Bugling Bulls-Is A Bugle Just A Bugle?

[Elknut1]

   For those who'd like to hear the sounds of these bulls before they read the answer go ahead & do so before reading the following paragraphs, the answer is in them! There are several different bulls here basically wanting the same thing, what is it? (grin) It's a sound many have heard countless times!


   The reason for this Thread is to share some features of our New App! It's not just elk sounds, it's a selective sound one at a time then an explanation of what the elk are conveying to you as a caller or to other elk they are communicating with, this is important as in many cases we hear elk in the distant but cannot see them. Having the ability to understand an Elk's language will give you the upper hand in breaking that language barrier! (grin) You will find that specific bugles send a specific message to the elk! Bulls will convey their thoughts or messages to other elk by their changes of intensity & cadence just as people do. Once you establish these changes in your memory banks it's easily brought up in your mind as the sounds are heard in the elkwoods. Identifying these specific messages in the field will now prepare you as to what to do next! In the past you may have fumbled around searching for the right sound or just any sound in hopes that it will work. This App will help take the guess work out of it for the most part putting the odds in your favor towards a close encounter!

  This example of these bugling bulls is a great one to start with. Most of us have heard these bugles countless times but did you know what they meant? These are very commonly used in late Aug - Sept - Oct. by bulls as cows become their main interest.  This sound is one bulls will use when they've heard cows nearby. They are giving these cows a direction to head as the bulls try their best to call them their way! Many have heard this bugle if they've cow called & received a response from a bull during their hunts. It's also a fairly easy bugle to imitate!


    ElkNut1

[Fullabull]

Yes, I have heard that bugle many times after making a cow sound. I like it when they don't see or hear you (a caw) coming in to them quick enough and they get frustrated, then lets out a sharp little sound just before he screams at you to get over there faster, then followed by a few short chuckles. That is one of my favorites

I think that App will be very good Paul.

Fullabull

[trophyhunt]

Man I love that sound!!

[WapitiTalk1]

Sweet!  Anxious for the new app to come out Paul.  The extra last breath/tone at the end of a bull calling cows to him bugle and expressed sense of urgency to "get over here now" will bring me, my bow, and my whiny cows calls in every time  .  For my fellow Hunt WA cats that haven't dabbled in Elknut's philosophy on elk language interpretation... well, you're missing out on a valuable set of tools for your elk kit.  RJ     

[Elknut1]

Ha Ha, I bet there's not many that are as anxious as myself!  This has been in the works a while now so it will be informative & yet fun on my part to have these various sounds available & defined at ones fingertips!

  Note the intensity of those bulls bugles, you can tell these bulls are peaking hard, their bugles show lots of intensity/urgency as their excitement flows freely for the cow they know is nearby. These same bulls can show interest in cows in early Sept with bugles no where near the intensity shown in the clip. Their intensity level would be half or less what's heard here yet they are still calling to a cow! Once in the elkwoods enough these times & sounds are easily identified. The same goes with the other various bugles bulls use to convey a message!

  ElkNut1

[Todd_ID]

I have my phone's ring tone set to a video of a bull making that same bugle.  I'd called him in with only bugles. He was beyond frustrated as he entered the meadow where I filmed him and my buddy was supposed to shoot him. He ended up being a young 6 point that my buddy passed on. They get mad when it doesn't go their way.

[Elknut1]

LOL! Yes they can be both upset & frustrated! Good point on using bugles to coax the bull closer! It seems many times when we get into bulls, especially satellites we turn to a Breeding Sequence, it absolutely kicks their butts & they can't help coming in to be part of the party! (grin) By the way the Breeding Sequence exhibits mostly bugling as the bull you're imitating does his darndest to maintain control over the few cows he has. A cool thing we like doing is during this sequence is everytime the real bull responds we have one cow (me) that answers him back with excited mews.  If other bulls respond in the area I make sure to only respond to the one bull via cow chatter showing I'm choosing him, it seems to work pretty darned good! (grin) We find it's generally best when multiple bulls around to choose one bull & work him, we do not try to entertain all of them at the same time & hope for the best! Thanks!

  ElkNut1

[Okanagan]

Fascinating stuff you are on to.  Good work!  I don't hunt elk much anymore but want to see your stuff just to learn.

