Ep. 54: Calling in Big Bulls: The Art of Bugle Escalation
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As a guide and hunter, I've spent thousands of days in the field. This show is about translating my hard-won experiences into tips and tactics that'll get you closer to your ultimate goal, success in the field. I'm Remy Warren. This is Cutting the Distance.

Welcome back everyone. This week we're going to be talking about one of my favorite elk hunting topics and that is calling elk. Primarily we're going to be talking about bugling bulls and bugling escalation techniques to incite a brawl. I'm going to give you the secrets to getting elk to play ball and a good formula for firing up a bull and playing out a bugle sequence from the location all the way to drawing that bull into your lap.

Calling elk can be one of the most exciting and honestly interactive forms of hunting there is. There's nothing like a direct challenge vocally to that big herd bull or the elk running around the mountain. I'm going to walk you through a cadence of calling to help you build momentum in a calling sequence. But first, I want to share the story of a bull that went from not wanting to play to getting pissed off and in my lap after I called him every name in the book.

This story takes place in Montana during the middle of September. Now, this should be perfect rut time, and it really was. But the trouble this particular week, it was really hot and there was a full moon. So I really believe that a lot of the elk rut activity was taking place at night.

I had a few days before I had to start guiding again. And like I always do, I'm out there hunting for myself. One, I use it as, Hey, I'm out hunting, chasing bulls. And two, now I'll know where the bulls are when it's time to guide. So killing two birds with one stone, um,

The day before, I think I had two days left before the hunters came in. So I'm out and I just, I really, me personally, the way I like to hunt, I like to bugle in elk and I just was not getting any response. So I was cruising spots, checking spots, going to a lot of different places and just couldn't really get anything to fire up.

But I did spot a group of elk the day before in this one particular area. It's really timbered, kind of like steep. I would say it's almost about three quarters of the way up the mountain below the alpine, just in this like steep, dark timber basin. But there's one side that had like some more openings and sparse. And I saw some elk moving through that with a nice bull in it. So I thought, okay, the next day I'm going to go in here and see if I can't get them to fire up.

But instead of going in right at first light, I decided I'm going to go in there like a few hours early in the dark and see if I can hear anything calling. So I get to the point, it's quite a while before daylight, but I'm just trying to locate where those elk are so I can kind of get myself into position before daylight or even just have an idea of if I'm in the right basin, if they're still here. So

I throw out a locator bugle, just a long bugle and get a good echo. So I know that I'm in a good spot where they might be able to hear it. Don't really hear anything, but I'm just sitting there. I've got nothing to do, but wait. And about 30 minutes after that bugle, I hear a bugle. Okay, cool. Those elk are at least here. So I wait and I just, what I do is I hit my timer on my watch and just see how long between the bugles are.

They're going and this elk, you know, I bugle back and just like nothing. I was hoping for one of those days where I bugle and then the just valley lights up with bugles everywhere. And it's just was not was not in the cards for me. So I wait and wait and no bugles and just kind of wondering, OK, did they move off? Do they hear me? Do they just not give a rats? What's going on?

So we wait a little bit longer. Now we're getting a little bit closer to daylight and I hear another bugle again. Okay, cool. So he's still in here and it sounded like bull hadn't moved. So I'm trying to analyze what might be going on, but I'm thinking, yeah, that bull's in here.

He's just, I don't know if he, maybe he can't hear me well. So I'm going to move out to this point, get a little closer now and maybe start closing some of that distance and see if I can start getting him escalated, getting him fired up. But he just did not sound like a bull that really wanted any action, wanted to play.

So I give him another bugle as it's getting closer to daylight. And now he's starting to bugle back. This was maybe after five minutes, he decides to bugle. Normally, okay, at least he's still making a sound. It's like, as soon as I think maybe he's not going to respond, maybe he's gone, he bugles back.

Okay, now we're getting pretty close to daylight. So I'm going to just close in on that spot. He hasn't really moved. So I go, I get a little bit closer. I throw out a bugle, but now I'm down a little bit lower and he's up higher. And I don't think that he can hear it as well, but he bugles back. Now I'm building a rapport with this bull. This bull that I originally thought really didn't care and wasn't going to start anything now is starting to get a little bit fired up. He responds, but he's just not that interested in me. Okay.

