Had too many hours in at work, so I had to take a day off on Friday - darn.
I decided to head up into the woods to see if I could bag a bear. I had my cow call with me to mask my sound in the woods and while I was out there, I heard an elk bugling quite a ways off. I figured I might toy with him a bit too see what happened, and so I cow called back to him a few times. He and I went back and forth like this for about half an hour, and then another bull began to chime in on the opposite side of me. This bull was in the direction that I planned on moving anyway, so I slowly moved away from the first bull and towards the second. This dual bugling went on for several minutes as well, as it appeared there were a group of several "cows" stuck in between the two bulls and they were both trying to win them over. Rather suddenly, the second bull started bugling closer and closer and I could tell he was headed my way. He started to move upwind of me, and I shifted upwind in response to try and keep him from smelling me. I pulled out my video camera and started recording as the bull came right in to 17 yards away! The video doesn't do it justice, but that bull was CLOSE - almost too close for comfort when not elk hunting. This bull was a magnificent looking animal and had a lot of mass. Really made me wish I was elk hunting at the moment! I've attached the video link below (sorry, don't know how to imbed a video on here yet).
Please excuse my pathetic cow calling. My cow call was giving me tons of trouble. Every single time I tried to call, the reed was stuck to one side of the call and so it would not allow any air movement through, so I had to blow extremely hard to even get a sound to come out and therefore had very little control over the pitch and quality of the cow calls. But, it didn't seem to matter as it convinced this big boy to come right in! Wish the video quality was better as well - I was using my ancient point-and-shoot camera with very low resolution. Will definitely be bringing my regular video camera with me next time. Enjoy!
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