July 24, 2025 • 64 mins
Dirk asked his Instagram followers to send questions regarding elk hunting. No surprise there were some smartypants questions, and some really good serious ones as well. He covers: why the Maverick diaphragm is so much better than the Pink Phelps, early season calling tactics, this year's broad head of choice, sleep talking, best calls NOT to make, optimizing your elk chuckles, stick with cow calls or switch to bugles when you get a bull to respond, calling to bulls that hang up and or run away, and more.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Welcome back to another episode of Cutting in the Distance podcast.
I'm Dirk Durham and today I'm running solo on this
episode and it looks like it's time for another penultum whiskey,
Q and A. Now this time the questions came from Instagram.
I put a post on Instagram. Actually it was in
(00:32):
my stories. That's where you can ask or you can
you can put a little icon there it says, ask
me a question, and I give a little video about
asking me some questions. And I told a kind of
a dark secret that a lot of you people may
not know about myself, just to kind of get the
conversation started. But I kind of did a little show
(00:54):
and tell showed everybody that I probably didn't know this,
but I wear glasses some times, yeah, the old readers,
So you know, I made myself vulnerable and showed off
my glasses. And then I and I ask if anybody
has any questions on elk hunting related stuff, and you know,
(01:16):
I got quite a few questions. Some of them were
really serious and some were not so serious. You got
some real wise acres on there, such as the bearded
elk whisper says, who is the handsomest elk collar, you know,
And I feel like that was kind of like a
self serving question, Tony. We all know who the bearded
(01:38):
elk whisper is and how fond you are of your beard.
I mean, I'm not gonna lie, I'm a little envious.
It's a beautiful beard. But anyway, I think I'll just
kind of dive right in into some of these questions here.
First one from Northwest Critters, what is your number one
tip for successfully calling in early season herd bulls? Now?
(02:03):
Early season herd bulls are awesome if you can find them.
Sometimes they're hard to find because maybe it's early enough,
they're not just chasing cows and bugling their heads off
all day long and all night. So sometimes it can
be kind of hard to locate unless you've done your
due diligence and done some scouting, maybe e scouting. But
(02:25):
from what I found in some of the areas where
I hunt, what happens is so all summer long bowls
will hang out together in bachelor groups. Sometimes they'll be
two or three, sometimes there'll be more. Sometimes there'll be
a few little bachelor groups in an area that they
don't always chum together all the time. Sometimes they mix
(02:46):
it up, they get together all of them, and then
they kind of separate in the smaller groups. But once
around that first week of August, somewhere around August fifth
or fifteenth, so somewhere in there. It's always different wherever
you're at. Somewhere in that first part of August, within
the first couple of weeks, the bulls shed their velvet.
(03:06):
And what I've seen is, man, those as soon as
they shed their velvet, they're not buddies anymore. That's they
testosterones kicking out. But they're shedding their velvet and they
move away from each other. They're no longer there they're
bosom buddies, you know, good old pals and grazing around
and chumming around with each other. They're getting kind of alley.
(03:26):
So they separate, and what they do is they go
they go stage in a place somewhere pretty close to
where the cows are at, and they kind of wait.
And I kind of I've talked about this a little
bit on some other podcasts lately. I kinda I kind
of compare it to the movie Rocky when he went
to Siberia to train to fight Ivandrego. I think it's
(03:50):
the guy's named the Russian Fella that he bought over there. Anyway,
kind of went out in solitude and started training like crazy.
You know, he's doing chin ups and and push ups
the cold and carrying around big beams and running through
the snow and stuff. It's not quite that dramatic, but
those bulls kind of split up from each other. They
find a little ridge and they hang out on that
ridge and they spend some time there getting worked up
(04:13):
for the rut. And you'll find these places later in September.
You'll find these kind of little places I call them
like a bolt's bedroom or a little Heidi hole. They
like to hang out for a week or so before
they go to the cows. And what they do is
they and you'll see them. You'll find a little bedding
area and a lot of the trees on this little ridge.
(04:35):
It's usually a ridge, kind of like a finger ridge
from off of a main ridge, and you'll find where
they've rubbed a lot of the trees around the bedding
area there. And come mid September to late September, those
elk are nowhere to be found, and you can look
at the sap the tree sap and kind of date
it back. If you've looked at elk rubs for a
(04:57):
long time and analyzed them. It's kind of a it
takes a little while, you know, if you're a new hunter.
But the basics of it is, when a rub is
super fresh, smoking hot fresh, there won't really be any
sap running out of the wood at all. You know,
they've they've stripped the bark with their antlers or their horns.
(05:17):
Some people get mad when you call them horns, but
I'll call them horns just because you know, I'm a redneck. Anyhow,
when they first strip that that bark from the tree,
there won't be any sap just running out of it.
Typically it's just real smooth. The bark is super like
(05:38):
like flexible, pliable, soft, movable, not the least bit crispy.
You give it a week. After a week, the tiniest
little bit of sap will be starting to come out,
and sometimes not even within a week. You know, the
sap won't start running and then but it'll look it
looks super smoking hot fresh. But then when you touch
(05:58):
that that bark that was pliable when it was really fresh,
now it is stiff. Now it's more like not quite
like a potato chip, but pretty stiff, pretty crunchy. And
as week by week it goes by, as it dries out,
(06:19):
then you'll start getting little beads of sap coming out
of the out of the wood. And then also the
bark will look crisp beer and crisp beer as time
goes by. So by the time the end of September,
a lot of those will have quite a bit of
sap beads on the wood and the bark will be really,
really crispy. Now, the needles typically won't be red at
(06:43):
this time, and some rubs the needles don't even turn
red even the next season. You know, if they didn't,
if they didn't hurt the tree enough, if they didn't
rub it enough to kill the tree, then sometimes those
trees live on. So reading rubs is really good, is
really good to establish these kind of little little areas.
(07:06):
So keep your eyes out for these kind of places
on the early season. So early season, if you're seeing
these little little bedding areas with these smoking, hot fresh rubs,
that's one of those little bull bedrooms or a little
heidi hole. And to call those bulls, I don't really
cal call a lot. Now I will cow call a
little bit, because, like I've always said, calling elk to
(07:28):
me is an experiment. I'm just trying to find out
what that bull is interested in hearing on that particular day.
So I will introduce a few cow calls. I'll do
some light col calling when I'm trying to locate a bowl.
But if I'm not hearing anything an he replies to that,
then I'll go to the bugles. And it seems to
(07:48):
me in that early time of year, which is kind
of contradictory to what a lot of people will say.
A lot of folks will say, Oh it's so early,
just go cow calls. The bulls really aren't bugling that much. Well,
I whenever I've had luck, it seems like they're actually
answering my bugle's better. But I'm not bugling from half
(08:08):
a mile away on a on a ridge top somewhere.
I'm actually down in there mixing it up with them.
So you know, you have to kind of get in there,
use some boot leather and traverse these places. And when
you start getting into these little bull bedroom areas and
you get it within a few hundred yards with a
couple of hundred yards and you bugle a lot of
times that bull is gonna answer, and he may not
(08:29):
sound aggressive, he may just sound you'll just give you
at a moony old bugle, very unimpressive. You'll think it's
it's a spike or a raghorn or something. But a
lot of times, you know, a lot of big bulls
will bugle like that. It's just like people. You know,
(08:51):
the people have they can they can adjust their voice.
They can be a soft talker or they can be
a screamer, right depending on their mood. So even if
you hear one of those mony bugles, that's a great thing,
especially early seasons, like okay, and you'll notice where they're at.
You'll locate him like, okay, he's around that ridge. What
you want to do is you want to get you
want to get the wind right. Make sure you keep
(09:12):
your wind right. You want to approach the ridge, and
I like to get as close as humanly possible without
getting picked off. That means I want to be one
hundred yards or less from where I think that bowl was. Now,
I don't call my way to him. Once I've kind
of located him, I get him to moan or bugle
two or three times, I'm like, Okay, I'm pretty sure
(09:32):
he's right there. Then I clam up, might be quiet,
put the calls away, and I just head over there.
And whenever I'm making that final approach and I get
a couple hundred yards away from that spot, I start
slowing down, being a lot quieter, being a lot more deliberate,
because I don't want to I don't want to be
heading towards him and then be moving too quick and
(09:55):
too loud and then bump him. Right once you break
that one hundred and fifty yard barrier, I'm really really
starting to get a lot quieter because I'm my goal
is to get one hundred yards or less from him.
And you know, as much as we love to think
we know where you hear an Elk from, or let's say,
(10:15):
maybe you've even seen him go go to bed in
a patch of timber or something and you've made a
made a mark on your on X. Once you get
over there, it doesn't mean they're still in that same
exact place. Of course, Elk can move, so you want
to you want to be real careful as you approach.
So I got to get that one hundred yards away,
and I want to try to be on that same
topographical line that I heard that gowal from. So I
(10:38):
don't want to be right above him. I don't want
to be right below him. No matter what the the
thermals are doing. If I, if I have the opportunity
to like really get strategic and tactical with this, I'm
going to get on that same same topographical line that
I think he's on. So I'm on the I'm basically
sidehill from him. That way, it's easy for him to
(10:59):
come to me. He just has to walk side hill
number one, number two. Now I have a little more
of advantage on those thermals. Let's say the wind's been
blown super good uphill or downhill consistently for you know,
thirty minutes to an hour, and you're like, oh, these
thermals are really great, man. I don't know how many
times over the years I've I've I've thought I had
(11:21):
the thermals nailed, and then out of the blues it
it changes. Maybe a big cloud goes over and covers
the sun for a minute and makes the ground get cool,
and then the thermal switch. So get on that side hill,
because then if that way, if they if they the
winds or the thermals changed, and go up or downhill.
You'll still be good. You'll still be safe. Once I
(11:43):
get there. Then I start opening up now, depending on
the bugle, depending on the area. If there's been a
lot of pressure, I may not open up with a bugle.
I may open up with a big stick on a
tree breaking. And I'm just gonna rake and rake and rake,
give it, you know, two to five minutes, and then
(12:04):
let it set, and then let it set for five
minutes and just kind of listen and they see what
you hear. Sometimes I'll get a bull out of their bed.
They'll just come want to take a look. If I
don't get any response, then I'll start bugling, and then
I'll start out back with that same type of bugle
that I heard earlier, that same mony bugle. I own
a match's intensity, So I'll give him a moany bugle.
(12:27):
And when he replies, and it may take he may
take a minute or three, you know, or longer to reply,
depending Then whenever I call again, I'm gonna wait that
same amount of time. So if it took him three
minutes to reply to me, I'm going to wait three
minutes again to reply to him and then kind of
(12:47):
slowly build this conversation. And also at this point, I'll
kind of know if I'm in his wheelhouse, Oh he's
further away than I thought, or holy smokes, I almost
stepped on this thing. He's like fifty yards away. I
can almost see him. That'll happen too. So you just
want to kind of use kid gloves here and be
(13:08):
real careful and not bump him out of there, and
then kind of let the let the conversation build slowly.
But what I found is once you kind of get
to talk into him a little bit, that mony bugle
eventually will change into just a full, full blown, full
full note bugle. And that's what I'm really looking for,
(13:29):
because whenever I hear him go from mony bugle to
a full bugle, I know I've got him because he's
starting to say, hey man, get out of here, because
he's defensive of his space. Right. This is his little
spot he's carved out, This is his little training area.
This is whatever whatever is going through a bull elk's mind.
This is his territory, and he don't want you on
his little ridge. So and also I've found they don't
(13:53):
they don't have that that bugle a lot in that
early season. It sounds like they're losing her mind. Just
you know that you hear middle of September just sounds
like a Jurassic Park scream or something. A lot of
times they just bugle that full bugle over and over
and then you hear sticks popping, and here it comes.
(14:14):
He's not necessarily mad, but he's more like curious and defensive,
like he's gonna come over and chase you out of there, like, hey, man,
get out of here. So that's how I that's how
I kind of play those early season bowls. And you know,
you may have to cover a lot of country, and
I'm not saying you won't hear them bugle from a
ridgetop somewhere. It's definitely. Definitely I've heard a lot of
bulls bugle from the ridgetops down off into some hell
(14:36):
hole or vice versa, from the bottom up into the
top somewhere. But it's a matter of just covering country
and making sure you you know, peel back every part
of that terrain to make sure that you can hear
every little nook and cranny of the landscape. All right,
My buddy Jeff Helm helm Dot. Yeah, how many elk
(14:59):
tags are you to fill this year? Well? For sure one,
you know I didn't I didn't draw anything. You probably
heard Jason and I talk earlier about elk tags. I
didn't draw anything. But I may have an opportunity to
pick up a second elk tag here in Idaho, depending
if there's any leftovers after the non residents return all
their tags back. So I may have an opportunity there.
