Knowing some great duck calling tips from some real pros will help you master your duck calling techniques.

• Late in the season one of the best duck calling tips I can give is to use what's called the "Agressive Feeding Call". By this time in the season ducks are very shy and have heard the"Come Back Call" all season and can become shy to it. The "Agressive Feeding Call" is a fairly loud, rapid series of kuks with a lot of growling into the call. This is louder and more demanding than regular feeding chatter. I tend to think of it as an assembly call. I push it pretty hard, and I vary the air pressure to break the sounds up.” Ducks are not used of hearing this type of called and are not educated to it all season long.

• A 22 year guided in the Louisiana marshes, Kelly Haydel of Bossier City, Louisiana,has mastered calling in his favorite bird, the specklebelly (white-fronted goose). He recommends that when calling specks, you have to develop a dialogue with an individual goose. The real tip is that when the goose makes his two-note yodel, blow it right back at him. He calls, and then you call. You have to develop a rhythm and a dialogue that goes back and forth.
  
  Haydel says if the goose quits calling, the hunter should continue calling with the same rhythm. “Just call as though the goose is still responding to you,” Haydel says. “Sometimes he’ll skip two or three sequences, but if you maintain the rhythm, he’ll join back in.”
  
  What if the specks circle just out of range and won’t finish? “Try ground-clucking to get them to come on in,” Haydel advises. “Just say hut-hut-hut into your call. Cluck rapidly five to 10 times, take a breath, and do it again. If the geese turn in, keep calling until you reach for your gun.”

• Mike Boyd of Tunica, Mississippi, hunts on Beaver Dam Lake and has lured thousands of mallards, gadwalls, and other ducks into his cypress tree-lined hole over the last 40 years. He has done this mostly with a quiet, subtle calling style that produces very little echo off the standing timber.
  
  Boyd’s secret calling weapon is an excited chatter that he calls the rau-rau call. “I’ve heard mallards make this call at other ducks that are passing by,” he explains. “It’s different from any other call ducks make. It’s four to five fast single notes that ascend the scale in volume, over and over. It’s a type of chuckle, but it’s more persuasive than a standard monotone feed call.”
  
  Boyd says when ducks circle close, he tones down the rau-rau call. But when they swing away, he ratchets the volume back up. “I test every day for what the birds like best,” he says. “Generally, though, I try not to overcall and just let the ducks work themselves if they will.”

• Barnie Calef of Palo, Iowa, is a three-time world champion duck caller and the founder of Calef Calls, makers of fine duck and goose calls. He has years of guiding experience in the upper Midwest. Calef believes that ducks are warier now than ever, so he’s gone to a more natural calling style.
  
  “When ducks are within calling range, blow some type of call at them—a hail call, greeting call, feeding call, whatever—and watch their reaction,” he advises. “If they turn toward your decoys, ease off on the calling. Then, when they start to leave, hit them again with the call they reacted positively to before. This is the call you should stick with to get them to come in.
  
  “I find myself calling less and making it mean more,” Calef adds. “I think if you blow at the right time and with a call the birds like, you’re better off with a lot less calling. Personally, I use a five-note greeting call just about all the time now.”

• Curt Wilson of Oroville, California, is a territory manager for Avery Outdoors and a lifelong duck hunter. Wilson grew up in west Tennessee, and he took calling methods he learned there with him when he moved to the West Coast. Once there, he also learned a few new things about calling Pacific Flyway mallards.
  
  “Back home in Tennessee, the best days for calling ducks were cold and clear with a moderate wind,” Wilson says. “But out here, the best calling days are windy and rainy. This is when you need to be aggressive with your calling—more frequency and louder volume. It’s as if the ducks have trouble hearing you in the wind. So on days like this, I’ll usually call right up until it’s time to shoot. If you let up on the birds, they’ll start sliding away.”
  
  Wilson believes storms stir up ducks, and this is why they respond enthusiastically to his aggressive calling. “It’s as if the storm excites them, and a loud, compulsive calling style is the best match to their mood,” he says.

• Brian “Bubba” McPhearson of Madison, Mississippi, supervises the waterfowl calling division of Primos Hunting Calls. During duck season, if he’s not making calls, he’s using them, mostly on mallards in this state’s duck-rich Mississippi Delta.
   
  “By the time ducks get this far down the flyway, they’ve heard a lot of calling, and they’re hard to finish,” McPhearson says. “So when they get tough, I blow a quiet little ‘hiccup call’ because it’s a call that’s rarely used in the field.”
  
  McPhearson describes this call as a series of five to six notes with an extra half-note separating the long notes. “It sounds like ‘wank-a, wank-a, wank-a. . . .’ You make the half-note with your tongue, pushing air up against your teeth. It’s almost like a stutter note or a little squeal at the end of each long note.”
  
  McPhearson uses this call when ducks have circled his spread a couple of times and have turned back for one more look. “It’s a convincer,” he explains. “I don’t know why it works, but it does, especially with ducks on public areas that have been called to a lot. They like it, and they come to it.”

• Jeff Coats of Bel Air, Maryland, has guided waterfowlers on Chesapeake Bay for 15 years. He specializes in hunting divers from boats over big, open-water decoy spreads. His clients typically take canvasbacks, redheads, scaup, buffleheads, and other species over his spread of more than a hundred decoys.
  
  Coats “calls” divers with a flag instead of a duck call. “I use a black cotton flag that’s 24 by 24 inches,” he says. “I rig it on a 36-inch pole. When ducks are passing at a distance, I stand up tall in the boat and wave the flag over my head. It’s just a big left-to-right, a slow wave. It’s like saying, ‘Hey, over here!’ When the birds see me and turn my way, I put the flag down and let them come on to the decoys.”
  
  Coats says flagging is especially effective when divers are skimming along barely above the water’s surface. “When the birds are low, they can’t see my decoys from as far,” he says. “So I flag to them to get them to flare up off the water. It’s a lot easier for them to see my decoys if they’re 50 feet high than if they’re two feet high.”

• J. R. Adkins of Rogersville, Tennessee, is a member of the Knight and Hale Game Calls pro staff, and he’s an avid Canada goose hunter and competition caller. He won the Tennessee state goose calling championship in 2006.
  
  Adkins says it’s common for geese to be coming to decoys and then land short by a couple of hundred yards. When most callers see this happening, they give up. “It’s as if they resign themselves to the fact that the geese are about to land out of range, and they continue making the same clucks and moans (laydown calls) they were blowing when the geese were approaching.”
  
  But Adkins doesn’t give up. When incoming honkers are about to land short, he “pours the coal to them,” switching to very loud, fast, excited calling to pull the birds those last few yards. “What I blow is wild-sounding. It’s really off the wall, but it’s unreal how well the geese respond to it,” he says. “Then once they pick back up and keep coming, I change back to regular laydown calls. It’s as if the geese are thinking, ‘Something’s going on over there, and we’d better go take a look.’ And they usually do.”