{"id":16,"date":"2008-03-03T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-03-03T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gandgmag.wpengine.com\/articles\/uncategorized\/the-call-master\/"},"modified":"2017-03-25T14:27:19","modified_gmt":"2017-03-25T18:27:19","slug":"the-call-master","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenandgun.com\/articles\/the-call-master","title":{"rendered":"The Call Master"},"content":{"rendered":"

It all began as a fluke, when Ralph Jensen bought an old duck call at a flea market for $2.50.<\/p>\n

\u201cI got it home and it didn\u2019t have a reed, so I went to a music store and bought a clarinet reed, but it was too thick. So I kept shaving it down till I got it the right size and it started vibrating.\u201d Jensen knows wood. Armed with the knowledge from a lifetime of creating fine reproduction furniture in his hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina, his creative wheels started spinning. \u201cI figured the reed would get wet and wouldn\u2019t sound, given the conditions that usually come with duck hunting,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n

Jensen knew of an outfit that salvaged heart pine from the bottom of the Cape Fear River. \u201cThat wood sat in water for centuries, from the days when timber was floated down the river, and I knew it was impermeable.\u201d Some of the wood had the king\u2019s stamp, so it dated back to the colonial era. He shaved it down to gossamer thinness, and it worked like a charm. \u201cI ended up making furniture out of some of it, but I also made wood duck calls out of some of it,\u201d he says. \u201cOne of the first ones I carved showed a wood duck in flight, and it\u2019s one of my favorites. It still hangs on my lanyard.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n \"\"

Photo: Brownie Harris<\/p>

<\/p>

Jensen carves birdcalls in the likeness of wild game and, upon request, pets<\/p> \n <\/div>\n\n

Since those early efforts, Jensen has been putting a little bit of history in many of his duck, goose, and turkey calls. He got his hands on some wood from a chapel door at a library in Bath, England, that dated back to the thirteenth century. Put together with mortises, it left pieces of wood too small for anyone else to do much with, but perfect for making tops for turkey calls. Then, the family of Navy Admiral Edwin Alexander Anderson, a Medal of Honor recipient from Jensen\u2019s neck of the woods, commissioned him to carve calls from the busted stock of Anderson\u2019s nineteenth-century Parker shotgun. After that, Jensen was contacted by a family who had a nineteenth-century piano that couldn\u2019t be restored and sat in the family\u2019s plantation house. Now it\u2019s making music of a different sort: Jensen, the persistent scavenger, used pieces from all of it \u2014 the case and sounding board, and ivory and ebony from the keys. \u201cI made them a Hepplewhite sideboard from part of it, but the rest I used for calls.\u201d In an ultimate act of creative recycling, he even made several calls that incorporated inlaid ivory from the piano, wood from the chapel door, and heart pine timber from the bottom of the Cape Fear River. \u201cI\u2019ve even made duck calls carved as a duck, and made the bill out of tusks from a wild boar,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, Jensen\u2019s calls are collector\u2019s items. He was blown away when one of his calls made from the old piano went for $1,200 at a Ducks Unlimited auction a couple of years back. Artist Bob Timberlake, a close friend, recently asked him if he could make a call from his drawing of a duck with its bill open. Then he had a decoy carver drive all the way from Minnesota to ask him to carve him a duck call featuring the head of his hunting lab. \u201cHe\u2019s in his eighties and he still spends many days hunting canvasbacks in the icy cold,\u201d says Jensen with admiration. \u201cWe did a swap: I gave him his call and he gave me one of his decoys.\u201d One of his most challenging commissions, though, was when a young couple approached him about carving a duck call in the form of Hoyt, their beloved bloodhound who had just died. \u201cCarving all the deep wrinkles was challenging,\u201d he says, \u201cbut when they got it, they both burst into tears, so I\u2019d say it was a success.\u201d<\/p>

<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A North Carolina woodworker crafts one-of-a-kind birdcalls<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":52067,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_cover_media_provider":"image","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_cover_video_id":0,"apple_news_cover_video_url":"","apple_news_cover_embedwebvideo_url":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1783,2407],"tags":[131,43,307],"authors":[2025],"issue":[2361],"recipe-type":[],"class_list":["post-16","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sporting","category-the-sporting-life","tag-decoy","tag-made-in-the-south","tag-north-carolina","authors-bryan-k-hunter","issue-march-april-08","location-north-carolina","rubric-made-in-the-south"],"acf":[],"apple_news_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe 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