(15:22):
I'm hoping. I'm hoping I'm gonna be able to archery
hunt with my son. I will be able to archery
hunt with my son, for sure. I'm not sure if
I'm going to hold a tag though I may just
it may be all about him. But if I know,
hunting with my son, there's been a lot of times
where I've left my bow in the truck and called
(15:44):
bulls in and they make him past him, and I
should have had my boat because I could have killed him.
But that was like fourteen fifteen, sixteen year old Austin
rather than shoot. He's going to be twenty seven. I
think this fall twenty eight. Man. Time flies when you're
having fun. But then if I can pick up a
second one, I'm gonna get one for rifle season. I'm
(16:05):
a terrible rifle hunter, but I love you know, I
love bow hunting. I love I love all kinds of hunting.
I'm an opportunist, right If I can get a tag
and spend more time in the woods, so be it.
I'm not going to pack my bow around during rifle season, though,
I'm not gonna take a knife to a gun fight.
I'm I'm I maybe dumb, but I'm not stupid, all right,
(16:28):
Chasin Roosevelt's He says, when are you gonna come hunt
these friggin' rosies one of these days. I've never hunted
Roosevelt elk, Someday I would. I'd like to have had
a couple buddies invite me over over the years, and
you know, scheduling conflicts or whatever, it just hasn't penciled out.
But someday I'll make it over there. I feel like
(16:50):
I'll enjoy it. I've spent a little bit of time
on the coast there in the woods, and it's it's
everything they promise you about what those ilk woods look
like and more. It's thick, it's nasty, it's steep a
lot like North Idaho, except the coastal stuff. Seems to me,
you have a lot more poky crap. You know, you
(17:11):
got your Devil's club and BlackBerry brush and all sorts
of stuff that want to poke you or kill you.
So but someday I'm gonna I'm gonna make it out there.
Let's see, all right, Idaho l Hunter says, what's on
the point the end of your arrows for elk this year?
So last year, I'm gonna I'm gonna un the same
(17:32):
thing I ran last year, which is I've got some
expandable broadheads. Yeah, I went to the went to the
dark side. I feel like expandables have really came a
long ways from what they were thirty years ago or
twenty years ago. You know, I feel like there's there's
(17:53):
a there's a lot of really valid points of not
having good penepratration if you an elk in the shoulder
bone or the shoulder blade or that knuckle or any
of that. Honestly, a lot of your three bread three
blade broadheads are really going to struggle on them kind
of places too. I've shot a lot of elk myself.
(18:15):
I've hit some in the shoulder with a three blade,
and you know, I didn't. I didn't penetrate. It just
snapped off at the insert. I did shoot two yearless
see in twenty twenty two, I shot two bowls with
iron wheels. They both penetrated. One of them penetrated, both scapulous.
(18:35):
It was a complete pass through. Blood trail wasn't great.
But I hit high. So if you picture an elk
and you draw a horizontal line down the downy's body,
you want to hit like dead center. You want to
hit below that horizontal line. And I didn't. I hit
above it, so most of the blood he bled internally,
he bled enough on the outside to track both of them. Did.
(18:58):
I kind of hit both of them a little high,
And I think I'm not sure if it was just Oh,
I'm definitely sure it was probably my shooting ability, but
maybe not. You know, if you've kind of slowed down.
That's if you slow down the shot on a on
a video, which that is one cool thing about filming
(19:18):
your hunts is if you slow down that video, then
a lot of times you can see those drop. Those
elk will drop you know, six eight inches or more,
depending on you know, how alert they are at the shot,
how how edgy they are, and if they see you,
or or how noisy your bow is. But there's a
lot to take in there. So I yeah, I hit
(19:40):
both those bulls high. Wasn't great blood trails, but I
wouldn't say that was the broadhead's fault. That was my
shot placement more than anything. I think if I would
have hit below the center line, I'd have had a
better blood trail. But anyway, be that as't that was
a tangent. I'm gonna shoot the evolution outdoors. I think
it's called a hide. It's a stainless steel Ferrell one
(20:03):
hundred and twenty five grain broadhead to two expandable blades
and then it's got kind of a cut on contact
chisel tip looking tip on it. That's pretty thick, heavy duty.
It's like thicker than most two blade broadheads are. It's
very heavy duty, very sharp, very sturdy, and I've shot
(20:27):
I've shot a couple of white tails with that head
and it's it's done good. So anyway, of course, yeah,
I know, I know you can't compare an elk to
a to a white tail, absolutely one percent, right, But
I do have a lot of friends and know some
people they're excellent hunters that kill a lot of elk,
(20:47):
kill a lot of big elk, and have had some
marginal shots over the years, you know, and hit them
with those expandables in the Evolution Outdoors in fact, and I'm,
by the way, ps I'm not sponsored, but you know,
the results were impressive. You know, they had a good
blood trail, they had a short blood trail, and the
(21:09):
bulls died easily quickly. So you know, what, what the heck,
I'm I'm willing to give it a shot. So last
year I tried them and I didn't even get my
bowl or my bow drawn back at all. During September.
If you guys watched the film that just dropped on
the Phelps game Calls channel, UH, it's It's my idaho
(21:30):
el kant last year, it's Uncallable. You Now, you might
remember the podcast I did with Bradley Dammerman and Cody
Wilson last fall from from the Field. We talked about
what we were doing and seeing in the woods, and
then you can basically follow up with that on YouTube
and see that that new film that dropped a week
(21:50):
or so ago, Uncallable was the was the title, uh,
A good Friend and Guide of of Bradley's guide Zelk, North, Idaho,
said he's hunted this particular area and the elk are
not really receptive to calls, you know, So we thought,
you know what, we're gonna go down test that theory out.
(22:11):
We're gonna see if that's really true or not. And yeah,
watch the film and see how it turns out. I mean,
there's some good and bad. But anyhow, I didn't get
to I didn't get to shoot an elk with one
of those last year. So this year I'm gonna try
it again and see if I can have some success
and get an arrow in elk. So I'm looking forward
(22:32):
to it now. I told you guys in the beginning
that we had some wise acres and my buddy Joel Turner,
you know, the the bow Whisper or whatever he calls
himself these days, the man with the plan, the guy
(22:57):
who who will teach you how to shoot in and
get over your target panic, he says, He asked, He's like,
do you still talk in your sleep? Oh man? So
Joel and I shared a room at an Airbnb here
a few years ago, at Elk shaped camp, and he says,
I got up. He said, I talked in my sleep
all night and he said I got up. He heard
(23:19):
me wrestle around, and he said that he looked up
and I was standing there in my underwear, just kind
of standing up in the room, just kind of facing
the wall and just like looking up, and he's like,
what's up, And he had said I didn't say nothing,
and then I just kind of laid back down and
then I did a bunch of mumbling in my sleep.
So so the question is do I still do that?
(23:39):
And I don't know. We'll have to ask missus Durham sometime.
I'm a little bit old now. I kind of talked
about my reader glasses. Well, you know, full disclosure, I
sleep with one of them stupid seapap machines because I snore,
and I think that keeps me from mumbling in my
sleep a lot, so she can't hear it. I mumble
into that stupid math as So, so I don't think
(24:02):
I probably talked in my sleep anymore, even though I
might do it, but nobody can hear it. Okay, So
I DJ buff. He says, you and Jason go into
a cold Play concert in the future. Too soon. That's
too soon. I know that's been popular on the on
the social media airwaves. But it's hilarious, all right, Scott Russo,
(24:27):
he has a question. He says he's got three names here, Gabriel,
Phelps Smith, So John Gabriel, Jason Phelps, and Charlie Smith.
One packer, one caller, one stays at home. Who's who? Okay,
this is gonna be great, So let's let's factor this out.
(24:49):
So John Gabriel, if you know John, Uh, awesome dude,
really great el Hunnor. He does all of our package
design work at at Phelps four Oliver Packaging. He's been
with us from day one. He's done a ton of
our graphic arts. Any any of the cool crap that
(25:11):
you see that's got any of our thumbnails for YouTube
or anything you see that's got some artistic stuff. Except
for our emails these days, John has had his hands
on it. And then Jason Phelps. We all know who
that guy is. He's like an ogre, right, He's like
the Juggernaut. He's six foot four and soper strong. He's
like a one man wonder. I've had him pack ELK
(25:34):
meat before and he's yeah, he's legit. And then Charlie Smith. Okay, well,
Charlie he's a really great elk hunter two, but he's
not a great elk killer. He's really good at chasing
these things around. I hope he's listening to this, and
Charlie is he was He was born on Saint Patrick's Day.
He's a red haired ginger and he's about five foot
(25:55):
six and a half and I think John's five foot
six or vice ver. So those two always argue and
bicker amongst each other to see who's the tallest, but
they're both they're both short fellas at five foot six ish.
I don't know, like I'm definitely going to have Jason
Phelps be a packer. Charlie Smith. He's a heck of
(26:18):
a caller too. But I will say John he has
called in and elk for me. Him and him and
Jason tag team to bowl in New Mexico for me
here in twenty twenty, So I would have to say
John he gets to call and stay home Charlie, because
Charlie sometimes you know, he's a little He's a surly
(26:41):
little leprechaun, right, So if I if I say he
has to stay home, He's definitely going to be mad
about it. So I'm definitely going to kick that hornet's
nest and make him stay home. So that's how that's
going to play out. Scott, Any good tags this year?
D Jones pass out is the question? Ask her? Any
(27:06):
good tags this year? Yeah? Like I said, I've got
I've got an Idaho elk tag. Have a Kansas Archery
white tail tag again. Man, Me and Jason must be
living right or something, because we've drawn This will be
like the fourth year we've drawn Kansas whitetail Archery tag
and that's just unheard of, you know. I fully expect
(27:30):
next year to not draw one. So that that's those tags.
And then Jason Phelps and I, I think we talked
about it before. We're going to the Yukon to hunt moose,
him and I both with Caesar Lake Outfitters up there.
We're gonna fly in, We're gonna drive all the way
up to the Yukon to Caesar Lake's base camp Dustin Roe,
(27:51):
he's the owner operator, and then we're gonna jump in
a plane and fly into some remote lake and hunt
moose for around twenty days or so. So it's going
to be it's going to be an adventure. I told Jason,
I said, Okay, here's the deal. You have to use
a bow and I'll use a rifle. And if a
bull comes in and it's too brushing you can't get
(28:11):
a shot, and it's a giant, then I'll shoot it
with the rifle just to make sure it don't get away,
or if it's just really big anyway, and maybe I'll
just get to shoot it anyhow. And he didn't like
that idea. I don't know why. He's kind of a
kind of a poopy pants I guess, all right, So
next question, Ultimate Ultimate Pursuit, Best calls not to make?
(28:35):
And when? And when how do I get on Team Phelps?
He wants to be on Team Phelps, So Ultimate Pursuit.
The best calls not to make? I think the best
calls not to make are just really crappy sound in
elk calls. Now, you don't have to sound like a
(28:58):
world champion elk collar by any means, but you have
to kind of sound like an elk. Now elk kind
of sound crappy. Sometimes they make some real god awful bugles,
but they still sound like an elk for the most part.
Right here, a couple of years ago, dusting It, Cameraman
Dusty and I were in in Idaho elk hunting and
it was the last twenty to thirty minutes of dark.
(29:21):
We had this bull going and man, we were just
closing in. We had him, We had him coming. He
was brush popping and he was almost on us and
behind us a ways. I heard a weird noise and
it sounded like somebody was abusing a puppy, just like
this real whiny, weird, weird noise. And I think they
(29:41):
were attempting to make a bugle maybe, or they were
trying to make a cow sound with like a like
a pack bugle or something. It was just it didn't
sound like an elk whatsoever. It's like a weird, little
whiny I don't know if they were trying to do
like some people will call it a bull squeal, like
an immature bull squeal. A lot of I don't know,
(30:02):
spikes just kind of do a weird, mony, weirdo, kind
of a pre puberty bugle a lot of times. I'm
not so, I'm not really sure what he was trying
to make the sound, but I heard it and I'm like, oh,
what was that? Is that a guy? And then ten
minutes later I heard it and they're like right behind us,
(30:23):
like fifty yards behind us in the brush, and they're
doing it a lot. This guy is doing it a lot.
And the elk was coming in like I had tension
on the string. I thought, okay, I'm gonna see this
bowl any second. And that guy started in with his
puppy puppy noise, and bull just shut up and left.
