Split Reed Spotlight: Shawn Stahl

If you were to have a conversation with Shawn Stahl, without knowing beforehand who he was, you might never know that he’s one of the most decorated and accomplished waterfowlers in the industry today. You might even think that he’s just like every other duck and goose hunter out there (he sure would have you think so). However, those of us who know better, know that Shawn has accomplished more in the waterfowl industry than most other duck and goose hunters combined. With wins on top of wins in the world of contest calling and multiple accomplishments in the area of pioneering the gear we use today, it’s no secret that Mr. Stahl isn’t just your average honker killer, regardless if he does “put his boots on one foot at a time, just like everyone else”, as he says. Split Reed recently had the chance to interview Shawn and talk about his hunting, contest calling, and other careers inside of the hunting industry, just to get a better glimpse of what exactly he has done for our world of waterfowling today.

Shawn had a good thing going before he started his rock rolling in the hunting industry. He was an engineer in the office furniture business, but he was also running around the country, jumping from stage to stage at different goose-calling competitions. “That all started out hunting public dry land for geese, about 10 minutes from my house, and everyone started telling me, ‘Oh man, you need to contest call!’ and back then I didn’t really know what it was, but I traveled around during the summer on the weekends and would hit different contests”. Shawn notes that traveling around from contest to contest and meeting new people opened some doors for him to go hunt in new places and meet new people. Especially as he started to win. “I’d take a vacation a couple of times a year to go hunt. I had vacation over the holidays and I’d go guiding. I’d string together 8 or 9 straight days of guiding a few times a year and I’d put that money towards contest calling and other projects like buying a trailer and filling it with decoys” he says. Shawn began winning more contests than he lost and slowly climbed the ranks until there wasn’t a contest that he didn’t either win or at the very least make the final cut. In 2000, Shawn won the crown jewel- The World Goose Calling Championship. After that, he kept blowing in contests for about two more years then decided to set the call on the shelf (for contest calling, at least).

However, his career in contest calling isn’t where the story ends. It would only continue to grow from there. It’s no secret that in the early 1990s there weren’t many resources to learn how to blow a goose call, and even less as the short reed became popular. Stahl took matters into his own hands, and with a camera and his own experience and know-how, and filmed an instructional DVD on how to blow a Canada goose call. Starting with the basics of on-air presentation, all the way to building a contest routine. The DVD was called “Honker Talk”, and for anyone who wishes to get better on a goose call, I strongly recommend watching it. “Following that, we started making a DVD series called Fowl Pursuit,” Stahl mentions, “I think we went through 12 years with that series and sold it pretty much everywhere”.

In 2002, the economy came crashing down, and the office furniture industry took a hit, leaving Stahl and thousands of others without a job. Luckily for Shawn, he had some employable skills that made it easy for him to get a job in an industry he had grown to love. “The two things I knew were product development, and the waterfowl industry because I’d already had my feet in it. So I went to work for Avery for a couple of years, overseeing their product development”. A job that would send him overseas to China of all places. Not many people picture getting sent to China when they get a job in the hunting industry, but that just goes to show you that while you may dream of working in the industry, that doesn’t mean you get to hunt every day! Stahl says that he had his first baby boy in 2003, “He turned one on July 1, and I had to take off for China either the next day or the day after for 30 days, came home for two weeks, then had to leave again for 26 days. That was pretty rough. Having a one-year-old at home and I’m off in China. So I left Avery and went worked for a few different call makers here and there, helping out at different shops. I got into some freelance videography work, and then landed with Rich-N-Tone about 13 or 14 years ago”. Stahl has worked with RNT for over a decade now, running all their goose call-related things, and helping host RNT-V (RNT’s TV series) whenever they need some goose hunting content. However, he hasn’t put down the camera on his own entirely. Stahl still does some of his own freelance videography, and still works with a few different companies in the outdoor industry, overseeing product development.

