Calling all Fowlers
One amusing way of passing the long summer evenings is to get your hands on a copy of the catalogue of wildfowl and game calls produced by the Philip S Olt Company of Illinois, USA.
We all know about the preoccupation which the Americans have with hand-carved decoys and how the art of carving is sometimes given more attention than the actual shooting of ducks and geese. Well, if the Olt pamphlet is anything to go by, those crazy Yanks must go really over the top about artificial hooters as well.
Indeed, some of the pictures which the catalogue paints of Stateside sport would make the legendary Elmar Fudd - the mad hunter in the Bugs Bunny cartoons - appear almost sane.
For example, how do you fancy a "Raspy Diaphragm Turkey Call" which is guaranteed to be "tuned with the built-in raspy sounds of the older hen turkey looking for a tom." You'll be pleased to know that it is covered with red plastic even if the idea of shooting randy turkeys seems a trifle unsporting.
Or how about an Owl Hooter? Apparently the call of the great horned owl causes turkeys to gobble. This, in turn, enables the hunter to locate the bird, creep up behind it and then give it a blast on one of the other instruments which will be neatly held on the specially designed contraption of "green nylon cord and stainless steel springs" which accommodates a selection of four calls and appears to be an essential part of the American sportsman's tackle.
Having said all that, I have to confess that I put my faith in an Olt 800 goose call many years ago and have never had any reason to change to another brand. In the right hands, a call of this type can be of considerable assistance in bringing geese to decoys although, if wrongly used, it can have precisely the opposite effect.
Apart from the humour of the Olt catalogue, the progress of the manufacturing company provides an interesting commentary upon the history of waterfowling in North America.
Philip S Olt was born of German descent in 1870 and spent most of his early years farming in the Illinois River valley. Like many young men in the rural mid-west, he spent a fair proportion of his spare time in fishing and shooting.
He produced his first call in 1904 and it worked so well on those Mississippi flyway ducks that some of his friends suggested that he should patent the device. Since that day his business has prospered and today Olt is one of the world's largest manufacturers of game bird and wildfowl calls.
Whether Philip Olt was the first to come up with the idea of a contoured reed base and straight reed for a duck call is not an absolute certainty. However, it is believed that if not the inventor, he was certainly the perfecter.
According to the present day boss of the company - Jim Olt - 1935 was one of the most significant years in the company's history. That was the year in which Ducks Unlimited was founded in response to a terrible threat which hung over the future of waterfowl in the USA and Canada. The drought conditions over large sections of the continent had created untold damage to nesting areas and resultant hatches of young ducks and geese.
Until that year it had been the practice to use live decoys - ducks which were set out and used as calling ducks, luring their wild brethren into range of the guns. This practice was outlawed, along with that of baiting ducks and geese. These legislative changes had a major impact upon the use of artificial wildfowl calls and, in 1935 alone, the Olt company sold approximately 10,000 items.
By 1941, sales had rocketed to 50,000 calls per year, each of them hand tuned and tested prior to shipment.
Finally, I knew that you would be desperate to learn that the "Super Slate Call" can produce a wide range of yelps, clucks, putts, purrs and kee kee runs. I don't know what the hell a "kee kee run" is but the rest of the repertoire sounds rather like the noises which emanated from my chicken run when I caught the neighbour's Jack Russell in at my pullets!.