Well, I'm going to start building up. I'm going to see if I can get him pissed off because I'm at this point fairly pissed off. Like it's peak rut. There's elk in the area and this bull should be responding to these bugles almost immediately. It's like the best time of day. There's no better time of day where this can happen. I'm thinking what the heck's going on. So I start to get aggressive and then the bull kind of, he still isn't getting aggressive, but he's calling back. So I give him a challenge call and,

And he just kind of gives me like a, we're over here, dude, you know, do whatever you want.

this is not acceptable so I start running in that direction to start closing the distance every time that bull bugles now I'm just cutting it in half cutting it in half but keeping an eye out because I did see quite a few cows in there the day before so I don't want to blow them out of there but I'm also just getting closer and closer and now that bull's bugling and now I've got that bull to a point where I'll bugle he'll bugle almost immediately right back so I'm okay this is good

but I'm pacing my bugles out where I, he's not losing interest, but I still got him on the hook.

I also don't want him to know exactly where I am every time because I don't want him to start pushing the cows away. So I get to a point where it's no longer that sound way across the canyon in the distance, but I'm on the same hillside as that bull. So the last bugle I made was a fairly aggressive bugle with some chuckles right across the canyon. Now he chuckled back like, okay, now I marked that spot in my mind. I'm hustling to get there.

I get into position and now it's not me starting the bugle off, but it's him because it seemed like it was always, I would call, he would respond and then it'd be dead. So by the time I get now to where I thought he was, he bugles back. He rips out now a meaner bugle. I cut him off, start chuckling, give him a challenge. And that was enough to send him running my direction.

at this point i'm actually trying to film myself so i've got the camera set up i see the antler tips of this bull and a really good like mature heavy five by five probably the herd bull in the area just like a solid solid bull and i just it's like super thick it's not really like fern thick but it's the wet side of the hill so there's just all this growth all this crap and i've got this one lane i'm half through the deadfall i've got my camera set up and i just see the antler tips coming down

Sweet. Draw back, the bull steps out in the open, I give him my "Ew!" And he stops and looks my direction, and I look at my camera and I see that he just walked out of the frame. And I'm full draw, I don't know what my problem is, I'm like, "Man, you should just shoot this bull." But now I'm trying to like, at full draw, slightly move the camera over with my elbow, and as I do that, the camera just starts to like tip over.

Like, oh no. So I catch it then with my elbow. I'm trying to just get him in the frame while at full draw because he's standing there at 20 yards. And I finally, somehow, I don't even know how I did it. I'm like finagling the camera with my elbow at full draw. The bull's standing there looking in my direction. I'm like, perfect. I think I get it close. I'm like, screw it at this point. Settle in. And then the bull just like walks through the opening.

And I'm thinking, dang it. So I let down and I keep calling. The bull calls back and he's just right there now. And all I have is bushes. He didn't run off yet. He didn't do anything. He's just right there now bugling. I'm bugling.

Like he's 20 yards away and I have no shot. My one opportunity, he walked off. So we're just bugling back and forth. I start raking a tree thing and maybe I could get him to come back in this direction. I know I can't move because I'm stuck between all this deadfall. And then I hear some cows up on the ridge where he came from and he just turns around and goes off to the cows. And that was the last I saw him.

So then I keep following him and he ended up pushing the cows up and over. And then it just went quiet, got hot for the day. And I figured they just went down to bed or whatever and never got a response. But I thought to myself, okay, well, this is my last day to hunt for myself. I'll come right back in here tomorrow with a hunter and we'll see if we can't do the same thing. So the next morning I essentially started out doing the exact same thing, but I started a little bit later because I thought, okay,

There was a long period of time I was just sitting there in the dark with nothing, no noise, nothing. And just see if he ends up being in kind of doing a similar pattern to what he did that day. So my hunter comes in, I kind of told him, yeah, we got some bulls located. Let's go see if we can get one. So the next day we go in there, sure enough, kind of like the same deal. I fire off bull, like responds a while later. It's just kind of like,

that point where you call and he calls back in that just when you think there's nothing there, and then he decides to call back. So I start cutting the time in half where I keep calling. And then I get those responses. He starts building up. Now we've got that bull. But unfortunately, this next day, I started where I was. He was down below me the day before. He was a lot higher the next day. So we're hiking and hustling uphill. I'm like, this bull is going to shut up pretty quick. So we got to get in there. We've got a very small window of opportunity.

Now, I pretty much do the same thing I did the day before. It was like hard to get him fired up. But then we did the same exact thing across the canyon. Then I cut off his bugle. I pretty much did the same way of talking to him. I was just like, by that point, I'd called him every name in the book.

We get onto the same hillside of the bull. We hear him up above us. Get into position, set my hunter up, cut him off. He bugles. I cut him off. I start raking a tree. I can hear him raking a tree. I'm chuckling. He's chuckling. I'm glucking. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

And then the bull starts, I hear, and the bull starts walking down. And all I see is the hunter at full draw. And that bull walked within six feet of him. He releases the arrow. The bull runs off and tips over dead.

