“With this record, you can become a really expert caller in a short time.…It is just as important as your gun.”—Advertisement for Herter’s Famous Calling Records (1956)The use of duck-calling horns and whistles by hunters in North America dates back to the mid–nineteenth century.1 Hand-turned calls were made of wood or cane, with copper, brass, tin, or cane reeds. In the 1930s, factory-produced calls offered options in plastic and hard rubber. In the following decade, call manufacturers and sporting goods companies sought to increase their customer base by circulating instructional pamphlets and training records. These materials standardized both the sounds of the calls and consumer expectations. In doing so, they were part of a longer tradition of manuals and handbooks that articulated protocols for the self-directed mastery of specialized knowledge, training the body in specific actions that, in the case of calling ducks, would enable humans to communicate with nonhuman others.2Traditionally, one learned this form of communication from a master caller. However, postwar manuals sought to replace in-person training with individual self-improvement. Manuals thus fit into a larger ecology of instructional materials that capitalized on the early survivalist and nostalgic back-to-the-land movements of the postwar era. Whether learning to use an axe, make jug wine, or tie a fishing lure, trainees learned self-reliance through repetition, checking their work against images, or, in the case of bird calls, audio tracks on long-play records. Callers repeated the same call, alternating between sounding (one’s own body) and listening (to the recording of a master caller) for weeks.3 Such tedious work drew on a long legacy of using instructional records, not just in animal mimicry, but education generally.4The training records were likely used in tandem with physical manuals and thus followed similar formats.5 Opening tracks offered basic instruction on how to hold and blow one’s call. Then the caller-in-training worked through different types of calls and scenarios for their use. For example, the narrator of Faulk’s Record of Duck and Goose Calling explained that “now as ducks approach the decoys, use a combination of the Feed Call and a single soft ‘quack,’” after which the listener heard the Feed Call, plus the additional soft “quack” and a description of how to make the sounds.6Precision, science, and sensory-perceptual expertise are the watchwords of the manuals, in which textual instruction was supplemented with graphic representations of common calls (see figure 1). These diagrams echoed Western musical notation (presuming familiarity), with pitch on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal. The Herter calling technique emphasized the sound made into the call: a “HOOT” (you don’t just say “quack” into a duck call) and recommended novices practice their “HOOT” bare-mouthed, without the call. The Comeback Call was the same “HOOT” but with more feeling. To make the mumbly “DUGAW” sounds of the Feed Call, the caller should practice rapidly saying “Dugaw-Dugaw-Dugaw” into their call until it runs together into a “Dugawdugawdugawdugaw.”7Compare Herter’s high-ball call to Bert Popowski’s (figure 2), represented explicitly in Western musical notation. This form of representation underscores Popowski’s belief that calling was “mastering a special type of music in which ducks are your severest critics.”8 A related pamphlet, the Olt Hunting Manual, emphasized “talking to” one’s quarry. Here, we find a hint of the other side of such expertise: the ducks themselves. Ironically, the communication encouraged by such manuals is only successful if it ends in a kill; expertise was measured in dead bodies.9But what of the other side of such expertise? Or, to put it another way: who (or what) is the real expert here? Consider, as some of these sources seemed to, that the ducks themselves are the experts—and that their expertise is precisely the problem against which such a manual was written. Anecdotal wisdom referred to “hunter-wise” ducks that, especially toward the end of a migration, required different calls to bring in.10 With the explosion of duck-call training in the first half of the twentieth century, the sounds of the flyway most certainly changed, both with the addition of human callers and the artificial selection of credulous birds. The better callers became, the more ducks were trained to become suspicious of the voices of their kin. Human duck-calling expertise co-developed with ducks’ duck-listening expertise.
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Jun 27, 2024
Carme Bartrina + 4
Open Access