Mother Nature provides for my concealment. Deadfalls, palmettos, brush piles and even the natural contours of wood lines provide excellent concealment.

Your use of camouflage is very important as well. Depending on early or late spring, match your patterns to your surroundings. There is a plethora of excellent camo on the market today. Chose the one that best suits the terrain you are consistently hunting. Turkeys will key in on movement before anything else. As, stated previously make sure you remain still as long as possible and when movement is necessary use slow, calculated motion. Granted, you can harvests turkeys in blue jeans, if it tickles your fancy. I prefer to capitalize on any advantage I may have that may counter his bionic like vision.

In Conclusion:

The wild turkey is a formidable opponent. His senses are his number one defense. It is not that he is smarter than the average turkey hunter, it’s just the fact that he capitalizes on his ability to discern motion. The turkey hunter must act in the same fashion. We must exploit the same god given instincts that are buried somewhere inside us. Always remember we are the highest rung on food chain ladder. We are the most intelligent creatures that scour the earth. Discipline and attention to detail can heighten our hunting ability. Think in those parameters and you will become a turkey predator.

Scott Ellis
Prostaff
Woodhaven Custom Calls
Tru-Glo Fiber Optics
Therma-Cell
Ol’ Tom Technical Gear
Member:Florida Outdoor Writer’s Assoc.

Scott Ellis
Prostaff
Woodhaven Custom Calls
Tru-Glo Fiber Optics
Therma-Cell
Ol’ Tom Technical Gear
Member:Florida Outdoor Writer’s Assoc.

Woodhaven Custom Calls-New Energy three pack. Consist of a Doug Benefield, Mitchell Johnston and my call, the Scott Ellis.

The Benefield is a ghost cut but the wing tips are left in tact. After running Doug’s call I was impressed with it’s tones. It delivers a medium amount of rasp with a clean front note of the yelp. It can perform a kee kee, as well some great clucks and purrs. It is overall easy to blow and will be a great fit for the caller that likes a less raspy yelper but still provides the versatility to produce the raspy turkey talk needed for cutting and cackling.

The Scott Ellis is a modified split V. It attains true turkey rasp with virtually no effort. I designed this call for consistency and true tone. As well it allows the hunter to produce “small talk”, cluck and purring and soft yelping. This call is a cutting machine, it produces crisp, sharp cutts. It will also produce a great fly down cackle. I experimented with different stretches and calling methods to ensure any way the hunter runs the call it will reproduce turkey “music”

The Mitchell Johnston is a great call and like all Woodhaven products reproduces pure turkey. It is stretched with less tension than the Doug’s and my call and it will be an instant hit with hunters. This batwing can kee kee with the best. It produce’s all turkey talk with a medium rasp. I was highly impressed with the realism of this call.

Scott Ellis
Prostaff
Woodhaven Custom Calls
Tru-Glo Fiber Optics
Therma-Cell
Ol’ Tom Technical Gear
Member:Florida Outdoor Writer’s Assoc.

Tanner Colten Moad, 5 years old, is one of the coolest kids I know. The youngest of 4 children of mine, Tanner never stops moving.

Before gun season in central eastern Oklahoma, the traditional bow season usually takes priority. I had taken the first week of bow season off from work in an attempt to tag out early at the request of my wife Lori. In her mind, if I was to tag out early, my deer season would then be “dear” season, with lots of additional chores getting done that get overlooked during each year’s deer season.

As a bow hunter, I was able to harvest a doe pretty quick, and two days later, stuck a nice 8 point that only took two steps before falling over. I had watched that buck spare with a 9-point two days earlier, and was in hopes I could manage to get the edge on one of them as both were very big bodied deer. Well, upon getting the close up view of the 8-point I had just harvested, I realized that half way up one side of his G-2, his antlers were completely broken off. A few of his other tines were damaged as well, which led me to believe that the 9-point he had previously been sparing with, probably wasn’t sparing anymore.