It was just one of those hunts where I remember it was very hard to get any bugles, but just by building an escalation of a bull that seemed like he didn't want to interact with me, building up an escalation in a way that got him going from, I'm not really interested to fired up and in our laps within the first half hour, hour of daylight.

I firmly believe that if you took some of the more successful elk callers every year, they'd be people that are very proficient with bugling. And I really believe that's because bugling is what really incites the bulls to talk to one another, as well as creates reactions between bulls to get them to come together and fight for a harem.

And so if you're able to mimic that, if you're able to copy that and insert yourself as a hunter into that where the elk thinks you're another bull, you're going to be a lot more likely to get that bull to come to you. Of course, cow calling can be successful and there's times that you should use cow calling. But in my experience, bugling is actually what gets the bulls to commit and to come in. And the better you are with a bugle, the more successful you'll be during that period at calling elk.

Now, you might be the type of person that maybe you've hunted elk a lot and don't bugle a lot because you don't really understand. Maybe you think you don't know what you're doing or you're new to elk hunting and the bugling is intimidating or you don't know what sounds to make. And that's a fair assumption. But I think that one thing you will learn is when you're out there, if you don't know what sound to make, just make the sound that that elk's making at that point.

It's a copycat kind of thing really helps build up and create or give you at least an idea of what sounds to make when. Now, I think more so or at least more important in many ways than the sounds is just this building or an escalation, the timing of when to call and the type of call that you might want to make.

when I think of it like this, over the years of elk calling, I always have this idea in my head, or I paint this visual picture of the escalation between two bulls fighting. So it's two bulls that there's no hunter involved. They're just in the woods doing elk things. What's going to cause those two elk to come together to clash antlers or to take that one bull and bring him to another one?

contrary to common belief, I think at least when I was growing up, I would watch elk hunting videos and it just seemed like the way that it was edited and all put together, you blow a bugle and an elk comes running in. And at least where I've hunted, that's not my experience in any way, shape or form. It's very difficult or can be very difficult to get the elk to commit to your setup. I mean, you might bugle and you hear another bugle and then that's it. And it's like, well, where does it go from there?

But over the years, I've kind of developed this idea of creating an escalation where you're continually talking with this elk, but you're building up the momentum and the intensity where it creates almost a frenzy where the elk has to react in some way. And you're hoping that you incite a reaction of the two of you coming together to fight. Now you're bringing a bow and he's bringing his antlers. So it hopefully works out good for you.

But if you're thinking about those two elk that are just calling, the first bull is not just going to go, I hate you. I mean, bugle. And the other bull is just going to go mean bugle back. Let's fight. And then they just run in and fight. I mean, maybe that happens sometimes. I mean, I've seen, I've done it enough where you can be surprised at things, but

Rarely is that the case. So it normally starts off some kind of escalation of where the elk at I'm calling for cows. And then the other bulls, like I've got cows over here and he's, they're kind of more or less talking to the cows where you kind of think they're talking to each other at first. So you're an elk or that other elk that's by itself calling out, Hey, any cows over here?

And that other bull hears it and he's telling the cows, no, I'm over here. These aren't your cows. These are my cows. And that other bull's like, you sure ladies, you don't want to hang out with me? Where are you at? And that other bull's like, come on ladies, stay with me. And at some point, then that becomes the bull with that herd saying,

leave me alone. I've got the dominance. And he's kind of more displaying for the cows than that other bull. And then that other bull is like, no, I'm more dominant. And then at some point it becomes the challenging bull saying you're a POS and then starts escalating into a fight where it starts out. He's just hollering at some ladies. He's just hollering at some ladies. And then at some point he's now saying, okay, you know what? These ladies aren't listening. I'm just going to beat you up and take your women.

And so that's kind of like the full escalation picture of what two elk are doing while they're bugling. And understanding that kind of helps you build a cadence in your calling of when to call and how to create that escalation from, hey, ladies, hey, ladies, to I'm going to beat you up. And if you don't come over here, I'm going to come steal your ladies. Let's see. Let's throw down. And that's what you want. You want to get that bull to come throw down with you.

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So I'm just going to go through, let's say, a standard morning or a standard escalation of calling and what I like to do. I started doing this a long time ago. I mean, as a teenager where I would bugle. And when I would bugle in an area, I would either like

look at my clock or I used to have like a watch that I'd wear a lot and just start a timer and see how long it took a bull to bugle back. Because I felt like the timing was really important in building that escalation. If I bugled and I had a great area where I could project a lot of sound and knew that something was going to hear that sound, and then it took a half hour or an hour for a bull to bugle back,

maybe or 10 minutes, whatever, however long it was, it gave me an idea of how interested that bull is, or maybe the threat that that bull saw me as, as well as maybe how willing that bull was going to be to build up into that go from talking to fighting mode. So a lot of times what I do is I'll throw out a location call.

