Predator Calling DVD Reviews

I purchased three Predator DVDs over the Christmas holidays and just finished viewing them. I was given no discounts nor do I get paid by anyone to do these reviews. I tried to give you an accurate and unbiased review of these DVDS. I get tired of reading reviews by magazines and other people that depend on payment from the companies making the products, so hopefully my reviews will not sound like infomercials. The following reviews are my personal opinion based on my own experience and forty years of predator calling. Good calling, Wild Ed




*** “Catastrophic” starts out with some sit on the edge of your chair bobcat hunts. It is more a watch the hunt of me and my guests than an educational DVD. However, for the observant or experienced hunter it does have lessons. It brings home how important a decoy can be in holding the attention of predators and keeping eyes off of the hunter. Gary Roberson takes us on some great hunts and shows that he is truly a professional. I very much enjoyed some of the hunts he presented. The professionalism goes downhill as guest hunters take the scene and I lost interest in hearing some of their opinions. Much of this part is just to showcase the Compucaller II that Burnham Brothers has on the market. Many of the South Texas hunts take place out of high dollar deer blinds which is not how most of us varmint call. The more I watched of this DVD I came to realize that this is about bobcat hunting not necessarily bobcat calling. In one scene a bobcat is arrowed off a dead deer after defending the deer carcass from a coyote. This DVD is worth the money but like me you may want to keep the remote handy to fast forward through some of the scenes. There are some excellent scenes of bobcat calling and responding to different sounds. Most of the filming in this DVD is done very well. I would love to see Gary come out with a Volume II that goes into the calling aspects and setups that would be of more use to those that want to improve on their own cat calling abilities. Wild Ed


***** “Hunting the Night Shift” Like the song says “It aint easy that’s the way you do it”. If you want to know how to set up and go out predator calling at night this is the DVD you want to purchase. These guys have taken night hunting for predators to the extreme and worked out about all the kinks that can be controlled. Anytime you are hunting the unexpected can happen but it will be the exception with the gear and rigging these guys have developed. I want one of those back of the pickup 360 degree chairs so bad I can taste it. I have been night hunting for predators for over 40 years and night shooting is not easy. These guys don’t hit them all but have as high a percentage of kills as I have seen. Randy Watson and Randy Buker do any excellent job of explaining what they are doing and how you can do it. I always like a DVD a lot more if people teach me how to effectively do what they are able to do. Randy Watson does an excellent job of explaining the equipment they use and how to use it. They do an excellent job of explaining how eyes look in the light. He also goes over safety and the importance of identifying your target or do not shoot. Randy and Randy will take you through the calls they each prefer and how they use them to bring critters into gun range. They cover both mouth blown calls and electronic calls. Watson covers nighttime calling site selection and the speed with which one should use lights at night extremely well. These guys even tell their secrets and tricks. A few of the night scenes are hard to see and hear but over all the filming is done well. In some shots you can actually see the bullet trail to the animal in the light. These guys need to produce another Volume soon as I could not get enough. I would also be interested in seeing their methods on daytime calling in that part of Texas. This DVD is a must have for anyone that hunts predators at night. It will have a permanent home in my collection. Wild Ed



**** “Texas Predator Pursuit”
Jeff Thomason and Todd Woodall present a lot of hunts over different terrains both in daytime and nighttime venues. The style is more like a come along and watch us hunt. The narration is pretty much non educational but they do have talking sessions where they try to explain in a how to manner. Their section on game calls is very educational and should be of help to beginners and even the more experienced will gain from the information. The night hunting part of the DVD was also very exciting with some good hunts. There are some good scenes with coyotes, grey fox and bobcats called from the truck out in West Texas. I thought that their nighttime hunting tips were right on track. The filming to me is just not quite in focus some of the time and much of the panning of the camera is to fast to watch. Jeff and Todd are very skilled predator hunters that hopefully will become better at filming. I understand there are four DVDs out by them and I plan on purchasing some more of their hunting DVDs. By the way I never missed a coyote seven times, I never had the opportunity for seven shots. Wild Ed

A Christmas Buck For Dinner

I took a small buck on Christmas day and spent half of the next day butchering the meat for a dinner with my wife’s family. I decided to prepare some fresh venison in a couple of my favorite ways. I took one of the back straps and cut off all the silver skin and membrane before brining for 8 hours in a brine of kosher salt, brown sugar, with garlic, allspice and cloves dissolved in a large mixing bowl. I then rubbed the back strap with fresh course ground black pepper. I also took the neck of the buck and trimmed on the membrane from it. I rubbed the neck with brisket rub which consists of kosher salt, course ground black pepper, garlic powder and allspice. Both of these cuts were placed on my smoker to cook for about 5 hours at around 225 degrees. The slow oak smoke permeates the meat with smoke flavor and hold the juices in the meat. It is cooked to a gorgeous red brown color by the oak wood smoke and has a flavor like no other. The fact that the meat is from our own harvest adds to the meal. Here are before and after pictures of the meat. Good eating, Wild Ed

