I just have a couple of varmint calls I've had for coyote hunting for a long time. The one I used to call a bear in last year was supposed to sound like a doe or fawn in distress. Sounds like something doing some crazy squealing to me!
Guy
Guy, you have a discriminating ear! IMO a bear probably has the same response as you, only he wonders if it might be something squealing that he can eat and it may be in trouble enough to make it easy to catch. I doubt that the bear thinks, "I can tell that it is a whitetail fawn making the sound rather than a mule deer fawn or a snowshoe hare."
FWIW, not particularly to you Guy, I wouldn't sweat too much about getting some precise call sound. Get a prey distress call that is easy for you to use and use it. The closest black bear I've called was with lip squeaks, no other call of any kind. I have called more bears with a fairly low and slightly coarse jackrabbit distress than any other sound, but that's because it is my always-with-me go-to call and I use it more than any other. At least that's what the call label says the sound is. I have other calls from other makers that produce so close to the same sound that it is hard to differentiate, and they are variously labeled hare distress, fawn distress, and bear cub distress.
When you hear real live wild animals making those sounds it is obvious that each different animal has more of a voice difference from others of his species than the difference between the man made calls.
1. The single most critical factor in calling a bear (or anything else) is to have a bear within sound of your call. Find a bear. Find an area with a bear in it and set up within sound range.
2. The next most critical factor is how you set up your ambush in the terrain, vegetation, wind and light conditions at the time. Ambush set up is way the most critical factor to actually see a bear that comes to the call and get a shot at him. MANY animals come to calls that the caller never sees and usually does not even know that they approached.
3. Next in sequence is to produce some kind of sound that interests the bear. The sound part is the easiest factor, very forgiving. For bears a fairly wide range of sounds will work, even wider for cats and canines. Just make a noise in the ballpark of sound range. Call makers and less experienced callers focus on sound.
This whole post is obviously IMO, but I have called quite a few bears and more than 30 species of wildlife, not counting any waterfowl. I do have preferences about calls, but my preferences are about how easy it is to blow, how much or little volume of air it takes to get it to make a sound, whether it will moan softly or only produce sound at higher volume, how loud it will go yet fade out to a whimper without cracking. I work over the reed on most new calls to get them to behave as I want. If it is a jackrabbit-hare-fawn-bear cub-human baby sound then I have confidence it will work to draw an animal, and if I do my part I may set up well enough to see the critter.
The Carlton bear call is a good one, and he obviously knows what he is doing.
