Recently I spent a pretty fantastic evening with some friends. No one was on their cell phone or working at the computer. There wasn’t even a television or radio playing in the background. We were just a group of people visiting with each other while engrossed in the task at hand which was making wing bone turkey calls.  

A wing bone turkey call is exactly what it sounds like. You simply take the three bones in a wild turkey’s wing and connect them in a specific order to make a turkey call. It dates back to almost the history of man and if you believe the internet, it was first used around 6500 B.C.     

As earlier mentioned, a wing bone call itself uses three bones from the wing of a turkey. Specifically, it is the humerus, ulna and radius bones. The humerus is the biggest of the three bones and the bell or wide part of the call. The middle or center bone is the ulna which connects all three bones together. The smallest bone is the radius which is also the mouth piece of the call.   

When making the call, the first thing to do is to take all the feathers and as much meat as you can off the bones. From there, boil the bones in water until the rest of the meat falls away.  

Use a miter saw box to cut off the ends of each bone. After that, it’s important to blow out or remove marrow from inside the bones. Then assembling the call is just a matter of connecting all three bones together in order of size. The largest bone is at the bottom. A two-part, quick-drying epoxy is used to hold the bones in place. 

Once the call is glued together and dried, it’s time to actually use it. The sound is produced by sucking air in through the call. The best way to describe how to do this is to pucker up like you’re going to smooch and then suck air in. The desired sound mimics a yelp hen turkey, but it may take a little practice to get to that point.  

The entire process from start to finish took a little over an hour. The evening was both special and memorable in that there were three generations/age groups involved in making the call. We enjoyed being together, sharing the common goal of building two turkey calls.   

I would have never guessed that making a turkey call would be such distraction from modern technology. 

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