(30:43):
So those are the kind of calls you don't want
to make if you can't, and people will say, you know,
don't ever call the elk. Well, if you sound like that,
absolutely do not call the elk. Do yourself and everyone
else in the woods a favor by not calling. Please,
don't just pick up a tube Walmart or whatever, call
(31:04):
at Walmart on the way to the woods and start
tooting on it and making some weird noises and think
that's going to work. Is not. You know, do your
due diligence, you know. Start now here we are, it's July.
We have plenty of time to pick up some calls
and start practicing. And you may not sound perfect. That's okay,
it's that's not what it's about. But you have to
(31:25):
sound somewhat like an elk and and put some realism,
into your into your into your calling scenario. Some calls
that you shouldn't make. Maybe they are a pretty decent
sounding call, but it's the same call over and over again.
There's this one particular call in tube. A lot of
people know if you hear the if you hear it,
(31:48):
you'll be like, oh, yep, that's one of them there calls.
It's like the same three note. It's the same three
note bugle over and over and over again. Which when
those came out, I think they, you know, worked pretty good.
But now, elk, if it's the same old noise over
and over again, they will get conditioned to it. So
(32:09):
you have to sound different now, not to say those bugles.
You can't make other noises. I mean you can if
that's all you got, or that's the one you want
to use, I'm not going to pick on you for that,
but man, learn how to make some other sounds with it.
Learn how to make some diverse noises. It's not the
same old three note bugle over and over again. Learn
(32:30):
how to get some low notes, learn how to get
some mid notes, learn how to get those high notes.
Learn how to you know, chuckle and grunt with it,
and It just all takes a little bit of time,
and it's five minutes a day, ten minutes a day,
pick up your calls, five ten minutes a day on
the way to work whatever, and practice with them, and
by September you'll have the confidence to know that when
(32:51):
you put it in your mouth, there's gonna be a
particular sound that you want to make that it's going
to come out, instead of buying one on the way
to Elk camp and being like, oh, I don't know
what this is gonna sound like. And you get out
in the woods and you blow it a couple of
times and you're like, oh, well, I'm just gonna put
that away, but you're probably gonna chase the elk away.
(33:13):
All right, here's a question from Dirty Bird Grimes. What's
the best drink to what your whistle before a bugle? Well,
you would like to say the Pendleton whiskey, but that's
not how we run, right, No, that's for after the hunt.
But here's here's my drink of choice for elk season.
(33:33):
I'm a coffee guy, right, I love coffee. But here's
the deal. I'm not. I'm kind of I'm kind of
a slow riser in the morning. I'm not in a
morning person, so I'm I don't take the time to
get up, make coffee, sip my coffee and enjoy it.
In the morning, I just get up and kind of
get around and and and head. I want to sleep
(33:54):
as long as I can, right, I'm just gonna be honest.
I want to be sleeping. I want to sleep as
long as I can. So what I do is I
take a Nalgene bottle thirty two ounces of liquid, and
I take one scoop or one packet of wilderness athlete.
I think they call it energy and focus, and then
I take another packet of hydrate and recover from wilderness athlete.
(34:18):
I put that in there. And then sometime and some
people call that a superman. Sometimes I'll even take another
scoop of electrolyte. Let's see, it's been really hot and dry,
and man, I've been sweating my brains out. I just
need that extra electrolytes in me. I'll take that a
scoop of electrolytes and pour in there, shake it up,
and I'll drink that. But I'm gonna drink that thing
(34:38):
in the first fifteen twenty minutes of my day. I
want to prime the system, right, We've got to prime
the pump. I gotta get some more liquid back into
me because the day before I probably drink a lot
of water, but probably not enough. It seems like we
always kind of run on the edge of dehydration when
we're el cunning. So I'll prime the pump with that.
That'll get things going, get me p in, get get
(35:02):
me hydrated right off the bat, and then that way
I can just maintain with my water bladder as I hunt.
So I don't know. I don't think that's probably the
answer old dirty bird Drives was looking for. But you
know what, dang it, they don't have to be all
funny your silly, silly question question answers here All right,
(35:25):
next question, And I'm not really sure how you say it,
d bill l A seven dB I l l A
wide seven. Basically, the question says, how do you make
your chuckle sound deeper and not like a sequence of barks? Well,
(35:48):
chuckle or a grunt is a lot like a bark,
but I think it's a lot in the base of it,
and it's kind of like the execution like it. To me,
a bark is like like an exaggerated chuckle or grunt.
Like when I'm barking, I'm putting all my air across
(36:08):
the diaphragm I can, and as much base o that
base like oh, that guttural like somebody punching me in
the gut. Oh that I'm trying to put as much
of that into that bark as I can. Compared to
like a chuckle or a grunt. It's a lot less
(36:29):
of that effort or a lot less of that pressure
or intensity. I'm not putting nearly as much air across
the reed, across the latex of the diaphragm. I'm not
putting as much base into it. But I am doing
quite a bit of base. But I think a lot
of people where they go wrong on their chuckles. Number
one is the cadence. They don't breathe in, breathe out,
breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out as they
(36:49):
make the calls. They do that, or they don't put
enough voice inflecture. They're not doing that, And it's it's
kind of hard, as I find out as I work
with a lot of folks teaching them how to call
and stuff. You know, it's it's not super intuitive to
(37:10):
make that that that sound with the diaphragm and then
combine it with that that guttural base. So if we
slow it way down, it's gonna sound kind of like this.
(37:30):
So we're just gonna hit that high note on your
diaphragm and then you're gonna drop your jaw and go, oh,
so speed it up. But I'm using a lot of
my voice. So if you're a professional beatboxer, you would
probably do really good chuckling and grunning. But if you're not,
(37:57):
you're gonna have to practice with it. And I've found
that working with some people that if you skip the
diaphragm part and just start learning to do that base
part or that guttural into the tube. So put your
mouth to the tube and just do that instead of
having the diaphragm, and your wife or significant other is
(38:19):
going to look at you like you're crazy, what are
you doing? But I promise you it's going to help.
And it's a lot of it is just learning how
to do that base thing. So you may just have
to start listening to a lot of hip hop music
as well, you know, get the beat down. But if
you if you do it in the tube without the diaphragm.
(38:39):
Then you start you start picking that up, and then
then put your diaphragm back in and I kind of
just break ol calling. I break it all down like
whenever I'm trying to get better at it, and these
are the kind of things I had to do at
the beginning. So break it down and then introduce your
your diaphragm reading there and you start getting that that
(38:59):
read sound, and then it's going to sound more like
a deep guttural chuckle or grunt. All right, the outdoors
in Colorado. Maybe it kind of a screenshot of these
things that kind of cut everybody's things off. And I
think this is like a continuation he had. He commented
(39:22):
two questions. It's just a continuation. So I'm going to
try not to screw this up. When you have a
bowl responding to cow calls, do you continue col calling
to close the distance, or do you introduce challenge, bugles, chuckling,
et cetera to get him in. Man, It's just it's
(39:42):
every situation is different, every bowl is different. To say
like this is the one way to do it on
every single out is just it don't work that way.
But what I will say if I have a bowl
answering to a particular kind of call. If he's answered really,
really well to cow calls, I'm just going to keep
(40:04):
giving him cow calls now because I've tried this before. Like,
all right, man, I've got him wound up. I've got
him wound up type on this cow call, you know,
and he came, he only came so far, you know,
help my nature. The bowl bugles bugles bugles at a
cow because he wants the cow to come to him, right.
(40:26):
He wants him to come join his herd of other cows.
If he has cows, a lot of times he'll go
part way, but he may not go the whole way. Now,
I will say, yeah, definitely been a lot of bulls
just cow called in. I've cow called in a few
and killed him as well. But a lot of times
those bulls will come only so far part way. Now,
(40:49):
if you have a shooter with you, if you guys
can separate and you hear that bowl and he seems
to be gaining ground on it, send your shooter out
front there and maybe have him intercept. But it's a
very pig it's a very tricky game because he may
get caught sneaking in on that bowl. You know, I
have to have your head on a swivel if you're
gonna sneak in on a bowl like that, if they're
heading your way already. But but what I've done is
(41:14):
is I've tried that, Like the bull will come only
so far. They'll hang up, and I'm like, then they'll
just stand there and I'll cow call and I'll bugle
and bugle and like, come over here. He wants me
to come his way. And I thought, well, okay, I'm
gonna make him think there's another bull here and he
needs to come over here and get this cow. So
I've started bugling. I've started, you know, challenge bugle and
(41:37):
started screaming, start lip ball, start chuckle. I mean, you
name you, name it. I've discrewed up. I've done it.
And and a lot of times they'll turn around and
they're like, yeah, no, I'm not interested. They'll turn around
and go back to their cows. Sometimes they do come.
(41:57):
But a lot of times if you start them out
on cow calls and they're just eating those up, if
you start bugling, in my experience, a lot of times
that's that could foul things up. Not every time, but
a lot of times. All right, Silent Assassin sixty nine,
(42:25):
What is the easiest way to learn the lip ball?
I've been trying and can't get it, and it's peeing
me off. Man, that is like a struggle for a
lot of folks. I think that's like number one or
(42:46):
number two struggle. Like people really struggle with both chuckles
and grunts, and they also struggle with lipball. I struggled
with the lipball forever. My friends they could do it,
and I'm just like, man, how do you do that?
It could just flawlessly, you know, you know this is
twenty years ago. Whatever, you can just flawy, you know,
(43:06):
do this lip ball. I'm like, man, how are you
doing that? So one one winner. As I'm sitting there
watching will Primos hunt on TV, I'm just like, you
know what, I'm gonna learn this. I'm gonna learn how
to lip ball. So I sat there and watched hunting
videos and buzzed my lips on my tube instead of
and I didn't use my diaphragm whatsoever. I Am just
(43:29):
getting my lips to figure out how they like to
buzz to get a good buzz on the on the tube.
Because I found when I try to transition and try
to bugle and then lipball, it's like my lips didn't
know what to do. They didn't know what to do,
they didn't know how to do it, they didn't know
where to be. And everybody I knew lipballed on the
(43:50):
front part of their lips, right right dead sinner, right
below their nose. But what I found is after I
started playing with this this tube, buzzing my lips on
it for about a month, I found that if I
buzzed on my right side of my lips, it worked great,
but I did on the front. I mean, I can
do it on the front, but it's not great. They're
(44:12):
not as pliable or something. I think. You know, everybody's
got a their different shaped lips, different lips. Maybe you
need to get some botox injections into your lips, some
filler as the girls call it. Maybe you need to
get your lips filled up. And if you have thin
lips and get them babies really a pumpin'. But I
don't I don't know, but everybody's lips are so different.
(44:34):
So it worked for me to put in the corner
of my mouth. Maybe it's your left side. Maybe it's
your right side, maybe it is dead center, but experiment
with that. But just get your lips cut, comfortable on
buzzing them on your tube and it's you know, it's
gonna sound like this. You'll just sit there doing it
(44:57):
over and over and over again. It's boring and your
significant other's going to look at like you like your nuts.
You can do it on the on the way to work.
Be careful. I did have somebody tell me they got
pulled over by a cop one. Somebody turned them in
for drinking and driving. They thought somebody's seen them with
a tube up to their mouth doing doing this stuff,
and they thought it was a bottle of wine. If
(45:20):
you believe it or not. So yeah, if you are
drinking and driving and practicing your your your calls, it's
probably not a good idea. Well it's not a good
idea at all to drink and drive, but it's an
extra bad idea if you're going to be doing that stuff.
So but all seriousness, buzz your lips and then once
you get really comfortable, like man, every time I can
(45:41):
put it up there, Man, I got a good lip
buzz or a lip ball. That's basically what a lipball
is now we can we can use our diaphragm to
make that same noise. And the easiest way I've found
to do it is like to start out with just
making that high pitch mosquito noise, that super high pitch
(46:02):
mosquito noise. And then so you do that coupled with
that buzz of your lips and you have a lipball.
So practice that over and over and over again. And
if you're doing it at home and you're not wanting
to disturb the whole house, you can't put your your
(46:23):
hand over the bottom of your tube and kind of
muffle it a little bit, let a little bit of
air come out. But that'll that'll allow you to like
practice at home without making everybody in the house matter
or ticking off the neighbor dogs. But do that over
and over again, that mosquito noise with that buzz on
your lips, and once you get like super confident, like, Okay,
every time I do that, I put it up there.
(46:44):
I can make that mosquito noise. I can make that buzz. Now,
I can, I can. I'm just I know what to do.
