Quaker Boy - Twisted Whitetail Combo Call

It’s a combo pack, and a really embarrassingly bad one at that.Included here, and arguably the best call in the pack (which isn’t saying much), is the Ridge Runner Hex grunter. Please don’t read that as an endorsement of this particular call, which is by far the worst grunter I’ve ever used, and definitely among the worst on the entire global hunting market. Upon blowing into the Ridge Runner Hex, you can easily hear the reed flapping around in there, slapping against other parts of the call, a plastic-on-plastic fluttering noise that announces its cheapness to the world. I mean, this thing sounds like it’s going to fall apart just by blowing into it. And the grunts come out sounding hollow and pathetic. No deer with a sense of shame is going to allow himself to be drawn in by such a cheap sound.You can adjust the sound by manipulating the O-ring or by extending/collapsing the tube ending, but doing so just makes the sound quality become even worse than it already was before, so forget about changing the tone. Simply leave the O-ring in its default position, and pray that whatever is out there is stupid or deaf enough to be drawn in by Ridge Runner Hex’s slapdash grunts.It’s sad, really, because Quaker Boy has had better grunters on the market that they could have included here instead of the Ridge Runner Hex. The Brawler, for example, would have been way nicer to include; but that call has some pitfalls of its own, which are beyond the scope of this particular product review.A Weezzy call got slapped into the mix. There’s not too much to say about this weird little thing. Its tones are off, and it lacks volume. Panic wheezes are exceptionally loud, and Weezzy will never be able to capture their volume no matter what you do with it. Even snort-wheezes have significant volume, but Weezzy simply cannot provide the threatening, aggressive tone of a buck’s snort-wheeze challenge, or a reasonable portion of its volume. It can’t wheeze; it can’t snort-wheeze; it can’t do much of anything, let alone produce a believable deer noise. Just a complete loser the entire way around.Next in the package, you get a Bleat-in-Heat call. Tilt it, and it makes what Quaker Boy claims is a doe bleat. The tone isn’t good, and the pitch is off. The deer sounds sick, and if the buck surmises that you’re an ill doe, he’ll keep his distance, which is never good. Make what you will of the Bleat-in-Heat; I’ve never gotten it to make a noise that I’m willing to hunt with. I’m not comfortable using something that sounds as bad as this. But hey, some people swear by can calls, so if you’re willing to jeopardize your auditory presentation with this wonky thing, then knock yourself out.There’s also a Twist-a-Bleat, a tool used for twisting your bleat can call in case you’re too lazy to simply tilt your own hand. When it was sold separately, Twist-a-Bleat always seemed like a gimmick to me, just a trick to separate lazier hunters from their money. Having tried it out in this pack, I can tell you that you lose a lot of control over the sounds that your can makes by using this thing. Using your hands makes it easier to change up tonal length in ways that the Twist-a-Bleat simply can’t. It’s also easier to cup your hand around the end when manually manipulating your can, something that’s pretty awkward to do if you’ve screwed Twist-a-Bleat into a tree. And if you don’t have the means (or the property rights!) to screw this cheap garbage into the tree, then it’s of zero value. All in all, I don’t understand why Quaker Boy would include Twist-a-Bleat in this pack; either their faith in its performance is overly inflated, or they simply needed a way to get rid of excess stock.Quaker Boy bills this combo pack as a “Complete set,” and “All you need.” Let’s set aside, for just a moment, the fact that there’s no fawn distress to attract does; there’s no rattle bag or antler analog; and so many other auditory aids to your hunt that are missing as well. What you actually do get in the Twisted Whitetail Combo pack is such a letdown anyway, and of such poor sound quality regardless, that the included calls are virtually unusable. So if a newbie hunter is starting from scratch and thinks that the Twisted Whitetail Combo pack is a viable option for going from zero to “Complete set” in one fell swoop, then he’s going to be sadly mistaken, and is ultimately going to need to replace every single one of these pieces of garbage with better, actually useful calling tools once he hears for himself just how lousy these second-rate calls are.You get a Quaker Boy sticker for the truck. Not a particularly cool one, neither; the Quaker Boy logo itself would have been much better. I stuck mine on a journal instead of the truck. But even then I peeled it off after a while, and threw it in the garbage just like I did with every single one of the calls in this package. When I did that, the decal left just enough sticky residue to be annoying, but didn’t seem like something that could withstand the elements had I chosen to deface the truck with it.All in all, you should save your money. What you ultimately pay for the Twisted Whitetail Combo pack, you should instead invest in a single good call of equal (or greater) monetary value. You’ll get better sound, which translates into better success afield. Believe me; a single good call is better than the handful of worthless trinkets that this combo pack offers.You know those news stories about dead whales washing ashore that have a literal half ton of plastic in their stomachs? A portion of that plastic trash will undoubtedly consist of Quaker Boy’s Twisted Whitetail Combo packs.