CARMEL, Maine — Mark Buzzell will tell you that his “eureka” moment — the instant he decided to start making game calls of his own — was probably more of a “You’ve got to be kidding me” moment.
The avid duck hunter, 49, had decided to order an award-winning call from a big box store. Duck season was fast approaching, and he decided he couldn’t live without the pricey call.
“When it got here — and I’m not the greatest duck-call-blower in the world — but it was horrific,” Buzzell said. “So I got upset that I’d spent $90 of my hard-earned money and I’ve got something that doesn’t even work.”
After reading about call-making on the internet and watching a few videos that illustrated the process, Buzzell made a decision.
“I decided, ‘You know what? If they can make it, I can,” Buzzell said.
And for the past five years, that’s exactly what he’s been doing, attending sporting expos and selling online through his business, Nor’Easter Game Calls.
Among Buzzell’s products: Calls for turkeys, ducks, geese, coyotes, deer and squirrels.
“If you can hunt it, I pretty much make a call for it,” Buzzell said.
And those calls he produces? They may not look like the calls you’re accustomed to.
That’s because Buzzell, who began handcrafting knives a decade ago and owns MAB Custom Knives, has used some of the skills he learned in that trade to make game calls out of some unusual materials.
“A lot of guys like to work with [common woods],” Buzzell said. “Me being a custom knife-maker, I’ve got a lot of stuff that other guys won’t work with. So [the two businesses] are a good mix. It gives me the chance to use some of the wood that I was using on my knives in the duck calls.”
The best part: Many of those original calls cost about $50.
The decision to turn each call into an original began shortly after he decided to create the first one on his lathe.
“I blew into [the first call], and it was like magic,” he said. “It sounded 10 times better than the piece I spent $90 for, and with the wood and everything, it was probably $15 worth of parts.”
So he started thinking: How can I make calls that are truly original?
“That’s when I took it to the next step, like using deer antler or giraffe bone, antelope horn, buffalo horn, stuff people don’t really work with,” Buzzell said. “So that guys could have a one-of-a-kind call that nobody else would see [on a store shelf].”
When he first started selling calls, he’d test his products on a pond behind a friend’s hunting camp, he said.
Ducks frequented the pond, after all. And he figured it wouldn’t hurt to try to communicate with the local mallards.
“If you can get them to talk back, and get the male to come right across the pond to you, you’ve got it perfect,” Buzzell said. And you could tell if you did it wrong: He’d have nothing to say. He’d stay in the back of the bog.”
Buzzell said he has long been an avid duck hunter, and sharing his calls with others who share his passion has been rewarding.
“It was always, ‘Get up before the sun even thought of coming up, bust the ice out of the way, put the boat in, and go,’” he said. “[And after I started making calls], the fun part was giving calls to buddies and having them try them out.”
As the business has grown, customers have begun to seek him out, Buzzell said. And some come with original materials of their own that they’d like turned into a call.
“I’ve had guys bring me wood from their yards and say, ‘This is a special apple tree. I want a call for my grandson, my son, my grandkids,’” Buzzell said. “And I build calls out of that.”
Buzzell has learned that building game calls is a nice companion business to the more labor-intensive craft of knife-building. And he says he has the right temperament for both.
“I’m a busybody. I don’t go to bed early. I stay up late,” he said. “I can either sit here and watch TV at night or find something that keeps me occupied.”
While it’s common for him to spend 30 to 60 hours on a single knife, the calls come more easily, and he can work on those while he’s waiting for a recently sanded knife blade to cool, or when a particular knife is being persnickety.
“Sometimes a knife doesn’t want to be built,” he said. It gives you a hard time and you need to be able to get away from it, and there might not be anything else to do if you don’t have any other knives [you’re working on]. So I can go right to the lathe and just relax and turn out a call.”
Buzzell points out that another business is operating under the same name, and using the same logo — that trademark case is working its way through the courts — and potential customers looking to learn about his line of calls should be sure to add a hyphen between the “Nor” and the “Easter” in order to go to the right website.
And he said despite the confusion that sometimes arises, he’s keeping plenty busy between the knife and game call businesses and his own full-time job.
“I kind of thought at some point I’d turn [game calls] into a business,” Buzzell said. “I really wanted to wait for retirement age to open it up full-bore, but it got so well-known that I’m sort of doing it now, as a hobby.”