As a lifetime hobby I've called more than 30 kinds of critters to me, and learned a few patterns that carry over across several species.  A major factor, that you are learning and exploiting, is what different vocals made by the same species are saying.  Too often folks assume that by using a vocal they can call an animal from that species, but almost all species make a number of sounds that mean different things.  Use the wrong vocal and the critter may run away instead of coming to you.  That's not because you made the sound wrong but because of what it is saying! 

Another factor that has interested me with elk is the wide variety of "voices" of different elk making the same sound, like tenors and basses among humans.  Bulls bugling that I have heard, some of them at the same time, have ranged from the high clean picolo, to steer bellows, deep donkey braying and to one ancient bull I killed that made a wheezing sound like a 90 year old man with emphasyma.  When hunting an area for sveral days, you can identify specific bulls by their individual voice.  My grandson and I have heard the same bull for the past two years, distinguished by his bugle that sounds more like a roar than a classic bugle.  My grandson named him Katy Perry two years ago after her song, ROAR.  Last Fall I was sitting on a dawn ridge listening with him when a bull roared from deep in the canyon below us and he said, "That's Katy Perry!"

Hope my nattering does not distract from your thread. 

[trophyhunt]

Fascinating stuff you are on to.  Good work!  I don't hunt elk much anymore but want to see your stuff just to learn.

As a lifetime hobby I've called more than 30 kinds of critters to me, and learned a few patterns that carry over across several species.  A major factor, that you are learning and exploiting, is what different vocals made by the same species are saying.  Too often folks assume that by using a vocal they can call an animal from that species, but almost all species make a number of sounds that mean different things.  Use the wrong vocal and the critter may run away instead of coming to you.  That's not because you made the sound wrong but because of what it is saying! 

Another factor that has interested me with elk is the wide variety of "voices" of different elk making the same sound, like tenors and basses among humans.  Bulls bugling that I have heard, some of them at the same time, have ranged from the high clean picolo, to steer bellows, deep donkey braying and to one ancient bull I killed that made a wheezing sound like a 90 year old man with emphasyma.  When hunting an area for sveral days, you can identify specific bulls by their individual voice.  My grandson and I have heard the same bull for the past two years, distinguished by his bugle that sounds more like a roar than a classic bugle.  My grandson named him Katy Perry two years ago after her song, ROAR.  Last Fall I was sitting on a dawn ridge listening with him when a bull roared from deep in the canyon below us and he said, "That's Katy Perry!"

Hope my nattering does not distract from your thread.

Interesting not nattering, but I am a Katy Perry fan!!

[Elknut1]

No problem sir, comment on this thread all you'd like! (grin) Thanks for the observation too, looks pretty accurate to me! Thanks!

  ElkNut1

[AKBowman]

With the seasons, the hunting pressure in SW WA and the lack of time off during early archery elk season I have only heard a handful of bugles (actual Elk bugling) the past 2 seasons. All of this elk vocalization interpretation doesn't mean much if you aren't hearing elk vocalize.

When I do hear a bull its typically a quick squeal or soft grunt and that's it.

Not much to interpret

[WapitiTalk1]

We all feel your pain AKBowman.  With the pending changes to the early archery season in WA, we may all have an opportunity to hear more elk chatter.  I remember when we used to have a very similar season to what is proposed and if memory serves, we had much more bugling going on.  Hopefully that's the case starting this fall with the season tentatively starting on the 12th? and going through the 23rd?  We'll see.  I have got into bugling bulls in the current/pre-2015 early season config throughout the years but as always, it's area (remoteness) and pressure dependent.     