With bow season quickly becoming gun season, my son Tanner, was getting pretty excited about going hunting with dad this year. I had to work the first day of the season, but promised to take him on Sunday. Sunday afternoon, around 3:00pm, I was off to the deer woods and had my little man right there with me on the 4-wheeler. We drove to a spot where not much hunting activity was going on, and climbed into the buddy stand that was located there. The buddy stand had the camouflage netting around its fall protective bars and I knew that if a deer did come in, that the anticipated movements of my son would go undetected.

To my surprise, Tanner, sat quietly in the stand with me, pulled out his binoculars, and commenced to scanning the woods all around. When a squirrel would drop an acorn from a tree, it would hit the leaves, and Tanner would turn quickly to identify what made the noise. He would whisper to me that he thought he heard something over there, or over there, and over there. I know this sounds crazy, but I loved every minute of watching him pay attention to what was going on in the woods around him. Now he was hungry, 15 minutes after we were in the stand. He pulled out a package of crackers and quietly munched on them while looking around. We switched positions about 10 times, so he could see everything. He would ask me questions about all kinds of woods activities and now sat in my lap to get a better view. About 1 and ½ hours in the stand now, Tanner started doing the chicken head. You know, when someone is trying desperately not to fall asleep, but their eyes roll back, and their heads starts popping up. Well, it wasn’t long before “Mr. Energy” was resting against my arm, quietly sleeping.

Soon as Tanner decided to snooze, I elected to stay in the stand since there was only about 30 minutes left of daylight. So I positioned Tanner so he could lay down across the buddy stand seat that was covered with a camouflage blanket, and I would stand up. After positioning Tanner towards comfort, I stood up in the stand, now facing the rear, and spotted a nice buck standing there watching me. I touched Tanner on the face and arm attempting to wake him from his afternoon nap. I whispered to him “Tanner, there is a deer, wake up”. No response. So I looked back up the deer was gone. I positioned my rifle across the stand bars and waited for the deer to exit the brush. Just as I thought, he walked right through the opening in the brush headed for the deep woods. I announced I was there with a mouthed made “grunt”. He stopped and “bang”. As soon as the shot rang out, “Tanner, jumped up, wide eyed and said “Did I GET HIM?. Excited now, he really wanted to know if he got a deer. I smiled at him and excitedly said yes son, you got a big old buck. He jumped up and down in the stand and hugged me, and said “Well, where is he? Let’s go get him.” His little voice was squeaking high and low with excitement. This was his first experience in the deer woods hunting, and man he sure loved it, as did I. We climbed down the stand together, and went to where the buck was standing. I showed him the blood on the ground and explained to him that he should walk beside the blood, not in it, when he was tracking a deer. He started to walk beside the trail when he squeaked again. “I found him, he is right there” pointing. All of these events happening so fast, I wanted them to slow down some so I could savor the enjoyment of watching him. I showed him the caution of approaching a wounded or dead animal, helped him count the points on the antlers, and hugs and pride just rushed through me. After all, this hunt was supposed to be all about him.

He helped me load the deer on the 4-wheeler, and away we went to show the family. Close to the house now, I walked beside the 4-wheeler and allowed Tanner to drive up to the house. Picture this, A five year old boy, dressed in a camouflage shirt and orange hat with vest, driving a ranch 4-wheeler with a rifle in the rack on the front, and a 140 pound 8-point deer strapped to the utility rack in the back, coming out of the deer woods and driving up to the house with his mother waiting for him with a camera. Wouldn’t you be proud? I know I was. Tanner will never forget his first deer hunt, but neither will I. I think Lori, my wife and his mother, took a million pictures that evening.
Not only that, but he beat me this year with his deer. Mine during bow season was 150 pounds, but his rack was bigger. It is good to start them off young.

Whether hunting public or privateland, the fundamentals of calling elk remain the same.

By Michael Waddell

We heard the bull bugle at first light and snuck into his core area. When I hit a lick on my bugle, the bull simply came unglued and stormed our position like a tank, crashing through brush and small lodgepole pines like they were atchsticks. Before we could react he was in our lap and we were pinned down, myself hiding behind a camera, too afraid to even touch the tripod for fear of my shaking hands would run the footage. All I could see of my partner edged against a stunted pine was the tip of his undrawn arrow shaking uncontrollably on the rest. Before a shot presented itself, the bull smelled a  rat and disappeared as quickly as he arrived.

