Down N Dirty DNDHNTPC Turkey Call

It took several hours to get the hang of. I thought it was the call, no, it was me. It works well. Got a pretty heavy Jake eight minutes into the season. The Toms ignored it (ME). Junior ran right to me. I was happy to have any big fat bird.

Sounds good but kind of hard to use

This item blew great for about a week. You have to blow it correctly or it will never sound right. The reads stopped working correctly and the call is worthless. I do not know how the wood call performs but the polycarbonate version went straight into the garbage.

good call not an easy one to master

It's very hard to use at first. I did some searching on forums and this is the best description on how to use it I've found for it.the tongue flutter is done with the top, flat part of your tongue. the tip of your tongue should be against your bottom teeth. you will have to experiment with tongue position, moving it slightly up or down, or back and forth just a little against the roof of your mouth, where your top teeth meet it, to make it work.start with the flat of your tongue away from the roof of your mouth far enough that nothing happens. slowly raise it until it starts to flutter. keep going until it stops.where it just STARTS to flutter is where it needs to be. your tongue should be LOOSE as should your cheeks.when you get to this point, the flutter will be too rapid to sound right. back pressure on the call exhaust lowers tongue flutter speed AND lowers the pitch of the call as well. timing both together is the key. keep your tongue LOOSE.try more tongue surface area for the flutter part if you're still having problems. Also try breathing all the way in before blowing the call. I have to if I want a full roll gobble.

The Haint is hands down the best gobble call on the market. Comparing this to a shaker call is a complete joke. This call does require some amount of skill and practice, and is not one of those calls you unwrap from the box on the way to the woods. If you just blow this call without learning it, you sound like a cross between a distressed rabbit, a squealing balloon, and a bobcat that swallowed a squeaky toy; but once you learn this call, it is the most realistic call I have ever heard.Difficulty - It really does not take long to learn this call. I recommend going to You Tube to check several videos, as well as watching the included DVD. (You Tube actually tells you more in much less time). This call is pretty loud, and with a baby at home, I did not get much of a chance to practice at night, so I practiced in the truck on the drive to and from work every day. It took me about two weeks to get fairly consistent (where most every call resembled a gobble and I was not getting those occasional dying rabbit-balloon-squeaky toy bobcat sounds as described above). A friend of mine purchased one the week after I did, and he was proficient within 3 or 4 days’ worth of practice. Those who have never used a duck call before will probably learn this call much more easily than those with duck calling experience. I will say that this would be an easy call to give up on, as it is one of those things that seems like you are not getting any different results until all the sudden it clicks. After several weeks of use, the method becomes second nature and you really don’t think about it anymore.The Method – The recommended method makes use of free air, instead of the diaphragm force used in duck calling. (This is why it is easier for non-duck callers to learn). The You Tube videos also explain how the Tooka-Tooka duck calling method works as well, but I had no luck whatsoever with this method, and had to go back and learn the free air style. In the free air method, you use your tongue against the back of your teeth to create pressure and get the roll of the gobble. The early tendency is to roll the front of your tongue (meaning purposefully flick the front of your tongue), instead of letting the back pressure create the tongue flutter. When you get it right, the middle/front part of the tongue vibrates instead of the tip. The squealing balloon high pitch is a dead giveaway that you are fluttering the tip of your tongue. Also, the front part of the gobble starts with a high amount of air if you want to get the loud roar then roll sound made by mature Gobblers.The Results – As expected, the included video makes claims of season long turkey slaying, with gobblers attempting to flog your head off the roost, and fall gobbler gangs coming to your call by the dozens. (So far, my only experience with The Haint is during spring, so I cannot dispute their fall gobbler gang claims). I have not had any Toms try to fist fight me yet, but that is not to say that this is not one of the best calls in the vest. During preseason scouting (when Toms were still vying for dominance), I did call up Toms from the roost to within 25 yards on two different mornings with the Haint. (Both times I did not mean to, I was trying to get a roosting location and they were already on top of me so fast off the roost that I could not leave in time.) During the actual season, however, I did not have any Toms come all the way in specifically due to the Haint. Where it really shined during the season was as a locator call, as it turned out to be the best locator I have ever used. It works great to get birds gobbling to hone in on roost locations, and even works to get birds gobbling on the ground when you track of a Tom that did not travel as you expect from the roost, or when looking for mid morning birds. I have not had any luck using it in the evening to locate Toms that have just flown up (stick to the owl hooters for this tactic). It does really get mature Toms fired up as well. I had a big Tom gobble for three straight minutes back to back, when I started gobbling at him from an adjacent ridge, and he would cut me off every time I gobbled after his initial outburst. He was on the opposite ridge, so I decided to get extra aggressive to see what would happen, and he gobbled at me every time I gobbled for half an hour (when I finally quit and decided that there was no way he was coming off the ridge, so I would have to go back and circle him up – which I did, and I should note that this fine Tom is no longer among the living). I have a lot of birds hang up because of terrain, and of course hens, and although the gobble call will fire them up, I have yet to pull a bird off hens or have him come across a holler as a result. The biggest use of the Haint is during the early part of season. It will get some responses during the second gobbling peak (mid late season), but in reality it loses its effectiveness after the halfway point in the season. I got response gobbles on every morning I used The Haint (with one exception when I heard no gobbling all morning) for the first three weeks of the season. The Haint played a part in two of the three Toms I killed this season, and successfully garnered responses on several more hunts in the first half of season. Definitely worth the price of admission, and small time investment for practice.The Downside - This sounds like a gimmick, but these are so realistic once you acquire some proficiency that there are some downsides to this call. First, you just can’t use this call on public land. It sounds too darn real. A friend of mine had his father convinced he was working a big Tom. His father knew he had the gobble call with him and where he was going to be, and he still was fooled into thinking it was a gobbler. (He realized that he had been fooled when he received a text message from said gobbler). The other downside is for non-dominant Toms. Most of the birds you kill are submissive Toms, as from a statistical standpoint there are a lot fewer Alpha Toms (one per his defined territory), and chances are much higher that submissive Toms do not already have a harem of hens with them. When you use this call after fly down, you roll the dice on which bird you are dealing with. Submissive Toms still seem to really give a lot of response, but while they respond to the call, they also shy from it in order to avoid the possibility of a beat down from the dominant Tom. I think they may also get discouraged upon hearing the gobble thinking that the hen he was responding to has now ben scooped up by the dominant bird. It took me a few hunts to learn this lesson, but if he doesn’t heat up immediately once on the ground, then it is best to use the Haint sparingly just as an occasional location check. Otherwise, you may have a great morning of hearing big gobbles, but they may always be headed just out of range.