Every time it's it comes out right, Then you can
start turning that into a like a bugle, so almost
like a location bugle. So you start out with a
crystal clear, high pitched mosquito type pitched bugle note, get
(47:07):
it going clean, buzz your lips and then drop off
this quick buzzing and then drop your jaw a little
bit and go ooh. So that's the easiest way to
do it. Now the advanced way to do it is
(47:28):
to do a full bugle. So you start out with
a normal full bugle and when you hit that high note,
then you start buzzing your lips. And that's super complicated.
There's a lot going on there. But if you build
those other fundamentals first, I think you'll definitely be able
to do a full bugle with a lip ball. This
sounds something like this, but practice makes perfect and it's
(47:55):
you know, five ten minutes a day will help if
you're just if you're just trying to learn how to
buzz your lips, same thing like if you're If you
do this, I promise you if you do this for
a week, two weeks ever for straight buzzing your lips,
then you start the mosquito thing. By September, you'll get this.
If you start now, So Benjamin horshe has a list,
(48:19):
He's got like a bunch of these comments questions, but
he kind of you have so many words to put
in there, so it's kind of a it keeps on going.
So he just kept on asking, continuing his question. But
I'm gonna try not to screw this up because it's
a little hard to track from each each little response here.
(48:39):
So it says, what is the easiest way to learn
the lip? Wait, that's sorry, bron guy. Uh, mid day,
same level. I get a bull fired up within one
hundred and fifty yards and he won't commit. Why happens
to me all the time? I bugle, I rake, my
I rake, my shooter is is fifty yards in front
(49:01):
of me. I'm aware of the thermals and the whole
encounter is September fifteenth is when I start my season.
They can be screaming, pissed off and still not come in,
and I continue pressuring and they continue to move off.
They aren't going to bed because it's midday. They don't
(49:24):
smell me or hear me. What the heck is going on.
I've arrowed two bulls in my five years of el
cutting career. Those bulls read the script. The thirty plus
other bulls move away, like I move away. I'd like
some advice thanks. So basically, he's getting bulls to come
(49:48):
in and they're hanging up, and they hang up for
a while and then they just move off and they
won't come to him. It's basically kind of what I'm
I'm I'm getting from this questionnaire. Bulls hang up on bulls, right.
The bulls don't just bugle and then walk over there
(50:10):
and just walk right up and fight. They'll sit there
and they'll bugle at each other and they'll rake. If
you can watch elk on a hillside, you'll notice there'll
be a herd bull or whatever, and you'll have other
bulls around, and they'll bugle back and forth and they'll rake.
The herd buller rake, the satellite bulls a rake, or
(50:32):
maybe there's an intruder, maybe there's another mature bull coming
to fight that that herd bull. But they'll sit there
and rake, and then they'll go so far and then
they hang up on each other. They'll bugle and rake
and bugle, and it's almost like somebody at that point,
somebody has to give, right, and your shooter is fifty
(50:54):
yards ahead of you, and the bulls pretty close. If
you're if you have bulls raking and you have a shooter.
As the caller, your job is to keep that bowl
raking and bugling, and your shooter's job is to close
that gap and do it swiftly yet quietly, and once
(51:17):
they get close enough they can watch that bowl once.
They every time that bowl puts his head down and
starts raking, those elk a lot of times will close
their eyes. They'll half close them, they'll close them completely,
they'll open them mid raking. But you can get away
with a lot, especially if you're quiet. They're making a
lot of noise themselves. But you want to get it
there as fast as you can and as quiet as
(51:39):
you can. And there's been a lot of bulls killed
by people keeping them talking and the shooter walking in
on them. Now, some areas are so dang brushy that's
just not going to work. It's too brushy. You can't
you can't close the distance like that. It's just it
doesn't work that way. So those those kind of situations,
(52:05):
you have to rely on the calls more. But sometimes
when they they hang up there. As the caller, if
they're not coming in. You could make a lot of
cow calls and aggressive bugles and it's just we'll start
walking away. Some people call it a fade away. Some people,
I don't know, people have those sorts of names for
this technique. But if you if you walk away like
(52:28):
you're you're chasing that cow. You're bugling, you're chasing that cow,
You're making a ton of noise, you're running around as
long as you're in a position where that elk cannot
see you. Man run around like break brush, grab rocks,
throw them, run around, make noise, make it sound like
you're a bull elk chasing a cow around and you
chase and you're chasing it away from your shooter. Right
(52:50):
because as you as you move away, you're creating some
more distance to where that bowl will maybe feel comfortable, like, okay,
that you were right here. Now you've ran away fifty
yards or one hundred yards back. Now that bull that
was hung up feels comfortable. They're like, hmm, I'm going
to go check that. I'm gonna go over there and
smell what's going on. I'm going to go see who
(53:12):
that bowl is. I'm going to see if that cow's
and heat. Because of that scent signature will be left
around there. He'll be able to smell and see what's
going on. And that's when your shooter can take take
advantage of that. Now, there's been other times where that
hasn't worked, but your shooter in you if as long
as you can say, you do the fade away, and
(53:33):
you do go through all that, and that bowl still
hasn't come in, and you move back up to your
original position, which is I like to be able to
see my shooter. I like to build to make eye contact.
At that point, signal your shooter for him to bugle. Right.
We want that bolt to think you've gone from being
(53:54):
sixty eighty yards away to up to where that shooter
is fifty yards ahead of you. If your shooter can
can rip a big bugle, that bull thinks, oh shoot,
he's right here. I'm gonna pop out and take a look.
And that has worked a lot too. I call that
like a sling shot, right. That's worked really well in
(54:15):
the past too. Also, I've had it where a bowl
will come in. Hang up, rake bugle, rake bugle, and
if you have a stalemate for too long, they will leave.
They will lose interest. And once they lose interest and
they leave, they're pretty hard to get interested again. If
they can, they walk away one hundred yards from where
(54:37):
they'd locked up a lot of times, there's no getting
them back. So as soon as that thing leaves, soon
as that thing turns its back and leaves, I'm on it.
I'm charging up. I'm running. So let's say you're your
your your shooter is fifty yards away, the bulls and
other fifty yards away. I'm gonna run right up to
my shooter. I'm gonna scream and run right up to
(54:59):
my shoes, and hopefully my shooter in that same instance
moves up as well. I want him to. Like, as
soon as that bull turns his head and can't see,
I want the shooter to move up in advance, and
I'm gonna advance that way, we kind of almost leap frog, right,
I go to where the shooter was to begin with,
and now the shooters have advanced another twenty five yards
(55:22):
or whatever makes sense. It's almost like a game of
red light green light. When that bowl turns his head
to leave and starts taking a step to leave, it's
green light that means go. When the bull stops and
turns around. It looks that's red light, and they'll catch
you like midstried and you have to like freeze, freeze fray.
(55:44):
And then once they don't see that other bull that's coming,
they'll turn around and go again. And then you just
keep on doing it. This is a tricky game. You
can get picked off really easy. If you're in a
country they have a lot of timber, it's fairly fairly wooded,
a lot of cover. You can get away with a lot.
And now if this is open country, this tactic is
not for you. This is not gonna not gonna work.
(56:07):
So but being aggressive and pushing up on those things,
because once they kind of leave, I feel like if
they come in, you've had your stalemate and they leave,
it's game over with that bowl and you might not
be able to get him to come in at all
tomorrow either. It seems like they haven't they recognize your bugle.
So you want to make your moves while you can.
(56:28):
You gotta be a riverboat gambler. You gotta put all
your all your chips on the table and just roll
the dice, baby, and see what happens, all right, Whitefish
King twenty nine. How do I do a better cow
call with a diaphragm, so cow calls. We talked a
little earlier about making that mosquito noise when we're practicing
(56:49):
our lip ball. So I like to tell people make
a mosquito noise. That's just a really super high pitch.
You just barely let a little bit of air seep out.
You're pushing pretty hard with your tongue. You get that
little mosquito noise like this really light. And then once
(57:11):
you can make that noise, just relax your tongue. Just relax,
maybe drop your jaw slightly, but just relax your tongue.
You know, to get that noise, you're pushing pretty fricking
hard with your tongue. But then when you want to
turn it into a calcol just relax your tongue kind
(57:41):
of speed it up. So just to get the fundamentals down,
you practice that long mosquito noise, then you drop your tongue.
Just relax your tongue, and you want to get that
nasal sound right, You want to be able to make that.
That's where your tongue is just barely even touching that latex.
You can you can can't even hardly feel that latex
(58:02):
at all. At that point, I've just made that noise.
I'm barely even I don't even think my tongue is
touching that. That's using that dome at the top of
the of the diaphragm. It's kind of rattling against that,
so a little bit just the dead air space there.
So do that practice that, and I think where a
(58:25):
lot of people kind of go wrong. I watch, like
do this into your cell phone or do it into
a mirror, record yourself and watch your face. Like I've
worked with people who like their mouth is super tight,
like flexed, all their muscles in their in their lips
and their cheeks are really tight. A calcohol is going
(58:47):
to sound really tight and chirpy or weird when you
when your mouth's all tensed up. But if your mouth
is very loose, relaxed, the only thing that's tight is
your tongue pressure to get that note, and it's very
briefly hit that note and then just relax it and
try to and try to just relax and find that
(59:08):
note to and just let it slide off. I've talked
about this, I think on some of the other podcasts.
Last summer we did a three three part podcast on
how to use the l calls. And another thing you
can you can practice is making a siren noise, which
that's where you start at the low sound of a
siren and then apply pressure with your tongue and climb
(59:29):
the octave of notes, hold it and then drop it
down together and then back and forth, back and forth.
And what you're doing is you're just really building that
that control of that diaphragm to where your tongue really
knows how much pressure at the right times, your internal
core or your diaphragm or your body understands how much
air pressure to put across it. And you just practice
(59:52):
that over and over again, and I promise you that's
going to help make those col calls get really smooth
and a lot sweet sounding instead of being too chirpy.
Relax your mouth. The only thing that should be flexing
is your tongue to get that high note. All right,
here's a good question from Rome Borley. He says, why
(01:00:14):
are dirks reads so much better than Jason's. Well, that's
basically science, you know. I don't know. I guess maybe
I just know how to build help diaphragms better than Jason.
I don't know, just kidding. We battle back and forth
on who's is the best ever, and I'll tell you.
I'll tell him right to his face mine's the best ever,
(01:00:35):
and he'll do the same with his But honestly, for
folks wanting to call, you may or may not like
my diaphragm. You may love it, or you may try
it and be like, oh, I hate that thing. I
can't make that thing go. That's why we offer such
a wide writer. I think we have sixteen different varieties
of amp diaphragms in our lineup, maybe more. Each one
(01:00:56):
has a different latex thickness and stretch to fit all
the different nuances of each caller. So if you like,
if you feel like you have to blow calls really hard,
you'd probably like a Maverick. If you don't blow the
calls as hard, you probably like that pink one, or
maybe maybe even like a black one, like the black amp.
(01:01:17):
Those are pretty pretty nice, softer latex. The gray amp
is a real popular one. You can google cal call
with them, but I always say pick pick up. You
know a handful of calls, you know three minimum three,
better yet five or six and play with them and
try them out. And see what what one works with
(01:01:40):
your style of calling the best. And then once you
kind of find one that you like, it's like, I
kind of like the way this one works, then practice
with it, and as time goes by, you'll you'll try
the other ones that you didn't like as much before,
and you may find you like them better than the
one you kind of like now, because as you learn
to call better, you'll learn to manipulate the calls better
(01:02:01):
and you'll probably find find a better favorite. So well,
I'm gonna wrap it up with that question. There. Appreciate
everybody listening. That was fun. Got to dive down some
deep rabbit holes and and answer some silly questions and
some serious ones too. If you have any other questions,
(01:02:22):
you can email us at Cutting the Distance podcast at
Phelpsgamecalls dot com and ask us some questions, or you
can always hit us up on socials. You know, if
you're gonna if you're gonna ask a question to Jason Phelps,
particularly on the on the Phelps Game Calls UH Instagram channel,
you could you might want to try to ask him
(01:02:45):
questions on his personal one. It's Jason Glenn Phelps. If
you're not following him already. Mine is the bugler and
the felt the Phelps game calls ones. Him and I
both kind of get on there and answer questions and
and help folks on and on the d M. But
it's not consistent. So he's kind of guilty of like
starting a conversation and then and then abandoning it sometimes,
(01:03:08):
So and I do the same thing sometimes, So apologize
for that. We just get a lot of questions and
it's kind of hard to remember which account that we're
answering questions on. So anyhow, appreciate everybody listening, And I
hope you guys summer is going well, and good luck.