[Elknut1]

AKbowman, I hear ya bud, there are times and areas in every state where hunters are abundant & the seasons seem to favor the elk more than the hunter! (grin) This is especially so on OTC Public Land hunts in which most all of us partake in on a yearly basis. Hunting these areas certainly takes some finesse & skill to overcome these types of obstacles. Some of us have the privilege of living in elk country & hunting to those later Sept days, I like the 10th to the 25th best myself but there are many times we enjoy hunting the first 10 days as well & you can bet there are plenty of other hunters thinking the same way! (grin)

  During the times of pre-rut the bulls are fairly quiet for the most part of course there are those exceptions where I've seen all out rut fests Sept 1st! They are few & far between! Generally though bulls are tough to come by as a rule & are pretty quiet outside the occasional 1 bugle at daylight! (grin) Of course knowing in many cases that's all you may get we try to do everything possible to take advantage of that single bull bugle & actually have a pretty fair success rate at calling him in! Get to 150 yards or so & go with a light breeding sequence or all bull sounds & raking with an Advertising sequence & you'd be surprised how effective it can be! Most bulls show up silently without a peep. Picking the right sequence depends on the sound we've heard.

   In the photos below the two smaller bulls bugled once in an hour & a half span & the bigger bull bugled twice in a two hour span but we were fortunate enough to still put them in the freezer with a selective sequence! We've taken some-where's around another 30 bulls when they were quiet even one I recall only gave a single grunt, he was asking who or what we were, 5 minutes later he was ours! Understanding the various sounds at times can be very beneficial to our hunts, we don't need non stop bugling to take bulls but it's a lot of fun when it does happen! (grin) So many times during ones 7 day hunts the elk are just flat quiet, how do you still hunt them at that time & fill a tag every year? This is one of the toughest challenges of elk hunting for runner & gunner type hunters. Just as there are tactics for vocal bulls there are equally as many tactics for quiet bulls.

  We are going to share in detail podcasts on this App of every hunt we can think of from quiet bulls pulled in to bugling herd bulls & the strategies it took to bring them into bowrange! The details is where it's at not just I called & in he came! Nope, hunters need to know everything from locating the bull & how it was done & everything in-between to putting him on the ground. We will also share the sounds used right when the calling took place. These should be entertaining & fun to listen to while driving to work or working out. Heck we'll even share our mistakes so you won't fail in some of the areas we did! (grin) We'll have some of the podcasts available next week, I'll grab one & put it on the site & you can see what to expect on future ones. Heck, it's the off season we can all use a kick start to get us thinking elk, maybe something like this may help, heck I don't know!  :dunno:Should be fun though!

  ElkNut1

[AKBowman]

Thanks for the info Elknut. Elk hunting and calling in elk is not some thing that is easy to learn when you are basically learning from scratch. I've been successful on archery kills on Dall Sheep, half a dozen blacktail, whitetail and goat and roosevelt elk I've almost given up on. It's frustrating because I feel like when I first moved here in 07' and started hunting elk in 08' there were way more elk than there are now in the area I hunt. It seems that we saw and heard more bulls in a day than I have during an entire season the past few seasons.

Some of the areas we would hike way back in around 9 miles only to find that someone is now hunting it off horseback!

This year we are pretty much bailing on the timber company area and hunting some deep nasty state land.

Pressure most definitely is a factor. Last year I had a 6 point bull with a small heard of about 3 cows and 2 calves in a bowl below me. I was maybe 150 yards away with the wind in my favor and gave two or three cow calls and a calf chirp while watching the bull in my binds to see his reaction. The lead cow looked around and when she didn't see the elk that was calling at her she freaked out and led the herd plum out of there country!

This situation told me a couple of things.

1. Just because we had ridden our man bikes back a good ways does not mean that these elk weren't pressured. They were pressured hard.
2. I needed to be extremely selective on the type and frequency of calling.
3. I was not skilled enough to call elk in this area into bow range with any consistency. I can make good elk sounds but my elk language needs drastic improvement.

Thanks again for the help. Time and effort will make it sweet when it happens.

[SNIPER10]

I have used that specific sound to call in 24 herd Bulls in the past three years in four different states.  When you slip in close to the cows, and then speak only to them with the bull calling cows bugle, it illicits a whole new range of emotion in the Bulls.  They have all come in stiff legged, and puffed up.  Really cool thing is, there seems to be no hang ups with this technique.  They come in ALL THE WAY!!!  If you can learn no other sound, the BCC is, in my opinion, the most effective elk sound for calling in herd Bulls.

Joel Turner
2x RMEF WORLD ELK CALLING CHAMPION/ PRO DIVISION
IRONMIND ARCHERY SYSTEMS