Petaluman Rich Peterson squeaks in fowl language with Kwakman Calls venture
With Turkey Day this week, hunters who are fond of fowl for dinner might ponder how to lure wild birds to their own demise. Rich Peterson, a Petaluma entrepreneur, speaks to turkeys, ducks, geese and other critters in their own language.
Peterson’s Kwakman Calls business is a division of A&G Tool and Die, launched by his father some 60 years ago. He makes a call named Tricky that sells for $35. Tricky will fool “the smartest of birds,” Peterson said. Whether turkeys rate high on IQ is a matter of hunter opinion. But this call beckons to them.
“It combines soft resin, heat-treated aluminum, fine acrylic and hardwood,” Peterson said. “Whether you’re at 10 feet or 100 yards, the range of sounds in this call will flat-out fool birds.”
Goose calls sell for $65 to $99. A custom-engraved Lucky 13 duck call in hot pink goes for $124. New in 2017 is the Storm duck call at $99 - “a double-reed mallard call with a devastating bottom end. Enough juice to break a duck down from a distance. Has rasp, squeak, squeal, pop,” the company website states. “Pick up this call and head to the blind.”
The company offers 16 different duck calls and six goose calls in a range of volumes, some raspy, others that sound like a young or older hen. “The hen is the vocal one,” Peterson said. Male ducks keep their quacks to themselves. “We do make a drake mallard call - more of a whistle,” Peterson said. The idea is to sound natural, a decoy that birds instinctively move toward.
He demonstrates the voice of a goose, then a duck. Uncanny.
“We have turkey calls, predator calls. We call just about everything,” Peterson said, including coyotes. “I have a howler that mimics a coyote. But to call a coyote, you sound like something dying - a rabbit. He’s looking for a meal. Then you get him.”
Peterson demonstrates the squeal of a rabbit in a coyote’s jaws. Chilling. “That’ll call a house cat,” he said. “Everything comes for a free meal.”
The Storm duck call comes in multiple colors: orange-crush pearl, Ferguson gray, ivory, mountain-dew pearl, blue and jet black.
“Machining and hunting run deep in our family,” said Peterson, who listened attentively to voices of thousands of ducks, and has manufactured their calls for three decades. He loves the work.
Kwakman Calls competes in a national duck-call market with the likes of Duck Commander, the Louisiana-based company run by the Robertsons, who starred in Duck Dynasty TV show.
Peterson flies to Colorado to hunt and ski. The business sells more than $100,000 worth of merchandise, including bird calls, a year- nearly 1,000 devices. Duck and geese calls are the biggest sellers. He barely keeps up with growing customer demand.
“We ship to New Zealand, Australia, Russia, France,” Peterson said, but primarily to the U.S., mostly the East Coast. “I am doing more and more in California. You go to Kansas, you are the odd man out if you don’t hunt,” he said.
“Go to the park and listen to a duck,” he suggested for buyers of new calls aiming to build skills. “Feed some bread. Park ducks make the same noises as a wild duck. Try to be natural.”
“I’m coming at it from an engineering” perspective, he said. “Use less air, make it quieter, more realistic.” He and other hunters test every new call before it goes up for sale.
He travels throughout the U.S. for sporting-goods shows: Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas and Louisiana.
Most calls are machined from acrylic with stainless-steel bands and reeds of Mylar, a brand of polyester film. He starts with acrylic rod. “I don’t have any CNCs (computer-numerical control machines) here,” Peterson said. He has two such high-tech machining devices at another shop where steel bands are made. Decades ago, bird calls were made from wood, especially walnut.
“A thousandth of an inch changes the whole tone,” he said. “I can work for a week on something and time flies by. I move air, bore size matters, slope matters. Some tilt forward, some back, some have grooves. Subtle changes make huge differences.”
Shortening a reed by a few thousandths of an inch can ruin it. A hair is roughly three thousandths of an inch in diameter. “Mathematically every insert has to be the same,” he said, and he experiments constantly with new prototypes. “I like the little nuances” of design, he said.
His shop is packed with machine tools, including a variety of lathes, grinders and drill presses. “I can stay competitive” by making everything from raw materials, he said. “We make all the tooling. I can do a better part on a manual machine than I can do on a CNC,” he said. “But I can’t put out the quantity.” A CNC machine can run all night long, swapping out tools as needed to machine a part.
“We used to do artificial heart valves, all the prototypes,” Peterson said. “We could get it closer,” to specifications within a few ten-thousandths of an inch. “Everything here is American-made. Imported acrylic is a lot cheaper, but it’s terrible” quality.
“I like coming down here,” he said. “Making stuff is just in my blood. I started hunting deer when I was 10, ducks when I was seven. I combine my trade with my pastime. I’m a happy guy.”
James Dunn covers technology, biotech, law, the food industry, and banking and finance. Reach him at: james.dunn@busjrnl.com or 707-521-4257