We got elk season in just a little over a month,
(01:03:28):
so I can't wait. We'll catch everybody on the flip flop.
Welcome back to another episode of Cutting in the Distance podcast.
I'm Dirk Durham and today I'm running solo on this
episode and it looks like it's time for another penultum whiskey,
Q and A. Now this time the questions came from Instagram.
I put a post on Instagram. Actually it was in
(00:32):
my stories. That's where you can ask or you can
you can put a little icon there it says, ask
me a question, and I give a little video about
asking me some questions. And I told a kind of
a dark secret that a lot of you people may
not know about myself, just to kind of get the
conversation started. But I kind of did a little show
(00:54):
and tell showed everybody that I probably didn't know this,
but I wear glasses some times, yeah, the old readers,
So you know, I made myself vulnerable and showed off
my glasses. And then I and I ask if anybody
has any questions on elk hunting related stuff, and you know,
(01:16):
I got quite a few questions. Some of them were
really serious and some were not so serious. You got
some real wise acres on there, such as the bearded
elk whisper says, who is the handsomest elk collar, you know,
And I feel like that was kind of like a
self serving question, Tony. We all know who the bearded
(01:38):
elk whisper is and how fond you are of your beard.
I mean, I'm not gonna lie, I'm a little envious.
It's a beautiful beard. But anyway, I think I'll just
kind of dive right in into some of these questions here.
First one from Northwest Critters, what is your number one
tip for successfully calling in early season herd bulls? Now?
(02:03):
Early season herd bulls are awesome if you can find them.
Sometimes they're hard to find because maybe it's early enough,
they're not just chasing cows and bugling their heads off
all day long and all night. So sometimes it can
be kind of hard to locate unless you've done your
due diligence and done some scouting, maybe e scouting. But
(02:25):
from what I found in some of the areas where
I hunt, what happens is so all summer long bowls
will hang out together in bachelor groups. Sometimes they'll be
two or three, sometimes there'll be more. Sometimes there'll be
a few little bachelor groups in an area that they
don't always chum together all the time. Sometimes they mix
(02:46):
it up, they get together all of them, and then
they kind of separate in the smaller groups. But once
around that first week of August, somewhere around August fifth
or fifteenth, so somewhere in there. It's always different wherever
you're at. Somewhere in that first part of August, within
the first couple of weeks, the bulls shed their velvet.
(03:06):
And what I've seen is, man, those as soon as
they shed their velvet, they're not buddies anymore. That's they
testosterones kicking out. But they're shedding their velvet and they
move away from each other. They're no longer there they're
bosom buddies, you know, good old pals and grazing around
and chumming around with each other. They're getting kind of alley.
(03:26):
So they separate, and what they do is they go
they go stage in a place somewhere pretty close to
where the cows are at, and they kind of wait.
And I kind of I've talked about this a little
bit on some other podcasts lately. I kinda I kind
of compare it to the movie Rocky when he went
to Siberia to train to fight Ivandrego. I think it's
(03:50):
the guy's named the Russian Fella that he bought over there. Anyway,
kind of went out in solitude and started training like crazy.
You know, he's doing chin ups and and push ups
the cold and carrying around big beams and running through
the snow and stuff. It's not quite that dramatic, but
those bulls kind of split up from each other. They
find a little ridge and they hang out on that
ridge and they spend some time there getting worked up
(04:13):
for the rut. And you'll find these places later in September.
You'll find these kind of little places I call them
like a bolt's bedroom or a little Heidi hole. They
like to hang out for a week or so before
they go to the cows. And what they do is
they and you'll see them. You'll find a little bedding
area and a lot of the trees on this little ridge.
(04:35):
It's usually a ridge, kind of like a finger ridge
from off of a main ridge, and you'll find where
they've rubbed a lot of the trees around the bedding
area there. And come mid September to late September, those
elk are nowhere to be found, and you can look
at the sap the tree sap and kind of date
it back. If you've looked at elk rubs for a
(04:57):
long time and analyzed them. It's kind of a it
takes a little while, you know, if you're a new hunter.
But the basics of it is, when a rub is
super fresh, smoking hot fresh, there won't really be any
sap running out of the wood at all. You know,
they've they've stripped the bark with their antlers or their horns.
(05:17):
Some people get mad when you call them horns, but
I'll call them horns just because you know, I'm a redneck. Anyhow,
when they first strip that that bark from the tree,
there won't be any sap just running out of it.
Typically it's just real smooth. The bark is super like
(05:38):
like flexible, pliable, soft, movable, not the least bit crispy.
You give it a week. After a week, the tiniest
little bit of sap will be starting to come out,
and sometimes not even within a week. You know, the
sap won't start running and then but it'll look it
looks super smoking hot fresh. But then when you touch
(05:58):
that that bark that was pliable when it was really fresh,
now it is stiff. Now it's more like not quite
like a potato chip, but pretty stiff, pretty crunchy. And
as week by week it goes by, as it dries out,
(06:19):
then you'll start getting little beads of sap coming out
of the out of the wood. And then also the
bark will look crisp beer and crisp beer as time
goes by. So by the time the end of September,
a lot of those will have quite a bit of
sap beads on the wood and the bark will be really,
really crispy. Now, the needles typically won't be red at
(06:43):
this time, and some rubs the needles don't even turn
red even the next season. You know, if they didn't,
if they didn't hurt the tree enough, if they didn't
rub it enough to kill the tree, then sometimes those
trees live on. So reading rubs is really good, is
really good to establish these kind of little little areas.
(07:06):
So keep your eyes out for these kind of places
on the early season. So early season, if you're seeing
these little little bedding areas with these smoking, hot fresh rubs,
that's one of those little bull bedrooms or a little
heidi hole. And to call those bulls, I don't really
cal call a lot. Now I will cow call a
little bit, because, like I've always said, calling elk to
(07:28):
me is an experiment. I'm just trying to find out
what that bull is interested in hearing on that particular day.
So I will introduce a few cow calls. I'll do
some light col calling when I'm trying to locate a bowl.
But if I'm not hearing anything an he replies to that,
then I'll go to the bugles. And it seems to
(07:48):
me in that early time of year, which is kind
of contradictory to what a lot of people will say.
A lot of folks will say, Oh it's so early,
just go cow calls. The bulls really aren't bugling that much. Well,
I whenever I've had luck, it seems like they're actually
answering my bugle's better. But I'm not bugling from half
(08:08):
a mile away on a on a ridge top somewhere.
I'm actually down in there mixing it up with them.
So you know, you have to kind of get in there,
use some boot leather and traverse these places. And when
you start getting into these little bull bedroom areas and
you get it within a few hundred yards with a
couple of hundred yards and you bugle a lot of
times that bull is gonna answer, and he may not
(08:29):
sound aggressive, he may just sound you'll just give you
at a moony old bugle, very unimpressive. You'll think it's
it's a spike or a raghorn or something. But a
lot of times, you know, a lot of big bulls
will bugle like that. It's just like people. You know,
(08:51):
the people have they can they can adjust their voice.
They can be a soft talker or they can be
a screamer, right depending on their mood. So even if
you hear one of those mony bugles, that's a great thing,
especially early seasons, like okay, and you'll notice where they're at.
You'll locate him like, okay, he's around that ridge. What
you want to do is you want to get you
want to get the wind right. Make sure you keep
(09:12):
your wind right. You want to approach the ridge, and
I like to get as close as humanly possible without
getting picked off. That means I want to be one
hundred yards or less from where I think that bowl was. Now,
I don't call my way to him. Once I've kind
of located him, I get him to moan or bugle
two or three times, I'm like, Okay, I'm pretty sure
(09:32):
he's right there. Then I clam up, might be quiet,
put the calls away, and I just head over there.
And whenever I'm making that final approach and I get
a couple hundred yards away from that spot, I start
slowing down, being a lot quieter, being a lot more deliberate,
because I don't want to I don't want to be
heading towards him and then be moving too quick and
(09:55):
too loud and then bump him. Right once you break
that one hundred and fifty yard barrier, I'm really really
starting to get a lot quieter because I'm my goal
is to get one hundred yards or less from him.
And you know, as much as we love to think
we know where you hear an Elk from, or let's say,
(10:15):
maybe you've even seen him go go to bed in
a patch of timber or something and you've made a
made a mark on your on X. Once you get
over there, it doesn't mean they're still in that same
exact place. Of course, Elk can move, so you want
to you want to be real careful as you approach.
So I got to get that one hundred yards away,
and I want to try to be on that same
topographical line that I heard that gowal from. So I
(10:38):
don't want to be right above him. I don't want
to be right below him. No matter what the the
thermals are doing. If I, if I have the opportunity
to like really get strategic and tactical with this, I'm
going to get on that same same topographical line that
I think he's on. So I'm on the I'm basically
sidehill from him. That way, it's easy for him to
(10:59):
come to me. He just has to walk side hill
number one, number two. Now I have a little more
of advantage on those thermals. Let's say the wind's been
blown super good uphill or downhill consistently for you know,
thirty minutes to an hour, and you're like, oh, these
thermals are really great, man. I don't know how many
times over the years I've I've I've thought I had
(11:21):
the thermals nailed, and then out of the blues it
it changes. Maybe a big cloud goes over and covers
the sun for a minute and makes the ground get cool,
and then the thermal switch. So get on that side hill,
because then if that way, if they if they the
winds or the thermals changed, and go up or downhill.
You'll still be good. You'll still be safe. Once I
(11:43):
get there. Then I start opening up now, depending on
the bugle, depending on the area. If there's been a
lot of pressure, I may not open up with a bugle.
I may open up with a big stick on a
tree breaking. And I'm just gonna rake and rake and rake,
give it, you know, two to five minutes, and then
(12:04):
let it set, and then let it set for five
minutes and just kind of listen and they see what
you hear. Sometimes I'll get a bull out of their bed.
They'll just come want to take a look. If I
don't get any response, then I'll start bugling, and then
I'll start out back with that same type of bugle
that I heard earlier, that same mony bugle. I own
a match's intensity, So I'll give him a moany bugle.
(12:27):
And when he replies, and it may take he may
take a minute or three, you know, or longer to reply,
depending Then whenever I call again, I'm gonna wait that
same amount of time. So if it took him three
minutes to reply to me, I'm going to wait three
minutes again to reply to him and then kind of
(12:47):
slowly build this conversation. And also at this point, I'll
kind of know if I'm in his wheelhouse, Oh he's
further away than I thought, or holy smokes, I almost
stepped on this thing. He's like fifty yards away. I
can almost see him. That'll happen too. So you just
want to kind of use kid gloves here and be
(13:08):
real careful and not bump him out of there, and
then kind of let the let the conversation build slowly.
But what I found is once you kind of get
to talk into him a little bit, that mony bugle
eventually will change into just a full, full blown, full
full note bugle. And that's what I'm really looking for,
(13:29):
because whenever I hear him go from mony bugle to
a full bugle, I know I've got him because he's
starting to say, hey man, get out of here, because
he's defensive of his space. Right. This is his little
spot he's carved out, This is his little training area.
This is whatever whatever is going through a bull elk's mind.
This is his territory, and he don't want you on
his little ridge. So and also I've found they don't
(13:53):
they don't have that that bugle a lot in that
early season. It sounds like they're losing her mind. Just
you know that you hear middle of September just sounds
like a Jurassic Park scream or something. A lot of
times they just bugle that full bugle over and over
and then you hear sticks popping, and here it comes.
(14:14):
He's not necessarily mad, but he's more like curious and defensive,
like he's gonna come over and chase you out of there, like, hey, man,
get out of here. So that's how I that's how
I kind of play those early season bowls. And you know,
you may have to cover a lot of country, and
I'm not saying you won't hear them bugle from a
ridgetop somewhere. It's definitely. Definitely I've heard a lot of
bulls bugle from the ridgetops down off into some hell
(14:36):
hole or vice versa, from the bottom up into the
top somewhere. But it's a matter of just covering country
and making sure you you know, peel back every part
of that terrain to make sure that you can hear
every little nook and cranny of the landscape. All right,
My buddy Jeff Helm helm Dot. Yeah, how many elk
(14:59):
tags are you to fill this year? Well? For sure one,
you know I didn't I didn't draw anything. You probably
heard Jason and I talk earlier about elk tags. I
didn't draw anything. But I may have an opportunity to
pick up a second elk tag here in Idaho, depending
if there's any leftovers after the non residents return all
their tags back. So I may have an opportunity there.