And that I've got, I've got actually some calls right here. So I use this location call and it's more, it's not really an aggressive tone. It's normally just a one note tone. You could do it one notes, two notes, three notes, but something long where you're just trying to carry the sound. So if it's a Canyon where it's close quarters and I just try to throw that long sound out where I try to get it to echo and travel in the area that I'm at.

And I want that sound to just travel and hopefully entice the ears of whatever's around. So I just start out like this. Okay.

You're just like a one note or maybe a couple notes and just a long drawn out sound that's just meant to travel. You can't really mess that up. Just a long note, loud, loud enough to catch the ears of an elk in the area. Then I'll set my timer and say, okay, am I going to hear anything here? Listen, maybe it's an area that I didn't get like a really good travel of the sound. So I might not wait as long there, but if it's an area where the sound travels a ways or it's before daylight, I'll sit and listen.

listen and see how long it takes to get a bull to make noise. And generally as I'm hunting, I'm throwing out these location bugles sometimes just to get anything to respond back. So I know where the elk are at, especially if I'm in a new area and don't know where they're at.

So I do that, time it, and now if it took a little bit longer for that bull to reply, instead of just bugling right back immediately, I try to kind of mirror what that elk's doing. And so use the elk to understand how you're going to start calling, but also try to build that timeframe closer and closer together. So what I'll do, if it took 15 minutes for that first bugle to go off,

I'm just now going to reset my timer once I hear that bolt and I'm going to call back in about half the time. If it took him 15 minutes, I'm going to go about seven minutes, we'll call it. That's a little less than half, seven and a half minutes and bugle back.

Same locator call, just throwing that out there, not really escalating at this point, just seeing if I can get him on the hook, just seeing if I can get a conversation going, seeing if I can maybe understand what that bull has going on where he is. Maybe that bull is just another lone bull by himself and he thought that I was talking to cows that I have, or maybe that bull has a bunch of cows. I don't know at this point.

So I'm just trying to build up and escalate the timeframe that I get this bull to go back, especially those ones that don't really necessarily have a need to start calling or to start fighting. Probably a bull that's got a bunch of cows and maybe there's not really a lot of other bulls around. He's not really going to be that interested in screaming back and starting a fight if he doesn't have to.

So I'm going to set my timer and cut it in half, half the time. And then I'm going to reset it and see how long it takes him to come back again. If it takes him the same amount of time or if it takes him a closer time. What I'm looking for is building up that time where he calls back and then I cut that time in half and I call back. And what I'm trying to do is keep it going where it's just long enough that he's interested and

And slowly trying to shorten that time to where I can get it where I call. And then he almost calls back within a minute or two. Better yet, trying to get him to that point where I call and he calls back almost immediately. Because as that happens, it's building intensity. It's getting him more fired up.

And it's creating a situation where I now have this bull on the hook, where I know that this bull is a potential bull that I can call in. And I have got his location and now we're communicating back and forth. Depending on how far that bugle is and the type of terrain and everything, I might now decide once I've got him to a point where he's bugling back fairly readily, I'm

Or even before that point where if I'm, if I can see that escalation building, that's when I'm going to take off and start cutting the distance to him. Most of the time, this will happen. Like these location bugles will happen at probably a distance because it's not really going to escalate into that fight over those long distances. But I'm also going to key into the type of bugles he's making.

Now, as I get closer, as I move in in between the calls, I'm just going to start closing the distance every time between my calls. And at some point, it's going to build an escalation of the type of call. And it's going to turn to what I would call a display call where he's just saying, giving a good mean bugle to kind of assert his dominance, whether he has cows. If you hear that right away from a bull,

It's probably means that that bull has cows and he's telling those cows like I'm dominant. I'm dominant. Don't listen to that guy over there. I'm dominant, but I will try to match that. Or if he's not doing that, I'll do that and see if he starts to match that. Cause you'll notice that bulls will start to talk back and forth in the same tone. So if I'm just throwing out a, like a more of a long note bugle, you might get a lot of those in response.

If you start hearing that more dominant style bugle, that more aggressive bugle, that's what you're looking for to say that bull probably has cows, but he's talking to those cows and saying that he's in charge.