Merry Christmas

May you and yours have a great Christmas and may GOD bless you in the new year. Travel safe and drive legal speeds. None of us need to get anywhere as fast as some of the people on the road here are driving. I saw two bad wrecks yesterday where people were hurt or died. I am going to take a few days and enjoy family and hope each of you do the same. Remember the reason for the season, Wild Ed

Texas Pecan Pralines

In my family the Christmas season is a time of unbelievable foods. The real treat as I was growing up was the homemade candies. We often had fudge, divinity and other treats. One I always liked was made from Ritz crackers spread with peanut butter and covered in chocolate, which I will pass on to you at a later date. My favorite was Pecan Pralines. Not the chewy Southern type but the hard sugary Mexican type of praline. I thought some of you might like to try your hand at making them. Here is the way I do it.

Texas Style Mexican Pralines

½ Stick Butter (melted)
1 cup White Sugar
1 cup Brown Sugar
2 cups Pecan halves
¾ cup Evaporated Milk (small can)
1 teaspoon Vanilla

Mix sugar, milk and butter together. Heat until boiling then add pecans and vanilla.
Cook until a drop dropped into a glass of cold water forms a ball. The first drops you put into the water will be stringy, then as the candy cooks the drops will flatten and finally when the candy is ready the drops will form a ball when dripped off a spoon into the glass of water. At this stage remove from heat and beat with spoon. When the mixture is cooling and starting to get hard drop onto wax paper and let harden.
Merry Christmas, Wild Ed

Kiss of Death Demo

I have received a lot of emails asking for a sound bite of the Kiss of Death lip squeak. Not being computer literate this is the best I could do. I hope this helps you learn to make the proper sounds. You may need to scroll to the bottom of the page and cut the music sound to hear the video without music. Good Calling, Wild Ed

Falconry Pictures Texas Style

I thought you might like to see some Falconry pictures taken by me and some of my friends of their birds in the field. Enjoy, Wild Ed

Easy Deer Camp Bread

When a bunch of grown men get together and buy supplies to go on an extended hunting or fishing trip it seems the bread they bring is often an after thought. The standard fare is plain thin sliced white bread. Sometimes someone sticks in some thick sliced plain white bread and a real thoughtful bunch will get a loaf of thin sliced wheat bread. None of these are very good to accompany a good meal. Everybody likes fresh baked bread but no one wants to go to the trouble to make it and few know a recipe by heart so here is a simple bread you really can’t mess up and takes next to no work as you do not knead the dough. It comes out tasting like some of the best sourdough bread you ever had. Here are the ingredients which are so easy you can remember them.  Now you can add whatever you like in your bread to this basic recipe.  If you want it sweet add sugar or syrup.  Berries and fruit can be added.  I often dump in a cup of grated cheese and a cup of chopped jalapenos.  The real beauty of this bread is that you do not have to knead it.  Just remember to cook in a greased glass or crock type dish.

6 Cups of Flour
2 Tablespoons of active dry yeast
1 Tablespoon of salt
3 cups or maybe a little more of room temperature water

Notice there is no oil or sugar, just flour, yeast, salt and water.
Mix the yeast in room temperature water and the salt into the flour
Pour water into flour and stir with a spoon. This will be sloppy, stringy wet dough. It kind of looks like you are making drop biscuits. Cover this with a cloth and let sit on the counter for 8-24 hours. I have used it in as little as 8 hours but it is better to wait.

When the mixture has set for at least 8 hours roll out into a greased cooking bowl or crock. The bread cooks better in a glass or ceramic dish and does not do well in a pan. I dust the mixture with flour lightly so I can roll it into the dish. It is very soft sticky dough and can not be picked up. Once in a baking dish I let it sit for 1 hour before baking. Bake at 375 degrees for approximately 45 minutes or until golden brown. My uncle recently made this bread and called to tell me we need to make the recipe bigger as it did not make enough or last very long at his house. Butter and enjoy, Wild Ed

CASH FROM THE BEGINNING

This article is by a close friend of mine and his first year in Falconry. Hope you enjoy it, Wild Ed