(15:22):
I'm hoping. I'm hoping I'm gonna be able to archery
hunt with my son. I will be able to archery
hunt with my son, for sure. I'm not sure if
I'm going to hold a tag though I may just
it may be all about him. But if I know,
hunting with my son, there's been a lot of times
where I've left my bow in the truck and called
(15:44):
bulls in and they make him past him, and I
should have had my boat because I could have killed him.
But that was like fourteen fifteen, sixteen year old Austin
rather than shoot. He's going to be twenty seven. I
think this fall twenty eight. Man. Time flies when you're
having fun. But then if I can pick up a
second one, I'm gonna get one for rifle season. I'm
(16:05):
a terrible rifle hunter, but I love you know, I
love bow hunting. I love I love all kinds of hunting.
I'm an opportunist, right If I can get a tag
and spend more time in the woods, so be it.
I'm not going to pack my bow around during rifle season, though,
I'm not gonna take a knife to a gun fight.
I'm I'm I maybe dumb, but I'm not stupid, all right,
(16:28):
Chasin Roosevelt's He says, when are you gonna come hunt
these friggin' rosies one of these days. I've never hunted
Roosevelt elk, Someday I would. I'd like to have had
a couple buddies invite me over over the years, and
you know, scheduling conflicts or whatever, it just hasn't penciled out.
But someday I'll make it over there. I feel like
(16:50):
I'll enjoy it. I've spent a little bit of time
on the coast there in the woods, and it's it's
everything they promise you about what those ilk woods look
like and more. It's thick, it's nasty, it's steep a
lot like North Idaho, except the coastal stuff. Seems to me,
you have a lot more poky crap. You know, you
(17:11):
got your Devil's club and BlackBerry brush and all sorts
of stuff that want to poke you or kill you.
So but someday I'm gonna I'm gonna make it out there.
Let's see, all right, Idaho l Hunter says, what's on
the point the end of your arrows for elk this year?
So last year, I'm gonna I'm gonna un the same
(17:32):
thing I ran last year, which is I've got some
expandable broadheads. Yeah, I went to the went to the
dark side. I feel like expandables have really came a
long ways from what they were thirty years ago or
twenty years ago. You know, I feel like there's there's
(17:53):
a there's a lot of really valid points of not
having good penepratration if you an elk in the shoulder
bone or the shoulder blade or that knuckle or any
of that. Honestly, a lot of your three bread three
blade broadheads are really going to struggle on them kind
of places too. I've shot a lot of elk myself.
(18:15):
I've hit some in the shoulder with a three blade,
and you know, I didn't. I didn't penetrate. It just
snapped off at the insert. I did shoot two yearless
see in twenty twenty two, I shot two bowls with
iron wheels. They both penetrated. One of them penetrated, both scapulous.
(18:35):
It was a complete pass through. Blood trail wasn't great.
But I hit high. So if you picture an elk
and you draw a horizontal line down the downy's body,
you want to hit like dead center. You want to
hit below that horizontal line. And I didn't. I hit
above it, so most of the blood he bled internally,
he bled enough on the outside to track both of them. Did.
(18:58):
I kind of hit both of them a little high,
And I think I'm not sure if it was just Oh,
I'm definitely sure it was probably my shooting ability, but
maybe not. You know, if you've kind of slowed down.
That's if you slow down the shot on a on
a video, which that is one cool thing about filming
(19:18):
your hunts is if you slow down that video, then
a lot of times you can see those drop. Those
elk will drop you know, six eight inches or more,
depending on you know, how alert they are at the shot,
how how edgy they are, and if they see you,
or or how noisy your bow is. But there's a
lot to take in there. So I yeah, I hit
(19:40):
both those bulls high. Wasn't great blood trails, but I
wouldn't say that was the broadhead's fault. That was my
shot placement more than anything. I think if I would
have hit below the center line, I'd have had a
better blood trail. But anyway, be that as't that was
a tangent. I'm gonna shoot the evolution outdoors. I think
it's called a hide. It's a stainless steel Ferrell one
(20:03):
hundred and twenty five grain broadhead to two expandable blades
and then it's got kind of a cut on contact
chisel tip looking tip on it. That's pretty thick, heavy duty.
It's like thicker than most two blade broadheads are. It's
very heavy duty, very sharp, very sturdy, and I've shot
(20:27):
I've shot a couple of white tails with that head
and it's it's done good. So anyway, of course, yeah,
I know, I know you can't compare an elk to
a to a white tail, absolutely one percent, right, But
I do have a lot of friends and know some
people they're excellent hunters that kill a lot of elk,
(20:47):
kill a lot of big elk, and have had some
marginal shots over the years, you know, and hit them
with those expandables in the Evolution Outdoors in fact, and I'm,
by the way, ps I'm not sponsored, but you know,
the results were impressive. You know, they had a good
blood trail, they had a short blood trail, and the
(21:09):
bulls died easily quickly. So you know, what, what the heck,
I'm I'm willing to give it a shot. So last
year I tried them and I didn't even get my
bowl or my bow drawn back at all. During September.
If you guys watched the film that just dropped on
the Phelps game Calls channel, UH, it's It's my idaho
(21:30):
el kant last year, it's Uncallable. You Now, you might
remember the podcast I did with Bradley Dammerman and Cody
Wilson last fall from from the Field. We talked about
what we were doing and seeing in the woods, and
then you can basically follow up with that on YouTube
and see that that new film that dropped a week
(21:50):
or so ago, Uncallable was the was the title, uh,
A good Friend and Guide of of Bradley's guide Zelk, North, Idaho,
said he's hunted this particular area and the elk are
not really receptive to calls, you know, So we thought,
you know what, we're gonna go down test that theory out.
(22:11):
We're gonna see if that's really true or not. And yeah,
watch the film and see how it turns out. I mean,
there's some good and bad. But anyhow, I didn't get
to I didn't get to shoot an elk with one
of those last year. So this year I'm gonna try
it again and see if I can have some success
and get an arrow in elk. So I'm looking forward
(22:32):
to it now. I told you guys in the beginning
that we had some wise acres and my buddy Joel Turner,
you know, the the bow Whisper or whatever he calls
himself these days, the man with the plan, the guy
(22:57):
who who will teach you how to shoot in and
get over your target panic, he says, He asked, He's like,
do you still talk in your sleep? Oh man? So
Joel and I shared a room at an Airbnb here
a few years ago, at Elk shaped camp, and he says,
I got up. He said, I talked in my sleep
all night and he said I got up. He heard
(23:19):
me wrestle around, and he said that he looked up
and I was standing there in my underwear, just kind
of standing up in the room, just kind of facing
the wall and just like looking up, and he's like,
what's up, And he had said I didn't say nothing,
and then I just kind of laid back down and
then I did a bunch of mumbling in my sleep.
So so the question is do I still do that?
(23:39):
And I don't know. We'll have to ask missus Durham sometime.
I'm a little bit old now. I kind of talked
about my reader glasses. Well, you know, full disclosure, I
sleep with one of them stupid seapap machines because I snore,
and I think that keeps me from mumbling in my
sleep a lot, so she can't hear it. I mumble
into that stupid math as So, so I don't think
(24:02):
I probably talked in my sleep anymore, even though I
might do it, but nobody can hear it. Okay, So
I DJ buff. He says, you and Jason go into
a cold Play concert in the future. Too soon. That's
too soon. I know that's been popular on the on
the social media airwaves. But it's hilarious, all right, Scott Russo,
(24:27):
he has a question. He says he's got three names here, Gabriel,
Phelps Smith, So John Gabriel, Jason Phelps, and Charlie Smith.
One packer, one caller, one stays at home. Who's who? Okay,
this is gonna be great, So let's let's factor this out.
(24:49):
So John Gabriel, if you know John, Uh, awesome dude,
really great el Hunnor. He does all of our package
design work at at Phelps four Oliver Packaging. He's been
with us from day one. He's done a ton of
our graphic arts. Any any of the cool crap that
(25:11):
you see that's got any of our thumbnails for YouTube
or anything you see that's got some artistic stuff. Except
for our emails these days, John has had his hands
on it. And then Jason Phelps. We all know who
that guy is. He's like an ogre, right, He's like
the Juggernaut. He's six foot four and soper strong. He's
like a one man wonder. I've had him pack ELK
(25:34):
meat before and he's yeah, he's legit. And then Charlie Smith. Okay, well,
Charlie he's a really great elk hunter two, but he's
not a great elk killer. He's really good at chasing
these things around. I hope he's listening to this, and
Charlie is he was He was born on Saint Patrick's Day.
He's a red haired ginger and he's about five foot
(25:55):
six and a half and I think John's five foot
six or vice ver. So those two always argue and
bicker amongst each other to see who's the tallest, but
they're both they're both short fellas at five foot six ish.
I don't know, like I'm definitely going to have Jason
Phelps be a packer. Charlie Smith. He's a heck of
(26:18):
a caller too. But I will say John he has
called in and elk for me. Him and him and
Jason tag team to bowl in New Mexico for me
here in twenty twenty, So I would have to say
John he gets to call and stay home Charlie, because
Charlie sometimes you know, he's a little He's a surly
(26:41):
little leprechaun, right, So if I if I say he
has to stay home, He's definitely going to be mad
about it. So I'm definitely going to kick that hornet's
nest and make him stay home. So that's how that's
going to play out. Scott, Any good tags this year?
D Jones pass out is the question? Ask her? Any
(27:06):
good tags this year? Yeah? Like I said, I've got
I've got an Idaho elk tag. Have a Kansas Archery
white tail tag again. Man, Me and Jason must be
living right or something, because we've drawn This will be
like the fourth year we've drawn Kansas whitetail Archery tag
and that's just unheard of, you know. I fully expect
(27:30):
next year to not draw one. So that that's those tags.
And then Jason Phelps and I, I think we talked
about it before. We're going to the Yukon to hunt moose,
him and I both with Caesar Lake Outfitters up there.
We're gonna fly in, We're gonna drive all the way
up to the Yukon to Caesar Lake's base camp Dustin Roe,
(27:51):
he's the owner operator, and then we're gonna jump in
a plane and fly into some remote lake and hunt
moose for around twenty days or so. So it's going
to be it's going to be an adventure. I told Jason,
I said, Okay, here's the deal. You have to use
a bow and I'll use a rifle. And if a
bull comes in and it's too brushing you can't get
(28:11):
a shot, and it's a giant, then I'll shoot it
with the rifle just to make sure it don't get away,
or if it's just really big anyway, and maybe I'll
just get to shoot it anyhow. And he didn't like
that idea. I don't know why. He's kind of a
kind of a poopy pants I guess, all right, So
next question, Ultimate Ultimate Pursuit, Best calls not to make?
(28:35):
And when? And when how do I get on Team Phelps?
He wants to be on Team Phelps, So Ultimate Pursuit.
The best calls not to make? I think the best
calls not to make are just really crappy sound in
elk calls. Now, you don't have to sound like a
(28:58):
world champion elk collar by any means, but you have
to kind of sound like an elk. Now elk kind
of sound crappy. Sometimes they make some real god awful bugles,
but they still sound like an elk for the most part.
Right here, a couple of years ago, dusting It, Cameraman
Dusty and I were in in Idaho elk hunting and
it was the last twenty to thirty minutes of dark.
(29:21):
We had this bull going and man, we were just
closing in. We had him, We had him coming. He
was brush popping and he was almost on us and
behind us a ways. I heard a weird noise and
it sounded like somebody was abusing a puppy, just like
this real whiny, weird, weird noise. And I think they
(29:41):
were attempting to make a bugle maybe, or they were
trying to make a cow sound with like a like
a pack bugle or something. It was just it didn't
sound like an elk whatsoever. It's like a weird, little
whiny I don't know if they were trying to do
like some people will call it a bull squeal, like
an immature bull squeal. A lot of I don't know,
(30:02):
spikes just kind of do a weird, mony, weirdo, kind
of a pre puberty bugle a lot of times. I'm
not so, I'm not really sure what he was trying
to make the sound, but I heard it and I'm like, oh,
what was that? Is that a guy? And then ten
minutes later I heard it and they're like right behind us,
(30:23):
like fifty yards behind us in the brush, and they're
doing it a lot. This guy is doing it a lot.
And the elk was coming in like I had tension
on the string. I thought, okay, I'm gonna see this
bowl any second. And that guy started in with his
puppy puppy noise, and bull just shut up and left.
