If you want to call a turkey, just talk to Randy Sullivan. He can give you a lot of choices that he creates in his Plympton workshop: slate calls, wing-bone calls, box calls, scratch box calls, trough calls, long paddle box calls that make a higher pitch, each designed to catch the ear of an ambitious Tom looking for a hen. Or you can work a crow caller. Why would you want to make sounds like a crow? To wake up the turkeys early in the morning so you can take your shot. Or owl calls, so turkeys think there are owls nearby and flush, or leave their cover.
The workmanship is beautiful, but Randy doesn’t take all the credit for that – the choice of the wood gives a lot to the appearance. A favorite is flame elm, a pale beauty with a streak or two of rose pink running through it.
Each handcrafted turkey call makes a distinctive sound. Randy demonstrated how a piece of wood used in the long paddle box caller is shaped to a specific curve to help give the call its voice. He told of his friendship with Dick Kirby, founder of Quaker Boy Game Calls, a legendary turkey call maker who gave Randy the formula for that curve, and Randy uses it to this day. The friend has since passed but the art of the turkey call continues through the friends like Randy he mentored.
While once you could just look up a Sullivan turkey call on eBay; these days he is more selective. He now has a following, people he makes calls for every year. “I just started making calls for the kids,” Sullivan continued. “Probably 70% of the calls I make go to the kids or for fundraisers all over the country, and that’s all right.” He said he donates a fair number of calls to the Carver Sportsmen’s Club for their youth hunts and gets a lot of satisfaction when a young hunter sends him a picture of their first turkey.
Once plentiful in colonial Massachusetts, the last known wild turkey was killed in 1851, according to the Mass.gov website. Native turkeys had been driven out of their habitat and hunted to extinction. The Mass Wildlife naturalists undertook re-introducing the wild turkey to the Massachusetts landscape in the western part of the state in the 1970s. Biologists relocated 37 wild turkeys from flocks in New York state. Those birds thrived and by 1978 the count was estimated at about 1,000. The turkey relocation and re-introduction was a success. Turkeys were introduced to areas east of the Connecticut River and throughout the northeastern, and southeastern areas of the state until the mid 1990s when the count for these birds was more than 25,000. In 1991 the wild turkey was named the official Massachusetts Game Bird.
If you’d like to talk turkey with Randy Sullivan just email him at [email protected]