It takes one to know one. That is it takes a guy who builds turkey calls with his own hands from scratch, tests them in the Mississippi woods on live birds and in the process has learned what works best under a wide variety of turkey hunting situations.
“That’s the truth alright,” said Paul Meeks of Raleigh. “I have built all kinds of turkey calls out of all types of materials, including rock.
“I like exotic woods, too — especially in box-type calls. It has taken more years than I want to admit to figure out which woods make the best turkey sounds, and that’s after the hand work is done.”
Some calls never make the grade, as far as Meeks is concerned.
“Of course the idea is to separate the gobbler or multiples from their hens,” he said. “This is not easy even under the best of circumstances. I have listened to hens calling in the woods for decades. I remember which real hen calls got responses from the gobblers, and those are the ones I try to replicate in the woods myself.”
So what works best?
“Personally, I prefer a more-coarse call, or what some term as raspy,” Meeks said. “I don’t, however, necessarily believe in making mega-loud calls unless there is a wind blowing or the gobbles I hear are quite a distance off. Then I might initially crank it up.”
Maintaining the quality of the call when increasing volume calls for one type of call, he said.
“For this I lean on wood calls of the box type because I can vary the intensity, as well as the pitch and frequency,” Meeks explained. “I can go light and quiet, or boom box with a good, well-tuned wood box call.”
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