(30:43):
So those are the kind of calls you don't want
to make if you can't, and people will say, you know,
don't ever call the elk. Well, if you sound like that,
absolutely do not call the elk. Do yourself and everyone
else in the woods a favor by not calling. Please,
don't just pick up a tube Walmart or whatever, call
(31:04):
at Walmart on the way to the woods and start
tooting on it and making some weird noises and think
that's going to work. Is not. You know, do your
due diligence, you know. Start now here we are, it's July.
We have plenty of time to pick up some calls
and start practicing. And you may not sound perfect. That's okay,
it's that's not what it's about. But you have to
(31:25):
sound somewhat like an elk and and put some realism,
into your into your into your calling scenario. Some calls
that you shouldn't make. Maybe they are a pretty decent
sounding call, but it's the same call over and over again.
There's this one particular call in tube. A lot of
people know if you hear the if you hear it,
(31:48):
you'll be like, oh, yep, that's one of them there calls.
It's like the same three note. It's the same three
note bugle over and over and over again. Which when
those came out, I think they, you know, worked pretty good.
But now, elk, if it's the same old noise over
and over again, they will get conditioned to it. So
(32:09):
you have to sound different now, not to say those bugles.
You can't make other noises. I mean you can if
that's all you got, or that's the one you want
to use, I'm not going to pick on you for that,
but man, learn how to make some other sounds with it.
Learn how to make some diverse noises. It's not the
same old three note bugle over and over again. Learn
(32:30):
how to get some low notes, learn how to get
some mid notes, learn how to get those high notes.
Learn how to you know, chuckle and grunt with it,
and It just all takes a little bit of time,
and it's five minutes a day, ten minutes a day,
pick up your calls, five ten minutes a day on
the way to work whatever, and practice with them, and
by September you'll have the confidence to know that when
(32:51):
you put it in your mouth, there's gonna be a
particular sound that you want to make that it's going
to come out, instead of buying one on the way
to Elk camp and being like, oh, I don't know
what this is gonna sound like. And you get out
in the woods and you blow it a couple of
times and you're like, oh, well, I'm just gonna put
that away, but you're probably gonna chase the elk away.
(33:13):
All right, here's a question from Dirty Bird Grimes. What's
the best drink to what your whistle before a bugle? Well,
you would like to say the Pendleton whiskey, but that's
not how we run, right, No, that's for after the hunt.
But here's here's my drink of choice for elk season.
(33:33):
I'm a coffee guy, right, I love coffee. But here's
the deal. I'm not. I'm kind of I'm kind of
a slow riser in the morning. I'm not in a
morning person, so I'm I don't take the time to
get up, make coffee, sip my coffee and enjoy it.
In the morning, I just get up and kind of
get around and and and head. I want to sleep
(33:54):
as long as I can, right, I'm just gonna be honest.
I want to be sleeping. I want to sleep as
long as I can. So what I do is I
take a Nalgene bottle thirty two ounces of liquid, and
I take one scoop or one packet of wilderness athlete.
I think they call it energy and focus, and then
I take another packet of hydrate and recover from wilderness athlete.
(34:18):
I put that in there. And then sometime and some
people call that a superman. Sometimes I'll even take another
scoop of electrolyte. Let's see, it's been really hot and dry,
and man, I've been sweating my brains out. I just
need that extra electrolytes in me. I'll take that a
scoop of electrolytes and pour in there, shake it up,
and I'll drink that. But I'm gonna drink that thing
(34:38):
in the first fifteen twenty minutes of my day. I
want to prime the system, right, We've got to prime
the pump. I gotta get some more liquid back into
me because the day before I probably drink a lot
of water, but probably not enough. It seems like we
always kind of run on the edge of dehydration when
we're el cunning. So I'll prime the pump with that.
That'll get things going, get me p in, get get
(35:02):
me hydrated right off the bat, and then that way
I can just maintain with my water bladder as I hunt.
So I don't know. I don't think that's probably the
answer old dirty bird Drives was looking for. But you
know what, dang it, they don't have to be all
funny your silly, silly question question answers here All right,
(35:25):
next question, And I'm not really sure how you say it,
d bill l A seven dB I l l A
wide seven. Basically, the question says, how do you make
your chuckle sound deeper and not like a sequence of barks? Well,
(35:48):
chuckle or a grunt is a lot like a bark,
but I think it's a lot in the base of it,
and it's kind of like the execution like it. To me,
a bark is like like an exaggerated chuckle or grunt.
Like when I'm barking, I'm putting all my air across
(36:08):
the diaphragm I can, and as much base o that
base like oh, that guttural like somebody punching me in
the gut. Oh that I'm trying to put as much
of that into that bark as I can. Compared to
like a chuckle or a grunt. It's a lot less
(36:29):
of that effort or a lot less of that pressure
or intensity. I'm not putting nearly as much air across
the reed, across the latex of the diaphragm. I'm not
putting as much base into it. But I am doing
quite a bit of base. But I think a lot
of people where they go wrong on their chuckles. Number
one is the cadence. They don't breathe in, breathe out,
breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out as they
(36:49):
make the calls. They do that, or they don't put
enough voice inflecture. They're not doing that, And it's it's
kind of hard, as I find out as I work
with a lot of folks teaching them how to call
and stuff. You know, it's it's not super intuitive to
(37:10):
make that that that sound with the diaphragm and then
combine it with that that guttural base. So if we
slow it way down, it's gonna sound kind of like this.
(37:30):
So we're just gonna hit that high note on your
diaphragm and then you're gonna drop your jaw and go, oh,
so speed it up. But I'm using a lot of
my voice. So if you're a professional beatboxer, you would
probably do really good chuckling and grunning. But if you're not,
(37:57):
you're gonna have to practice with it. And I've found
that working with some people that if you skip the
diaphragm part and just start learning to do that base
part or that guttural into the tube. So put your
mouth to the tube and just do that instead of
having the diaphragm, and your wife or significant other is
(38:19):
going to look at you like you're crazy, what are
you doing? But I promise you it's going to help.
And it's a lot of it is just learning how
to do that base thing. So you may just have
to start listening to a lot of hip hop music
as well, you know, get the beat down. But if
you if you do it in the tube without the diaphragm.
(38:39):
Then you start you start picking that up, and then
then put your diaphragm back in and I kind of
just break ol calling. I break it all down like
whenever I'm trying to get better at it, and these
are the kind of things I had to do at
the beginning. So break it down and then introduce your
your diaphragm reading there and you start getting that that
(38:59):
read sound, and then it's going to sound more like
a deep guttural chuckle or grunt. All right, the outdoors
in Colorado. Maybe it kind of a screenshot of these
things that kind of cut everybody's things off. And I
think this is like a continuation he had. He commented
(39:22):
two questions. It's just a continuation. So I'm going to
try not to screw this up. When you have a
bowl responding to cow calls, do you continue col calling
to close the distance, or do you introduce challenge, bugles, chuckling,
et cetera to get him in. Man, It's just it's
(39:42):
every situation is different, every bowl is different. To say
like this is the one way to do it on
every single out is just it don't work that way.
But what I will say if I have a bowl
answering to a particular kind of call. If he's answered really,
really well to cow calls, I'm just going to keep
(40:04):
giving him cow calls now because I've tried this before. Like,
all right, man, I've got him wound up. I've got
him wound up type on this cow call, you know,
and he came, he only came so far, you know,
help my nature. The bowl bugles bugles bugles at a
cow because he wants the cow to come to him, right.
(40:26):
He wants him to come join his herd of other cows.
If he has cows, a lot of times he'll go
part way, but he may not go the whole way. Now,
I will say, yeah, definitely been a lot of bulls
just cow called in. I've cow called in a few
and killed him as well. But a lot of times
those bulls will come only so far part way. Now,
(40:49):
if you have a shooter with you, if you guys
can separate and you hear that bowl and he seems
to be gaining ground on it, send your shooter out
front there and maybe have him intercept. But it's a
very pig it's a very tricky game because he may
get caught sneaking in on that bowl. You know, I
have to have your head on a swivel if you're
gonna sneak in on a bowl like that, if they're
heading your way already. But but what I've done is
(41:14):
is I've tried that, Like the bull will come only
so far. They'll hang up, and I'm like, then they'll
just stand there and I'll cow call and I'll bugle
and bugle and like, come over here. He wants me
to come his way. And I thought, well, okay, I'm
gonna make him think there's another bull here and he
needs to come over here and get this cow. So
I've started bugling. I've started, you know, challenge bugle and
(41:37):
started screaming, start lip ball, start chuckle. I mean, you
name you, name it. I've discrewed up. I've done it.
And and a lot of times they'll turn around and
they're like, yeah, no, I'm not interested. They'll turn around
and go back to their cows. Sometimes they do come.
(41:57):
But a lot of times if you start them out
on cow calls and they're just eating those up, if
you start bugling, in my experience, a lot of times
that's that could foul things up. Not every time, but
a lot of times. All right, Silent Assassin sixty nine,
(42:25):
What is the easiest way to learn the lip ball?
I've been trying and can't get it, and it's peeing
me off. Man, that is like a struggle for a
lot of folks. I think that's like number one or
(42:46):
number two struggle. Like people really struggle with both chuckles
and grunts, and they also struggle with lipball. I struggled
with the lipball forever. My friends they could do it,
and I'm just like, man, how do you do that?
It could just flawlessly, you know, you know this is
twenty years ago. Whatever, you can just flawy, you know,
(43:06):
do this lip ball. I'm like, man, how are you
doing that? So one one winner. As I'm sitting there
watching will Primos hunt on TV, I'm just like, you
know what, I'm gonna learn this. I'm gonna learn how
to lip ball. So I sat there and watched hunting
videos and buzzed my lips on my tube instead of
and I didn't use my diaphragm whatsoever. I Am just
(43:29):
getting my lips to figure out how they like to
buzz to get a good buzz on the on the tube.
Because I found when I try to transition and try
to bugle and then lipball, it's like my lips didn't
know what to do. They didn't know what to do,
they didn't know how to do it, they didn't know
where to be. And everybody I knew lipballed on the
(43:50):
front part of their lips, right right dead sinner, right
below their nose. But what I found is after I
started playing with this this tube, buzzing my lips on
it for about a month, I found that if I
buzzed on my right side of my lips, it worked great,
but I did on the front. I mean, I can
do it on the front, but it's not great. They're
(44:12):
not as pliable or something. I think. You know, everybody's
got a their different shaped lips, different lips. Maybe you
need to get some botox injections into your lips, some
filler as the girls call it. Maybe you need to
get your lips filled up. And if you have thin
lips and get them babies really a pumpin'. But I
don't I don't know, but everybody's lips are so different.
(44:34):
So it worked for me to put in the corner
of my mouth. Maybe it's your left side. Maybe it's
your right side, maybe it is dead center, but experiment
with that. But just get your lips cut, comfortable on
buzzing them on your tube and it's you know, it's
gonna sound like this. You'll just sit there doing it
(44:57):
over and over and over again. It's boring and your
significant other's going to look at like you like your nuts.
You can do it on the on the way to work.
Be careful. I did have somebody tell me they got
pulled over by a cop one. Somebody turned them in
for drinking and driving. They thought somebody's seen them with
a tube up to their mouth doing doing this stuff,
and they thought it was a bottle of wine. If
(45:20):
you believe it or not. So yeah, if you are
drinking and driving and practicing your your your calls, it's
probably not a good idea. Well it's not a good
idea at all to drink and drive, but it's an
extra bad idea if you're going to be doing that stuff.
So but all seriousness, buzz your lips and then once
you get really comfortable, like man, every time I can
(45:41):
put it up there, Man, I got a good lip
buzz or a lip ball. That's basically what a lipball
is now we can we can use our diaphragm to
make that same noise. And the easiest way I've found
to do it is like to start out with just
making that high pitch mosquito noise, that super high pitch
(46:02):
mosquito noise. And then so you do that coupled with
that buzz of your lips and you have a lipball.
So practice that over and over and over again. And
if you're doing it at home and you're not wanting
to disturb the whole house, you can't put your your
(46:23):
hand over the bottom of your tube and kind of
muffle it a little bit, let a little bit of
air come out. But that'll that'll allow you to like
practice at home without making everybody in the house matter
or ticking off the neighbor dogs. But do that over
and over again, that mosquito noise with that buzz on
your lips, and once you get like super confident, like, Okay,
every time I do that, I put it up there.
(46:44):
I can make that mosquito noise. I can make that buzz. Now,
I can, I can. I'm just I know what to do.
