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The next day, I went into my dad’s shop, where he was boring barrels for duck calls.
“Hey, you want to hear my duck call?” I asked him. I was a little bit nervous because I’d never blown a call in front of him before.
“Yeah, let me hear it,” he said.
I blew on the duck call.
“You sound like a gadwall,” he said.
A gadwall hen sounds like a mallard hen, except her cadence is a little shorter and sounds scratchier. But they’re pretty close. I didn’t know if he was complimenting me or criticizing me!
“Hey, look on the bright side,” he said. “If the sperm count had been lower, you might have come out as a shoveler.”
Shovelers are pretty much trash ducks and aren’t very good to eat. But after Phil told me I sounded like a gadwall, I’ve always had a special place for them in my heart. Several years later, I actually invented the first gadwall drake call. Gadwalls are unique in that the hen very rarely makes a sound. One day, we were working the ducks, and I had a mallard hen call in one hand and our six-in-one whistle in the other because we were working pintails. I blew the hen call and then the whistle. One time, I blew them at the same time and stopped. That sounds like a gadwall drake, I thought to myself. I started blowing them simultaneously so my dad could hear them.
“Hey, you might be onto something,” he said. “Why don’t we try that? We’ll get the gadwall decoys and try it on ’em. If it gets them into the decoys, we’ll figure out a way to build them.”
It was amazing how many gadwalls responded to my drake call. We ended up building the call, and no one has successfully duplicated it. It isn’t the prettiest of duck calls, but it’s effective.
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