Moose Hunting: Calling, Decoying, and Stalking by Dave Kelso

Author:Dave Kelso
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781629140933
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2014-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Illustration 8-7

During the 2004 Maine moose hunt, we faced a problem with hang-ups that we had not run into before. We were hunting in zone 11 and had been hunting there for several years. The larger bulls were refusing to come out in the open where we could see them. They would not even cross an opening of significant size that would allow the hunters to get a shot. No matter which of the tricks we tried, nothing would get the big bulls to come out. Plenty of smaller bulls responded to the calls, but the hunters were, understandably, passing them up.

Corey and I discussed this at length and we came up with a plan. We would walk into the area we knew a moose to be and just go into the woods. We would walk until we found a natural shooting lane offering a shot of fifty or more yards. The lane would not have to be exceptionally wide, just clear of branches and trees that would allow a hunter to sneak a bullet through into a moose that we managed to coax into showing itself (see Illustration 8-7).

Since the moose were hanging-up, we also decided to try a second tactic along with the calling technique. Rather than sound like the cow in heat, and following that by a rival bull call, we would do a cow-in-heat call, then a young bull call, and then a series of agitated cow calls and young bull grunts. It was coming to the end of the week and we had to do something to get the larger bulls to show.

On the first afternoon we tried this, Corey called out an exceptional bull for the hunters. It took close to forty-five minutes from the time of the first response to the moment the hunter pulled the trigger. As Corey said, “It’s moose that I work for that I remember the most.” And work he did.

Corey started his calling sequence at the edge of a hardwood ridge that rolled down into a spruce growth that had been cut over. The thought we had was that moose had been called to too much from the cut-over area itself, although our normal plan would have been to call within the cut-over area.

Once a bull responded to the cow-in-heat call, Corey kept it up until the bull showed signs of hanging-up—at which point Corey started to grunt like a young bull, mixing, those with his cow-in-heat calls. Once he started doing dual calls he also started walking a twenty-yard circle behind the hunters. He was snapping brush and limbs and stomping his feet, the same sounds an agitated cow would make trying to get away from a bull she did not want to mate with.

All this activity apparently proved too much for the other bull. He came into sight, stepping into the small natural shooting lane they had set up on, and the hunter dropped the forty-nine-inch spread bull on the spot with one shot.

We learned two valuable lessons from this.

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