I'm going to then start escalating from a timing thing to more of a type of call thing where I'm matching his intensity and his passion. One thing with elk calling, I think to be a good elk caller, you really have to feel that call. You have to feel like you got to get into the mindset of that bull and understand what is he saying? Is he pissed? If you get a bugle backwards, like, Ooh, that feels strong. You want to reapply in kind. You want to give him strong, right?

I think there's a lot of misconception with people that hear a strong bugle and they're like, well, I'm just going to bugle weak because I don't want to scare him away. If you have that mindset, I mean, that's fine. Different strokes for different blokes.

I just would rather be a bull that's like worth a damn, worth a fight, where I'm the bull that's saying to those cows, no, that guy, you don't deserve that guy. You deserve me. I'm coming over there to kick his ass. Because if a bull rounds up his cows and moves away, it's probably that you're doing something right, not doing something wrong. And you can actually play off of that. So...

I start out meek, but if that bull starts to escalate or I want to start escalating to a fight, now I'm going to switch that cadence to a more aggressive sound. And hopefully that bull will start building that more aggressive sound. I'll start throwing in a little bit more chuckling. That's the, you know, like the...

And I'm going to start building that chuckling. And you should start hearing that bull doing the same. So we've gone from a cadence of throwing out a location bugle and maybe not getting a response right away to then cutting the time in half and getting that bull to start responding more regularly. Now we're going to start asserting more dominance,

And we're going to hope that that bull starts doing the same. Now, if that bull doesn't, so you throw out a more dominant sound where you're just talking to the cows and asserting your presence, and that bull just kind of keeps a more...

He doesn't kind of escalate to that level. You may find that it could just be a satellite bull thinking out by himself looking for a cow. And he'll probably at that point be coming in quiet. So if you kind of go to that and you give it a show, a display show, and the other bull doesn't respond that way, you may actually find that if you do that and the bull shuts up,

keep calling now start throwing out cow calls and other things because that bull may actually be coming your way and he may be more of a satellite bull that's just going to come in quiet and investigate and see what's going on so you can kind of build the escalation and then understand what that elk might be doing or what that elk might be thinking if you do that call though

You're more dominant. You throw out a call where you're just asserting that dominance to the cows and you keep getting that call in return. Now I'm going to start closing in that distance to that herd because I'm probably assuming that he probably has some cows or whatever, and I'm going to start making that sound. And now I'm going to get in there. And before I start to challenge him.

Now, a challenge call is more like a call where it's just a high pitch and then real fast, real aggressive, chuckle, chuckle, chuckle, or you'll start hearing some growls and some other things. But that's when you really know, okay, that bull wants to fight. That bull is probably going to come in. And I'll throw those calls out myself to see if I can incite that in whatever elk I'm calling to.

Once I've escalated the calling, so I've gone, I've started cutting down the time, the bull's starting to react. Now, while all that's going on, I'm closing in, I'm closing in, I'm closing in. I'm trying to close that gap between me and that elk. I'm never going to assume that that elk's just going to come straight to me. What I want to do is I want to get up in his business. And then when I get close enough,

There's going to be a point where I really want to piss that bull off. And I find one of the best ways is as that bull starts bugling, once he now is kind of initiating an angry bugle and challenging me or getting aggressive, I'm going to throw my call out there, maybe start chuckling,

at him and cut his bugle off. That's a surefire way to really piss off a more dominant bull. And in the midst of that, I might be raking a tree or whatever, because he's probably fired up and now I'm fired up and I'm trying to match that fire level. But also sometimes when I get in close, cutting him off and saying, oh, you're going to talk. No, I'm going to talk. You can't talk to those cows. I'm going to talk to those cows. And that is a really good way to try to get that bull to commit that last bit of distance.

Now that you've got a little bit better idea of bugling and building the timing and the escalation to go from locating that elk to hopefully getting him fired up and wanting to challenge you, next week we're going to jump into what I like to call building an elk party. So it's adding in those cow sounds and creating this illusion that you're

you are where the party's at. You're the bull, you're bugling, you've got all the cows, you've got the hot cows. So we're going to throw in some cow calls and just help build out an illusion to a full calling setup of not just the bugles, but creating a party that all the other elk will want to join in on.

If you're like me, I hope that you've got an elk tag this season and these tips will help you come September. So it's plenty of time. Bust out your bugles. Start doing some of these practices. If you listen to this podcast while you're in the car, that's actually when I do most of my bugling practice or calling practice. Grab some calls, grab some bugles, keep them in your truck. Generally when you're by yourself and you can cruise down the road, making cow sounds, elk sounds, bull sounds, whatever.

and be ready for September to go, to roll off and challenge that elk. So until next time, keep escalating the challenge. We will bugle at you later.

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