New call combines ease of flute-type with short-reed’s versatility

GRAND FORKS, N.D. — Ask Chris Davies about his passion for waterfowl hunting, and he’ll talk about the thrill of seeing ducks and geese way off in the distance and coaxing them into the decoys for a closer look.

Calling them closer is both the challenge and the attraction.

“I like reading the birds,” said Davies. “I have more fun just making sounds and seeing how they react.”

Davies, 29, has taken his penchant for making those sounds to another level with a new goose call that’s making a quite a honk in both hunting and competitive calling circles. Davies calls it the Feather Duster, and he’s already sold the short-reed calls as far away as Norway and Nigeria.

Not bad for a project that developed in a corner of his father-in-law’s shop in East Grand Forks.

A shift administrator at American Crystal in East Grand Forks, Davies says he started thinking about making a goose call while working part-time at a local sporting goods store. He says a lot of people would blow flute calls, which are simpler, but less versatile than short-reed calls. Problem is, short-reed calls can be harder to use, so Davies began toying with making a call that would be easier to master.

The Feather Duster does that, he says, because its length and inner workings, or “guts,” allow users to master a variety of sounds more easily than they might with other reed calls. In that sense, he says, the product combines the ease of a flute call with the versatility of a short-reed.

Davies says he started experimenting with designing a call last spring and came up with the Feather Duster after considerable trial and error. He settled on dymondwood, a compressed birch-acrylic veneer that is dyed in various colors and sounds as good as it looks, for the body of the call. He turns the wood for each of the calls on a lathe and hand tunes each Feather Duster, shaving the reed to make sure it sounds just right.

He says it takes about an hour to make each call, from the time he puts a rough piece of wood on the lathe to when he has the call tuned and ready for action.

“If I hear something I don’t like, I’ll retune it,” he said. “That’s where some of the time factor comes in. When it leaves this shop, it’s basically competition quality. You can go and make every sound you could ever possibly want to make out of that call — with a lot of practice.”

Davies says the Feather Duster is one of the lower-sounding calls on the market, which is ideal for local giant Canada geese. At the same time, he says, it’s versatile enough to produce high-pitched sounds.

“It’s a real ‘goosey’-sounding call, and quite a few people have said it’s one of the best meat calls, hunting calls they’ve ever heard,” Davies said. “They’re pretty avid waterfowl hunters so they know what they’re talking about.”

Davies says his contacts at Cabela’s and in the waterfowl industry have helped market the call, which retails for $90, and the demand has exceeded anything he ever could have expected. The calls are available on the outdoors Web site Nodakoutdoors.com, and Davies also created his own Web site, featherdustercalls.com, to market the calls.

Earlier this fall, Davies says he and a buddy filled their limit on geese and decided to stay in the field and shoot some video. Davies says a flock of geese had landed in a field about 500 yards away when about six geese came in to join the flock. Davies says he called the half dozen geese away from the flock on the ground and to within about 15 feet of the blind.

Only when the sun glared off the camera lens did the geese flare.

“I started hammering on the call, and they picked up and they came right over,” he said. “To pull them off the real birds, I was just smiling from ear to ear. We got it on video. It was pretty neat. If you know what you’re doing, you can kind of read the birds and make them do what you want them to do.”

Davies says competitive calling has gained popularity in the last three years. A good caller, he says, can sound like an entire flock of geese.

“You can just picture it,” he said. “It’s peaks and valleys. You go really fast, really loud and then you slow it down, and then you go really fast and pick it up again and then you drop it off. That’s what a really good caller can do, and that’s what makes them excel at competition calling.

In many ways, Davies says, using a call is like playing a musical instrument. Technique is crucial, he says. That means hand placement, tongue placement, mouth placement, not puffing out the cheeks and using more of a “gutteral” chest motion to produce the sound.

Davies says he tells people not to blow into the call, but to grunt.

“There’s a whole lot of things that go into it, but the number one thing is practice,” Davies said. “You’ve got to practice. I emphasize that a lot with people.”