I got a late start last year so I'm in my second season but still in my first year. I trapped my passage male red tail in early December of 2006. His name is Cash and what a great first year we had! I would like to thank my sponsor Wild Ed for putting up with the several thousand miles of driving to get this dream even started not to mention the months of questions that led to the driving. Ed was really there to help or answer question everyday at any time I needed him. He came to my house for my inspection as well as invited me on every trapping trip he went on. Trapping was slow last year and birds were hard to find. I drove nearly 4000 miles in my search for a healthy red tail. On December 10th I decided to drive down near Tilden, TX to have a look because my sponsor and I had been down there earlier in the year and I had spotted a few passage birds but I had not yet received my permits. As soon as the sun peeked from beneath the earth I saw a great looking bird high on a power pole. I tossed the bal chatri and the game was started. I parked down the road a little ways to look back and I could not see the hawk anywhere. I could not see the trap either. Soon I realized that the hawk got the trap and pulled it off the shoulder into some tall grass before I even got parked. I made my way back to the area and removed him from the bal chatri. It was clearly a passage red tailed hawk. I examined him closely because I have found several hawks that appear nice but then discovered bullets holes in them, holes in their crops, broken toes and or talons. This hawk looked healthy but had a large amount of lice and subsequently a lot of feathers eaten. His keel felt about 50% and he weighed 940 grams with a hood and sock on. I decided he was the right hawk for me and returned to Central Texas to start what has become the greatest of adventures.
Cash manned very quickly and always seemed to find something around the yard that scared him more than me. The strangest things would send him into a panic. My kids and dogs could run circles around him and he would never lower his foot, but if a car drove down the gravel road and he heard it coming he would go nuts. Not at the vehicle itself but the sound of it. The AC condenser running has the same affect. My sponsor Ed had a solution or sound advice for every stumbling block I hit and almost made this ancient art feel rather simple. He fed on the fist after the third day and was on the creance by the 5th day. On December 30th he flew free for the first time at 849 grams. Ed and I took Cash to a large field for a few last minute creance flights then Ed said, “Cut him Loose". He flew great and followed well. It was the proudest moment in my life since the last of my 3 children’s birth. We did not find any game that day but treated the time as extended training. Within a week Cash was killing squirrels and rabbits almost every outing. Cash will crash any brush from tall weeds to cedar piles and his feathers are still unbroken. I flew Cash on several species of captive bred fully flighted birds with success as well. I had heard of a few people hunting African Guinea Fowl so I had to give that a try as well. I must say that it truly a humbling experience. Every bird is an eager watchdog and any movement at all will cause an alarm to be set off. And if your hawk does get the opportunity to give a chase the most likely ending will be a hawk sitting on the ground with a fistful of tail feathers hoping he has a bird in the pile somewhere only to be disappointed. I will attempt Guinea Fowl again in the future. Cash learned a lot his first season and so did I. He learned that he had to work hard for his meals and that the days of sitting and waiting for food to run to him was over. I learned that weight control and hunger were not the same thing. I'm still working on the details though. Weight is my biggest challenge to this day and as I become more consistent so do my odds of success.
I can honestly say that my hunting days with Cash far exceeded any expectations I had. I have not touched any of my rifles or my many traditional bows since his first free flight. I put Cash up to molt in late March and began a quail, pheasant, chukar, rat, and button quail breeding project. Needless to say Cash ate very well this summer and it shows. Cash has his adult feathers now and only a few of the lice eaten feathers remain. His head has the most of the damaged feathers but I can see a few new feathers growing in so I think he will look stunning this year. I have already lowered his weight and have hunted him 3 times this season. He is flying in the 980 gram range now but still needs to be dropped some. In his first two hunts he got a fox and a ground squirrel but on the third hunt we did not find a single slip. I tossed a cock pheasant at the end of the hunt and Cash nailed it 30 foot in the air with no problems at all.
This looks like it will be a great year for Cash. With the nice rains we have had and some conservative hunting last year the game populations in my area seem to have improved quite a bit. I also put in some time this summer and acquired nearly ten times the hunting land I had last year allowing me to spread out my hunting to conserve game even more this year. I wish everyone a great hunt this year and look forward to seeing you all at the meet this January.
Dustin M.

Predators, Varmints and the Kiss of Death

When I was a small child I spent many holidays with my grandparents. They owned a ranch near Round Mountain, Texas a small community southwest of Marble Falls, Texas. Sometimes my grandfather would go to Marble Falls for cattle feed and supplies and I got to ride along. It was always a special trip to town for we would stop at the Blue Bonnet Cafe, a Texas tradition, for granddad's coffee and pie. I would get a soft drink which I drank as fast a possible so I could ask to go across the street. Permission granted I headed to my favorite shop in the whole world. It was Burnham Brothers Sporting Goods and for a youngster eat up with hunting this place was heaven on earth. They used to have a window full of live rattlesnakes and all the latest hunting gear, but better than that it had Murry and Winston Burnham. They would sit in the shop and tell stories about calling in predators with calls and many times with sounds they made themselves. I considered these two men the superstars of predator calling. I would sit and listen to whatever golden words of advice they would give me and go back to the ranch and practice varmint calling for hours. Two of my most prized possessions were Burnham Brother Predator calls. One day when the Burnham’s were passing out the gospel of varmint calling the subject of lip squeaking came up. I do not remember if it was Murry or Winston that helped show me how to suck on the back of my middle finger and make this wonderful squeak that sounds something like a young squirrel, rodent or even rabbit in distress. Learning to make this magical sound was the beginning of a lifetime of calling animals.

