Honk if you like goose calling

Trevor Shannahan lifts his custom-designed, hand-tuned, glittering blue instrument to his lips and plays the soundtrack to life on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

“HA-RONK!” he begins. “HA-RONK!”

Shannahan sways like a jazz trumpeter taking a solo. He crouches, bends at the waist, and turns to and fro, his hands fluttering as he blows a cacophony of honks, moans, purrs and growls. Close your eyes, and he sounds just like a flock of Canada geese.

He is a one-man gaggle, and a young man with a dream.

The Eastern Shore is to goose hunters what Augusta National is to golfers — hallowed ground. Though the skeins flying overhead are not so plentiful as they were decades ago, the Canada goose remains as much a part of the region’s identity as the blue crabs scrabbling along the bottom of Chesapeake Bay.

“Even if you don’t hunt, you know about the goose-hunting traditions around here,” said Shannahan, 20, a sturdy Eastern Shore native who has been hunting since he was 4 and who for the last four years has been competing in calling contests across the country.

In mid-November, the historic town of Easton will host its annual Waterfowl Festival and the World Goose Calling Championship, now in its 35th year. Marylanders have won the world championship 13 times, more than residents of any other state. Shannahan, who competed in the Maryland state championships in July, hopes to win No. 14.

First prize is worth thousands of dollars, a trophy, a grab bag of merchandise and, just maybe, fame.

A competitive goose caller needs lungs like a bellows, a musician’s ear and obsessive attention to detail. John Taylor, the 1998 world champion from Quantico, Md., remembers filming top callers’ routines and watching them over and over, studying how they held the call and how their throat muscles flexed and bulged.

Carved from exotic woods, molded from plastic or turned out of gleaming acrylic, the calls are basically hollow tubes shaped to please the eye and fit the hand. Inside is a single reed made of Mylar. A caller creates notes through breath control, tongue positioning and by opening and closing the hands around the call’s bell-shaped exhaust.

A call that will fool a flock in the field can be had for $20. But a first-rate specimen, laser-engraved and hand-tuned, can command $250. Some callers switch from brand to brand, hoping to find a model that fits their lips and style like a custom suit.

In competition, each caller performs a 90-second routine based on what might happen during an actual goose hunt. First comes an ear-splitting greeting to an imaginary far-off flock. Then, with a series of clucks, moans and honks, the caller tries to lure the geese ever closer.

At one point, a caller must pretend to lose his control over the birds and frantically call them back. And then, as the time ticks down, a series of murmurs and contented grunts brings the imaginary flock in for a landing.

To the uninitiated ear, it is nearly impossible to know whether a caller clucked when he should have honked. But judges — expert callers and often former champions — listen for specifics.

“I think first, it’s about control of the instrument,” said Sean Mann of Trappe, Md., who won the world championship in 1985 and 1986. “I want to know how you’d bring the birds into your [decoy] spread, but I also want to know that you’re a student of the critter, that you’re bringing in something that you’ve heard a goose do in the field.”

Added Taylor: “You hear them doing a lot of fancy stuff and you say, ‘Holy Moses’ — but it doesn’t sound much like a goose.”

For a few, calling becomes a profession. Mann, 48, grew up with the region’s marsh mud “squishing between my toes” as he fished, crabbed and hunted. At age 7, he called in and killed his first goose, a solitary bird that flapped through an early morning fog in response to his experimental bleats. “I was ruined for life,” he said.

In 1981 he entered the world championships on a dare and finished fourth. Not satisfied with the calls then on the market, he began experimenting and by 1984 had developed the Eastern Shoreman, a 10 3/8-inch-long wooden call that resembles a souvenir baseball bat. He didn’t win that year’s contest but took orders for 25 calls at $100 each at a time when calls typically fetched $10.

He won the next two world championships, launching a career that now includes a call-manufacturing business, a guiding service for waterfowl hunters and a gig as host of a cable television hunting show, “Beretta’s Waterfowler’s Edge.”

Mann’s status “certainly attracts some business, like people who want to play golf with Tiger or Phil,” he said, referring to top golfers Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. “But all it really means financially is that you have a chance.”

Taylor, 46, doesn’t even try. Though he sells his Shore Thing calls for $150 each, he never has given up his job as a corrections officer. “I don’t depend on this to pay my bills,” he said.

Yet it is his passion. When the Maryland goose seasons were closed for six years in the 1990s because of declining populations, Taylor would go out into the frigid dawn with his call and decoys, leaving his shotgun behind. Then he would lure the geese, thrilling to the spectacle of the majestic birds landing all around him.

“It is our life,” he said. “Every day I talk to someone about geese, goose hunting, goose calls or goose calling, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

Shannahan represents the next generation. He hunts at least 50 days during Maryland’s 60-day goose season. Much of the rest of his year is consumed by calling — blowing practice routines and posting them on YouTube, traveling to contests and, lately, trying to build a better call himself.

In December, he began turning calls on a lathe in a small shop at his home. He’s learned which materials to avoid (cocobolo wood, though beautiful, gives him a rash) and experimented with reed configurations and bore diameters.

In June, he flew to Michigan to work with a manufacturer to design the perfect call for his style. The result, called the Stage Reaper, is inscribed with Shannahan’s signature, like a major leaguer’s name on a Louisville Slugger. It will sell for $130 to $140.

He doesn’t expect call making to become his career. “I do it for fun.”

His custom instrument didn’t help Shannahan in late July at the Maryland state championships. He was cut after the second of three rounds. “I liked it,” he said of his routine. “The judges didn’t.”

He consoled himself with a victory the same day in the state duck calling championship, qualifying him for the World’s Championship Duck Calling Contest in Stuttgart, Ark. If pressed, Shannahan will admit that he is probably better at duck calling, at least on the contest stage.

Which world championship would he rather win? The duck contest is older, probably more famous, a touch more lucrative and attracts more entries. But as a son of the Eastern Shore, Shannahan is conflicted.

“I love goose calling so much.”

kluft@tribune.com