Pennsylvania Game News - January 2010 - 54

Straight from the Bowstring Straight from the Bowstring The Naturalist’s Eye The Naturalist’s Eye By Tom Tatum By Tom Tatum By Marcia Bonta By Marcia Bonta By Marcia Bonta The right calls and knowing when and how to use them is something every archery hunter should have in his or her bag of tricks. Calls of the Wild T HE FIRST TIME I ever heard a buck grunt I was perched in my treestand as the last few minutes ran out on the 1981 regular archery season. I heard the buck long before I saw it. I squinted through failing light as the odd sounds came closer, and I noted that the steady procession of grunts resembled the noises a hungry, routing pig might make. At that juncture in my young bowhunting career, those strange sounds puzzled me. Then I caught the shadowy movement of a deer, a dandy 8-point, drunk with the rut, and his winding, grunting route just might lead him within range. The buck’s unpredictable path drew him off to my right at the farther limits of my effective range. When he paused to make a small scrape, I turned, eased back the string, put my sight pin just behind his ample shoulder, and released my arrow. The shot arched low, passed just beneath the deer’s brisket, and lodged in a nest of underbrush. The buck bolted and disappeared. I couldn’t be sure I had missed, and in my youthful exuberance, I followed up the shot immediately. The evidence confirmed a near miss. How near? A thick dusting of cleanly clipped white deer hair littered the ground where the buck had stood. Just beyond lay my bloodless arrow. I had underestimated the range – maybe a factor of the buck’s considerable bulk — but the distance had been closer to 35 yards than the 20 or so I had calculated. I spit out a lungful of air in disgust, realizing how close I had come to filling my tag in the waning seconds of the season. Evening drained into the woodlot and I listened to the sounds of twilight: a few resilient insects, a distant barking dog, and the cacophonous honking of Canada geese passing overhead. But the buck and his curious chorus of grunts were long gone. In retrospect, perhaps if I’d had a grunt call in my back pocket on that long-ago afternoon, I may have had the power to lure that rutting buck within range. But I didn’t have that power back then — no hunter did — because the invention of the commercial grunt call was at least a year away. By most reports, the first such deer call was conceived in 1982, by Missouri hunter/inventor Brad Harris. Harris worked for Lohman Game Calls and had spent enough time in the wild to observe, listen to, and study deer vocalization. The first grunt call was introduced to the public around 1984. Such a device for calling deer was long overdue. For generations, hunters had relied on “calls of the wild” to mimick everything from duck quacks and goose honks to turkey yelps and predator yaps and even elk bugles — to lure game within shooting distance. It wasn’t long before hunters grew to appreciate the magnetic calling power of Harris’s buck grunt. Today, some 25 years later, sporting goods stores and archery GAME NEWS

Pennsylvania Game News - January 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Pennsylvania Game News - January 2010