Single-reed calls are the choice of most "professional" callers, because once you've mastered a single-reed call you can make yourself sound like more than one duck. The multiple-duck effect can benefit you greatly when hunting hard-to-work birds. However, the single-reed call takes a lot of practice, because you have to bring air up from the diaphragm, emit a short grunt, and stop the note with your tongue to get just the right note out.

Another decision that a prospective duck caller has to make is whether to buy a wooden or acrylic call. While wooden duck calls have been used successfully for decades, the proliferation of acrylic calls on the market now has more and more hunters using them.

One definite advantage of acrylic calls is durability. Wooden calls soak up moisture, which can change the dimensions of the barrel and thus change the sound; acrylic models don't have that problem, and a call fabricated from this impermeable plastic should last a lifetime.

START WITH THE BASICS
Once you've bought a call, you've got to learn how to blow it. Every hunter has to have some basic calls for both ducks and geese in the arsenal. We'll start with the ducks.

Ducks
As easy as the call may sound, some callers never master the basic quack, a short, two-syllable note that's produced by happy hen mallards (they do most of the talking). It's a great confidence call and is easily made by just saying the word "quack" into the call.

The lonesome-hen call can be very effective, especially when ducks are call-shy. This is nothing more than widely spaced, irregular, drawn-out quacks. You can base your lonesome hen on your basic quack, but remember to spread the quacks out and to make the call a bit lower and throatier.

Yet another standard call is the feeding call/chuckle, a rumbling call produced by saying tika-tika-tika over and over. The feeding call adds variety to the sounds you make, but shouldn't be overused.

One other good call to add to the mix is the mallard whistle. Besides being something else to add variety to your calls, the mallard whistle is easy to blow. If you venture out with young hunters, this is a great call to teach them, because they can blow it with ease, and thus feel partly responsible for bringing in the ducks. And an accomplished caller can produce all the necessary pintail and widgeon noises and chirps with the whistle as well.

Canada Geese
The standard call for goose hunting is the honk. Anybody who's ever heard a gaggle of geese fly over on a fall day has heard it. But callers often try to make it too complicated. It's made up of two notes, a low pitch -- deep, guttural -- and then a high one, the cluck or the honk. Just about everything else in goose calling is a variation on those two notes.