While this experience didn’t result in a dead elk, it did hopelessly addict me to calling them. It seems that in all walks of life, be it the animal kingdom or humans, communication is a key ingredient for all social interaction. However not all living things communicate to the same degree. If you ask my wife, I am sure she will tell you I lack in the communication department, in fact I am sure she believes I don’t listen to her at all, but when it comes to communicating with animals I can barely shut up. Of all the animals I love to communicate with elk rate right at the top. By nature elk are very vocal. The uninitiated often simply think of bulls bugling, but cows, calves and bulls make all sorts of noises year around. If you encounter a larger herd of elk while you might not hear a thing from a distance, if you get close you will hear lots of subtle vocalization. Most of the time these are sounds of contentment, but depending on what’s happening the vocalization reflects it. Elk can convey contentment, danger, curiosity, or a cow in heat. Bulls for instance only bugle primarily in the rut, but they also communicate to establish a pecking order. After spending a considerable amount of time chasing the mighty wapiti, I’m convinced every elk in the herd knows each other by sound alone. This happens with the cows as well as the bulls and based on my evaluation somewhere in this mix is the deadly secret to calling elk archery-close.

Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Flattery

It seems that the more vocal a herd the better the odds are for success at calling them. Some cows call subtle, while others are loud-mouth ladies actively looking for a date. By listening it gives you a better opportunity to imitate the particular tones and intensity of the herd. By calling we are automatically intruding into the social club without an invitation. The closer we can sound to a known elk, and match that intensity the better the odds are of filling a tag. Even though we may sound like an outsider to the herd, luckily for us, love crazed bulls are not looking to be intimate with just one or two cows they are looking for all the love of every cow in the world, so taking advantage of their sexual frustrations and promiscuity is what we aim to do. It doesn’t take a world champion elk caller to trick bulls within range. By simply paying attention to the herd and understanding simple elk rhythm, tone and more important volume when calling, a hunter can depend on an elk call to be a valuable asset to dulling broadheads.

Public Versus Private Land

Since I started hunting elk 16 years ago, on private as well as public ground, I have realize that comparing these two different types of ground are like comparing night and day and it is all about the amount of pressure each receives. Generally speaking private ground bulls are way easier to call than public ground animals, but this is not always the case. Some private land does get a lot of pressure, which can make for some pretty tough calling duels with elk that can serve you up a humble pie every time you bust out a call. While conversely some public land either through sheer remoteness or hard-to-get tags is like calling the best private land in the nation. Hunting un-touched land and cow calling to bulls that have never heard a Hoochie Mamma would obviously be nice and it wouldn’t take long working over these uneducated elk to start feeling like an elk calling pro only to be deflated the first time we went to the national forest and mixed it up with bulls so well-known by local hunters that they have knick names. However, regardless of where you hunt the basics of calling remain the same. Start with mastering the cow call and all its various inflections. Your basic reed type calls are the easiest to learn as well as get proficient with. You will find two kinds; both are bite down reed-type of calls, one being enclosed and the other having an open reed or reeds. These calls make a very realistic sound and before your wife can run you out of the house you will master the basics.  I rely heavily on the cow call and think most of the time hunters are better off sticking with it over a bugle no matter where he is hunting. But learning how to make a basic bugle is important, especially for locating bulls at a distance before getting close and working him with your cow call. In addition, sometimes it is the bugle that finally provokes a dominant bull to commit, especially during the early season when bulls are still sorting out their peckin’ order.