Every time it's it comes out right, Then you can
start turning that into a like a bugle, so almost
like a location bugle. So you start out with a
crystal clear, high pitched mosquito type pitched bugle note, get
(47:07):
it going clean, buzz your lips and then drop off
this quick buzzing and then drop your jaw a little
bit and go ooh. So that's the easiest way to
do it. Now the advanced way to do it is
(47:28):
to do a full bugle. So you start out with
a normal full bugle and when you hit that high note,
then you start buzzing your lips. And that's super complicated.
There's a lot going on there. But if you build
those other fundamentals first, I think you'll definitely be able
to do a full bugle with a lip ball. This
sounds something like this, but practice makes perfect and it's
(47:55):
you know, five ten minutes a day will help if
you're just if you're just trying to learn how to
buzz your lips, same thing like if you're If you
do this, I promise you if you do this for
a week, two weeks ever for straight buzzing your lips,
then you start the mosquito thing. By September, you'll get this.
If you start now, So Benjamin horshe has a list,
(48:19):
He's got like a bunch of these comments questions, but
he kind of you have so many words to put
in there, so it's kind of a it keeps on going.
So he just kept on asking, continuing his question. But
I'm gonna try not to screw this up because it's
a little hard to track from each each little response here.
(48:39):
So it says, what is the easiest way to learn
the lip? Wait, that's sorry, bron guy. Uh, mid day,
same level. I get a bull fired up within one
hundred and fifty yards and he won't commit. Why happens
to me all the time? I bugle, I rake, my
I rake, my shooter is is fifty yards in front
(49:01):
of me. I'm aware of the thermals and the whole
encounter is September fifteenth is when I start my season.
They can be screaming, pissed off and still not come in,
and I continue pressuring and they continue to move off.
They aren't going to bed because it's midday. They don't
(49:24):
smell me or hear me. What the heck is going on.
I've arrowed two bulls in my five years of el
cutting career. Those bulls read the script. The thirty plus
other bulls move away, like I move away. I'd like
some advice thanks. So basically, he's getting bulls to come
(49:48):
in and they're hanging up, and they hang up for
a while and then they just move off and they
won't come to him. It's basically kind of what I'm
I'm I'm getting from this questionnaire. Bulls hang up on bulls, right.
The bulls don't just bugle and then walk over there
(50:10):
and just walk right up and fight. They'll sit there
and they'll bugle at each other and they'll rake. If
you can watch elk on a hillside, you'll notice there'll
be a herd bull or whatever, and you'll have other
bulls around, and they'll bugle back and forth and they'll rake.
The herd buller rake, the satellite bulls a rake, or
(50:32):
maybe there's an intruder, maybe there's another mature bull coming
to fight that that herd bull. But they'll sit there
and rake, and then they'll go so far and then
they hang up on each other. They'll bugle and rake
and bugle, and it's almost like somebody at that point,
somebody has to give, right, and your shooter is fifty
(50:54):
yards ahead of you, and the bulls pretty close. If
you're if you have bulls raking and you have a shooter.
As the caller, your job is to keep that bowl
raking and bugling, and your shooter's job is to close
that gap and do it swiftly yet quietly, and once
(51:17):
they get close enough they can watch that bowl once.
They every time that bowl puts his head down and
starts raking, those elk a lot of times will close
their eyes. They'll half close them, they'll close them completely,
they'll open them mid raking. But you can get away
with a lot, especially if you're quiet. They're making a
lot of noise themselves. But you want to get it
there as fast as you can and as quiet as
(51:39):
you can. And there's been a lot of bulls killed
by people keeping them talking and the shooter walking in
on them. Now, some areas are so dang brushy that's
just not going to work. It's too brushy. You can't
you can't close the distance like that. It's just it
doesn't work that way. So those those kind of situations,
(52:05):
you have to rely on the calls more. But sometimes
when they they hang up there. As the caller, if
they're not coming in. You could make a lot of
cow calls and aggressive bugles and it's just we'll start
walking away. Some people call it a fade away. Some people,
I don't know, people have those sorts of names for
this technique. But if you if you walk away like
(52:28):
you're you're chasing that cow. You're bugling, you're chasing that cow,
You're making a ton of noise, you're running around as
long as you're in a position where that elk cannot
see you. Man run around like break brush, grab rocks,
throw them, run around, make noise, make it sound like
you're a bull elk chasing a cow around and you
chase and you're chasing it away from your shooter. Right
(52:50):
because as you as you move away, you're creating some
more distance to where that bowl will maybe feel comfortable, like, okay,
that you were right here. Now you've ran away fifty
yards or one hundred yards back. Now that bull that
was hung up feels comfortable. They're like, hmm, I'm going
to go check that. I'm gonna go over there and
smell what's going on. I'm going to go see who
(53:12):
that bowl is. I'm going to see if that cow's
and heat. Because of that scent signature will be left
around there. He'll be able to smell and see what's
going on. And that's when your shooter can take take
advantage of that. Now, there's been other times where that
hasn't worked, but your shooter in you if as long
as you can say, you do the fade away, and
(53:33):
you do go through all that, and that bowl still
hasn't come in, and you move back up to your
original position, which is I like to be able to
see my shooter. I like to build to make eye contact.
At that point, signal your shooter for him to bugle. Right.
We want that bolt to think you've gone from being
(53:54):
sixty eighty yards away to up to where that shooter
is fifty yards ahead of you. If your shooter can
can rip a big bugle, that bull thinks, oh shoot,
he's right here. I'm gonna pop out and take a look.
And that has worked a lot too. I call that
like a sling shot, right. That's worked really well in
(54:15):
the past too. Also, I've had it where a bowl
will come in. Hang up, rake bugle, rake bugle, and
if you have a stalemate for too long, they will leave.
They will lose interest. And once they lose interest and
they leave, they're pretty hard to get interested again. If
they can, they walk away one hundred yards from where
(54:37):
they'd locked up a lot of times, there's no getting
them back. So as soon as that thing leaves, soon
as that thing turns its back and leaves, I'm on it.
I'm charging up. I'm running. So let's say you're your
your your shooter is fifty yards away, the bulls and
other fifty yards away. I'm gonna run right up to
my shooter. I'm gonna scream and run right up to
(54:59):
my shoes, and hopefully my shooter in that same instance
moves up as well. I want him to. Like, as
soon as that bull turns his head and can't see,
I want the shooter to move up in advance, and
I'm gonna advance that way, we kind of almost leap frog, right,
I go to where the shooter was to begin with,
and now the shooters have advanced another twenty five yards
(55:22):
or whatever makes sense. It's almost like a game of
red light green light. When that bowl turns his head
to leave and starts taking a step to leave, it's
green light that means go. When the bull stops and
turns around. It looks that's red light, and they'll catch
you like midstried and you have to like freeze, freeze fray.
(55:44):
And then once they don't see that other bull that's coming,
they'll turn around and go again. And then you just
keep on doing it. This is a tricky game. You
can get picked off really easy. If you're in a
country they have a lot of timber, it's fairly fairly wooded,
a lot of cover. You can get away with a lot.
And now if this is open country, this tactic is
not for you. This is not gonna not gonna work.
(56:07):
So but being aggressive and pushing up on those things,
because once they kind of leave, I feel like if
they come in, you've had your stalemate and they leave,
it's game over with that bowl and you might not
be able to get him to come in at all
tomorrow either. It seems like they haven't they recognize your bugle.
So you want to make your moves while you can.
(56:28):
You gotta be a riverboat gambler. You gotta put all
your all your chips on the table and just roll
the dice, baby, and see what happens, all right, Whitefish
King twenty nine. How do I do a better cow
call with a diaphragm, so cow calls. We talked a
little earlier about making that mosquito noise when we're practicing
(56:49):
our lip ball. So I like to tell people make
a mosquito noise. That's just a really super high pitch.
You just barely let a little bit of air seep out.
You're pushing pretty hard with your tongue. You get that
little mosquito noise like this really light. And then once
(57:11):
you can make that noise, just relax your tongue. Just relax,
maybe drop your jaw slightly, but just relax your tongue.
You know, to get that noise, you're pushing pretty fricking
hard with your tongue. But then when you want to
turn it into a calcol just relax your tongue kind
(57:41):
of speed it up. So just to get the fundamentals down,
you practice that long mosquito noise, then you drop your tongue.
Just relax your tongue, and you want to get that
nasal sound right, You want to be able to make that.
That's where your tongue is just barely even touching that latex.
You can you can can't even hardly feel that latex
(58:02):
at all. At that point, I've just made that noise.
I'm barely even I don't even think my tongue is
touching that. That's using that dome at the top of
the of the diaphragm. It's kind of rattling against that,
so a little bit just the dead air space there.
So do that practice that, and I think where a
(58:25):
lot of people kind of go wrong. I watch, like
do this into your cell phone or do it into
a mirror, record yourself and watch your face. Like I've
worked with people who like their mouth is super tight,
like flexed, all their muscles in their in their lips
and their cheeks are really tight. A calcohol is going
(58:47):
to sound really tight and chirpy or weird when you
when your mouth's all tensed up. But if your mouth
is very loose, relaxed, the only thing that's tight is
your tongue pressure to get that note, and it's very
briefly hit that note and then just relax it and
try to and try to just relax and find that
(59:08):
note to and just let it slide off. I've talked
about this, I think on some of the other podcasts.
Last summer we did a three three part podcast on
how to use the l calls. And another thing you
can you can practice is making a siren noise, which
that's where you start at the low sound of a
siren and then apply pressure with your tongue and climb
(59:29):
the octave of notes, hold it and then drop it
down together and then back and forth, back and forth.
And what you're doing is you're just really building that
that control of that diaphragm to where your tongue really
knows how much pressure at the right times, your internal
core or your diaphragm or your body understands how much
air pressure to put across it. And you just practice
(59:52):
that over and over again, and I promise you that's
going to help make those col calls get really smooth
and a lot sweet sounding instead of being too chirpy.
Relax your mouth. The only thing that should be flexing
is your tongue to get that high note. All right,
here's a good question from Rome Borley. He says, why
(01:00:14):
are dirks reads so much better than Jason's. Well, that's
basically science, you know. I don't know. I guess maybe
I just know how to build help diaphragms better than Jason.
I don't know, just kidding. We battle back and forth
on who's is the best ever, and I'll tell you.
I'll tell him right to his face mine's the best ever,
(01:00:35):
and he'll do the same with his But honestly, for
folks wanting to call, you may or may not like
my diaphragm. You may love it, or you may try
it and be like, oh, I hate that thing. I
can't make that thing go. That's why we offer such
a wide writer. I think we have sixteen different varieties
of amp diaphragms in our lineup, maybe more. Each one
(01:00:56):
has a different latex thickness and stretch to fit all
the different nuances of each caller. So if you like,
if you feel like you have to blow calls really hard,
you'd probably like a Maverick. If you don't blow the
calls as hard, you probably like that pink one, or
maybe maybe even like a black one, like the black amp.
(01:01:17):
Those are pretty pretty nice, softer latex. The gray amp
is a real popular one. You can google cal call
with them, but I always say pick pick up. You
know a handful of calls, you know three minimum three,
better yet five or six and play with them and
try them out. And see what what one works with
(01:01:40):
your style of calling the best. And then once you
kind of find one that you like, it's like, I
kind of like the way this one works, then practice
with it, and as time goes by, you'll you'll try
the other ones that you didn't like as much before,
and you may find you like them better than the
one you kind of like now, because as you learn
to call better, you'll learn to manipulate the calls better
(01:02:01):
and you'll probably find find a better favorite. So well,
I'm gonna wrap it up with that question. There. Appreciate
everybody listening. That was fun. Got to dive down some
deep rabbit holes and and answer some silly questions and
some serious ones too. If you have any other questions,
(01:02:22):
you can email us at Cutting the Distance podcast at
Phelpsgamecalls dot com and ask us some questions, or you
can always hit us up on socials. You know, if
you're gonna if you're gonna ask a question to Jason Phelps,
particularly on the on the Phelps Game Calls UH Instagram channel,
you could you might want to try to ask him
(01:02:45):
questions on his personal one. It's Jason Glenn Phelps. If
you're not following him already. Mine is the bugler and
the felt the Phelps game calls ones. Him and I
both kind of get on there and answer questions and
and help folks on and on the d M. But
it's not consistent. So he's kind of guilty of like
starting a conversation and then and then abandoning it sometimes,
(01:03:08):
So and I do the same thing sometimes, So apologize
for that. We just get a lot of questions and
it's kind of hard to remember which account that we're
answering questions on. So anyhow, appreciate everybody listening, And I
hope you guys summer is going well, and good luck.
We got elk season in just a little over a month,
(01:03:28):
so I can't wait. We'll catch everybody on the flip flop.
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