How to Call a Moose

I call, thrash, listen, flash, and scoop and drain water, in that order. Five steps, five videos, and what I have learned about each one guiding moose hunters in Alaska for forty-five years.

Your voice makes the sound. What you call through decides how far it travels and whether it carries the deep nasal quality a bull is listening for.

Two sounds do nearly all the work. Cow calls are higher pitched and longer, anywhere from two seconds to almost a minute. Bull grunts are short and deep, one to two seconds long at two to three second intervals.

By about the first of September most big bulls have stripped their velvet and turned ornery. That is when I add short grunts to my thrashing, especially in the first and last session of the day. From about the seventh to the tenth of September, bulls and cows start grouping up and calling begins to work well. Add short cow calls in groups of two or three, and try to sound like several moose rather than one, moving back and forth inside a hundred foot area while you thrash, grunt and call.

One exception worth knowing early. On a bull that already has cows with him, grunts and thrashing are the safer choice. Cows can lead him away.

From late August my calling is almost all brush thrashing. That is the sound of a bull scraping velvet off new antlers, and it is what is actually happening out there at that time of year.

Find a dry spruce. Break branches two to three inches thick so they crack loud. Chop a dead tree with a wood handled axe. Rake your call against trunks and brush. An axe handle works, and so does an old shoulder blade.

Start really loud for the first few minutes to get the sound out there, then tone it down.

We have called in big bulls from two and three miles out, on or before September first, with nothing but thrashing. Bulls are curious at that time of year. Not yet fighting, but willing to travel a long way to look at future competition.

Several years ago on August 28th I was flying hunters into a camp on a gravel bar in western Alaska. Opening day was September first. Across the river, three miles from camp, I flew past a big bull destroying a bush while he scraped off the last of his velvet. My guys went out three hundred yards from camp that same afternoon with an axe to cut firewood. That bull came to the exact spot they chopped wood, thirty minutes before dark, the same day.

If you doubt whether your moose sounds are good enough, at least go and thrash. It brings bulls in through most of the season and there is nothing to get wrong.

Put the small end to your ear and it works in reverse. Instead of carrying your calls out it gathers sound coming back in, and you will hear a bull answering two to three times further out than you would unaided.

A bull already has that advantage. All that bone on his head draws sound in much like cupping your hand to your ear, which is why he hears you long before you hear him.

Call from one place and watch from another. Pick ground with real visibility, swamps and mixed birch and willow, then pick two or three calling spots about a hundred yards out from your lookout, in different directions. Glassing means moving around, stretching, keeping warm and the occasional nature call, all of which makes noise and soaks the country in human scent. An approaching bull can pinpoint the exact spot you called from even if your last call was hours ago, and he will come at it from downwind. If he is focused on that spot and you are back at your lookout, you have time to judge him and to set up a shot.

Early in my career we all napped after lunch. Except one guide, a school teacher named Lenny, who never took naps and sat in his lookout while the rest of us rested. His clients killed big bulls three years running, almost at high noon. Since then I keep somebody on watch as much as possible, even through the middle of the day, and we have taken a lot of midday bulls for it.

When two men square off, one of them shakes a fist. The bull moose version of that is what I call flashing. Bulls shake their heads, grunt, drool and wave their antlers back and forth as they walk up on another bull before they go to battle, and they do beat each other up badly over a cow. Sometimes seriously, sometimes mortally.

So it is for two situations. When you already have a bull responding and you want to bring him the rest of the way in, or when you are working toward a bull that has hung up and stopped committing. Flash and wave alongside your thrashing and bull grunts, not instead of them, and hide behind brush while you do it. I have even put white garbage bags on my arms and waved them like antlers.

Wear bright red or hunter orange when you flash. You are deliberately waving something that looks like an antler, from behind brush, in country where other people are hunting moose. Use extreme caution and stay alert.

This one has a condition on it. You need water. Dip it, lift it, and let it drain, and it sounds like a cow relieving herself. To a bull working a drainage in late September, that is a cow standing right there.

It is no hardship to set up for. Natural drainages with beaver dams and ponds are some of the best moose country there is, because moose love water and feed on pond weed. If you have picked your calling spots well you are often near water anyway. Look for the same ground you would look for otherwise: major game trails, rub poles, scent pits, fresh beds and tracks.

If you spook a bull, blow a stalk, or he winds you and goes, belt out a long, loud, wavering cow call and keep it going for a minute if you can. More often than not he stops and takes another look.

One September I was following two hundred feet behind my guide and his hunter with a video camera, walking the edge of a swamp on a hot afternoon. They crouched. My guide was pointing into the woods and the hunter had his gun up but could not find the bull in his scope, because he had the power cranked too high. Five minutes of that and the bull turned and ran. I tried two bull grunts. Nothing. Then a long wavering cow call, and he stepped back into the swamp and the hunter took him. My guide was in disbelief.

A week later the same guide had a client miss a standing broadside shot at a hundred yards, and the bull was running flat out. My guide did a long cow call. The bull stopped and the hunter hit him at two hundred. It happened again with a third client the week after that. He is a believer now.

Call for twenty to forty minutes at a time, three to five hours apart. Inside a session: thrash and call for two or three minutes, glass the country thoroughly, then listen and wait five or ten minutes before going again. Repeat that all session. Continuous all day calling is not necessary.

Moose are most active at night. When you call at first light they have already bedded or are about to. They hear you. They come at their midday feed, or that evening, or the next morning. A moose can pinpoint you and will come and look on his own schedule, whether you are calling then or not.

Commit to an area and watch it all day. Take shifts if you have to. We now get nearly half our success at midday, often at high noon, and because camps sit near good calling ground much of it happens close to camp. That alone saves an enormous amount of meat packing.

Still deciding what to call with? The types of moose calls are compared honestly, including the ones that cost nothing.

Four of those five steps work with nothing but your own voice and a dead spruce, and I would rather you went out and thrashed with an axe handle than stayed home. The fifth one, the water, needs something that scoops.

Wayne’s moose call does all five on one 11 ounce piece of gear. Born in Alaska in 1993 and made in the USA.