Earning Your Public Ground PhD

Lets face it, unless you have deep pockets much of the private ground in the West is pretty much off limits, so you have to learn to hunt public land. This is not a bad thing as public ground comprises millions upon millions of acres across the West and happens to have some of the biggest bulls found anywhere. While it can be tougher than private, once you learn how to hunt it you won’t be disappointed. Over the years, one of my favorite places to hunt is the Gila National Forest, in New Mexico, and even though this is a trophy area tags are fairly obtainable through application. In the Gila, the trophy potential is off the chart, sporting some of the biggest bulls in the country, but just because the big ones live there doesn’t mean thatyou automatically make one call and they come running to get in the back of your truck. These mature jokers have a PhD in avoiding hunters. Over the last six years I have hunted this area religiously and have had the opportunity to shoot some nice bulls all by using elk calls as an aid to close the coffin. Notice I said, “as an aid”, meaning the call was just one thing in a bag of tricks to help smoke these monarchs. My biggest bull that came out of the Gila was a 378 P&Y bull that had earned the name Professor because he always seemed to take you to school when you applied too much pressure. However, this bull was vocal and would bugle his butt off. He also seemed to be fairly easy to find, not only by his gnarly, raspy bugle that set him apart, but frequently he could be found early in the morning in a large meadow just south of a particular water hole that always attracted a large herd. The Professor was not the only bull in the area that had large headgear, but it was The Professor that seemed to call the shots. I had caught this bull in the open several times, but calling seemed to really make him uneasy when you were in close. The Professor however would bugle hard to distant cow calls and seem to be whole heartedly interested, but had a sixth sense when you moved in for the attack. Final we decided to have a caller stay behind as we worked him coming off the meadow at daybreak. By doing this we could keep him interested and bugling as we stalked in closer. The caller always was no closer than 80 yards behind me. While the caller kept him occupied, I slid within 50 yards and gave him a G5 Tekan right behind the shoulder. This hunt was really a stalk, but the call and caller had a big part to do with his demise. Once we started quartering the bull up, we found a piece of an old arrow lodged just below the backstraps, so obviously someone had him in close before and gave the Prof and education, which explained why he was so wary.

The Double Team

As this old bull showed, hunting with a partner can work extremely well. It not only puts the hunter out in front of the call, but it gives the hunter a chance to move and adjust the angle based on where the bull might be approaching. Likewise, the caller has the flexibility to move as well and apply a lot of different calling techniques. The double team plan worked again on another hunt. It had been hot and the bulls were only bugling early and late. As soon as the sun would rise the elk woods would turn in to a ghost town.
Just after daybreak on the fourth day of our hunt we heard this bull bugle. He hit it only two times, both very weak and he sounded like the littlest rag horn in the land but with no other game in town we went after him. Getting as close as possible to where we thought the bugle came from I eased up and sat down by a pine stump while my buddy moved back and to my right about 40 yards. Neither of us were very optimistic about our chances. My buddy made one or maybe two very soft cow calls on a two reed diaphragm then he started raking a tree and rolled a few rocks. We sat there for possibly 10 minutes in silence, then out of nowhere appeared a wide 340 inch 6 x 6 coming directly to us, at 25 yards the bull let out a soft chuckle, looked over his surrounding and kept walking in the direction of where the last rock had been rolled, which led him 16 steps from my pine stump. By now I was at full draw waiting for a broadside shot. When the arrow left my bow, I knew we had killed a call shy monster by keeping it low key and staying patient. Needless to say, I was never convinced by the two times he had bugled earlier that he was a shooter. This was a lesson in itself. Never judge a bugle until you can see what is making the sound.
The most exciting way to bag a bull elk is to get him in close, and the best way to do that is with a call. Confidence in your call is critical, because if you’re insecure about using your call there is a good chance you will spook elk. Have confidence in your calling ability and become just another elk in the herd where you are hunting. Find a call that works for you and not what works for some else. Think like an elk and do as elk do. Realism, rhythm, and volume control can make the difference between bringin’ them in or running them over the next ridge. And remember its not always about calling, it can be just patiently listening to the sounds around you and applying minimal calls, while practicing good woodsmenship, and stalking skills that could help you put that monster on the back of the truck.

By Michael Waddell

Photo by Doris Barrilleaux

Hailey Marie Barrilleaux, 10, of Riverview, Florida accompanies her dad, Don, on many of his hunts in Green Swamp, Florida. Hailey proudly shows off the hog she and her dad bagged on the last day of hunting. She also enjoys target practice with him. Move over Sarah Palin.

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Todd Krater
U.S. Hunting Today
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