The sound is simply made by making a kissing sound with your lips and pressing them against the palm-side of the middle finger. You can play with the way you do it until you get the best sound and volume. Most people would call me a liar if I told them about the hundreds of animals that have come to this sound. I will never forget one icy cold morning when my uncle and I were going to break ice on the stock pond so the cattle could get water. As we drove through the pasture a grey fox ran across the road. At that time grey fox furs were worth about $30.00 which was a lot of money back then. We cut the truck off and set for a couple of minutes. I then began to squeak on the back of finger and here came the fox running to capture what thing was making such a frantic scream. This was the first time I had a witness to what I could do with this sound. I became a success at squirrel hunting overnight. Squirrels that hear the sound may come running or move from cover. Many squirrels will start barking and chattering upon hearing the squeak. I have called numerous hawks, owls, coyotes, foxes, coons, ringtails, bobcats, feral cats, ground squirrels, rock squirrels, wild dogs and I am sure others I can’t remember. I have had even deer, javelina and feral hogs come to the sound, maybe out of curiosity, but they came. This is one call I always have with me and do not have to remember where I put it. To the Burnham’s wherever you now are I want to say thank you for a lifetime of making memories and instilling the flame of predator calling in my heart. Even 45 years later it still burns. Good calling, Wild Ed

What to Look for in Binoculars

I got the following question from Paul R.

Subject: binoculars
Message: Can you give me a brief overview on why you recommend the binoculars that you recommend on your site and also what is most important when choosing binoculars for falconry/hunting?

Here is the answer I sent him.

Paul, I feel that objective size and weight are two important items for me. I can not afford the real high dollar glass such as the German binoculars so I try and find the best for the money I can spend. I look for an 8-10 power for birding and hunting. If was looking at raptors from a vehicle I would go with 10-12. I also feel you need at least a 40mm objective lens for light gathering. I have had binoculars with smaller objective lens and lose the ability to see clearly at low light conditions such as dawn or dusk. Coated lens are a plus and so are waterproof glasses. All in all you get what you pay for so go to a big sporting goods store and see which are the clearest and feel the best in your hands. We all have different eyes and face shapes, if you wear glasses make sure you can see through them with glasses on as some have poorly designed eye cups for glasses wearers. Another important issue is warranty and service. All this should be looked at when making a binocular purchase. Good Viewing, Wild Ed

Customer Service Saga Concludes

Corey Foy of Simmons Optics, a Meade Instruments company, came through and helped me find the rubber eye ring for my Simmons scope on my rifle. I know he went the extra mile and hope that others have similar results. I am always willing to give someone a chance to correct a wrong. Hoping you have a good one, Wild Ed

TEXAS WILDLIFE ALL AROUND US

I am often surprised by the animals we see while out on the family place in Lampasas County. The place is a little over 300 acres and I am limited to hunting and using about 100 acres of this. The land is only about 15 minutes from downtown and has small tracts and houses on several sides of the place. We have seen numerous hawks such as Coopers and Red Tailed Hawks. I have seen Great Horned Owls and the small Screech Owl that we hear calling at night. I have seen a Peregrine Falcon as it passed on migration to the South. There are the normal Raccoons, Squirrels and Rabbits along with the Texas Armadillo. I have had the secretive Ring-tailed Cat use one of the deer blinds for a house. We have seen Rat snakes, Copperheads and Rattlesnakes along with various grass snakes that I can not identify. When we camp we often hear coyotes and foxes at night and sometimes catch a glimpse of them crossing a pasture.
Yesterday I got a shock but then I should not have been surprised. I was heading out of the place up to the gate on the county road and saw what looked to be a giant jackrabbit sitting in the road. I drove closer not paying attention until something in my brain said stop and pay attention. The creature changed its position somewhat and the ears perked up where I could see them. I was looking at a rather large Bobcat. As I drove closer he turned and trotted into the brush and vanished. What a regal beautiful spotted cat he was. I hope he stays around a long time. Keep your eyes open, Wild Ed