Rut Sounds

Everything else in the moose sounds library is a demonstration. This page is the real thing.

Thirty moose at the peak. Listening through a megaphone, Wayne’s partner Mark heard calling activity deeper in the woods. They went towards it and found themselves in the middle of roughly thirty moose at the peak of the rut.

A bull coming in. The dominant bull out of a large group they called in. Listen for the tongue rolling and the grunting as he approaches.

A bull and a cow answering each other. A cow about six hundred yards away gave a long drawn-out call and the bull started in her direction. Mark gave three cow calls, and the bull stopped and looked back.

Two things worth taking from these recordings. Real cow calls run long: well into the rut, some reach almost a minute. And real moose move around while they call. That is why Wayne moves back and forth inside a hundred-foot area when he is trying to sound like a group rather than a single animal.

The rut has a shape: it starts slowly in late August with velvet-scraping, most of the breeding happens in the last two weeks of September, and the main rut ends around 10 October. Cows that were not bred come back into heat about twenty-seven days later, which is why calling still works into early November.

The Bull Magnet® carries them further and adds the nasal tone a bull is listening for. Born in Alaska in 1993 and made in the USA.