When asked how he got proficient on a goose call, Stahl mentions that he was all self-taught, and mainly did so by listening to live geese and trying to mimic the sounds he heard. “When I bought my first short-reed, it was a Tim Grounds Half-Breed, and I had previously been blowing a flute. An old A-50 style flute, and a Ken Martin resonant cavity style call, and picking that thing up; that was entirely different,” says Stahl. Much like everyone else at that time, the Half-Breed was a completely different animal and one that took time and practice to get good at. “Most people when they blow a call, if it doesn’t sound good, they think it’s the call’s fault when in all reality they just aren’t that good at blowing a goose call. All goose calls are relatively similar in how you use them. It’s the same end product, just a different recipe”.  Shawn says that once he figured out the mechanics of the short reed, he went out and listened to birds, and spent hours and hours figuring out how to make the sounds that they did. He even went as far as recording live birds on an old camcorder and would play it back to allow him the chance to figure out how to make the notes he was hearing, and truly “dial in” the sound of a live goose. Shawn also notes that while it may be easier in today’s world to get online and look up how to do certain notes from certain callers, that’s not always the best thing to do. He says, “I think you fall into a box when you look up how to call and watch guys on YouTube. I don’t want to sound like anyone else, I want to sound like a goose. I’ve said this for years, I don’t think geese get book smart, I think they get conditioned smart, and if we’re all hunting the same way, whether it’s how we’re calling to how we’re setting out our decoys, geese get conditioned to that. And if it’s working, great! Try that, but if it isn’t working, then you need to try something different”. Even still, Stahl studies geese and listens to them while trying to come up with different notes and sounds to make while hunting. Mentioning that he doesn’t care much for listening to other callers and listening to them. “I’d rather listen to real birds and mimic what they do, then go on YouTube and try to figure out how to do a double-cluck triple-back-flip over the moon spit hyper note or whatever they want to call whatever they’re coming up with these days”.

Stahl has anywhere from 100-200 geese in his backyard during the Fall and Winter months, and he studies them. Watching how they interact with other birds. What they do, what they don’t do. Which sounds they make, and which ones they don’t. “Birds don’t talk to each other as much as we think they do,” says Stahl, “the longer I’ve been out of contest calling, the smaller my vocabulary has gotten, and the less calling I actually do out hunting. Geese don’t talk that much because they don’t want to give themselves up. That’s where the food is. Unless they’re getting really aggressive, geese usually are pretty quiet”. Stahl gives the advice to let the birds work when they’re coming at you. “Let the birds come to you, if they’re going to come, then if they go buy you, that’s when you get after them. That’s where I’ve started to see myself change a little bit and be more successful as I’ve gotten away from contest calling. I can still do all the trick notes, but those notes aren’t needed. Those are just to impress the guys when you’re working at a booth”.

When asked if waterfowl hunting was something that he grew up doing, Stahl notes that it wasn’t something his family did at all. While he did grow up hunting, waterfowl was not a part of the game that was chased. “If you grew up in the Upper-Midwest in the ’80s as I did, then you probably grew up hunting deer, pheasants, and you probably chased a lot of rabbits, and maybe some squirrels, but no one really chased geese,” Shawn notes. He adds that he started hunting waterfowl when he was 14 years old. He shot his deer for the season, and the fire was still lit, so, with the help of his dad, he tracked down about a dozen paper-mache decoys and the next morning killed two teal. “The light bulb went off in my head and I knew that this was cool, and it was something I wanted to do”. Then the rock kept rolling. From hunting ducks at nearby sloughs to public dry-land honker hunting to being able to hunt all over the country, Stahl has been chasing webbed feet ever since. One thing that’s noteworthy, is Stahl is also well versed in the art of hunting with beagles. A lost art in today’s world. Mentioning that his rabbit season would reach well into March, he and his grandpa would use a string of beagles to hunt. Shawn adds that while he loves all types of hunting, especially waterfowl, there is something special about watching a good string of beagles work a rabbit. That’s usually something you only read about in old books from Robert Ruark or Gene Hill, not very many people have had the experience of actually getting to see it unfold in real life.

It doesn’t come as any surprise when talking about his love for operating a call, Shawn says that’s his main love out in the field. It would almost be expected from someone who works for a call-making company, as well as a world champion competitor. He adds that it’s something that he loved from the moment he really learned how to start using a call. However, with all that said, Stahl also argues that calling isn’t as effective as it used to be. “A goose call is never the same as a real goose. It’s just a little bit different. I don’t know if the geese have just gotten conditioned to it, and these are just my thoughts, not scientific proof, but I think they’ve gotten used to short reeds, and I think they’re a little counterproductive now,” he notes.

“Ducks and geese aren’t as smart as we give them credit for,” says Stahl, “they’re survivalists, and they’re really good survivalists. They see the things that we do as hunters and learn to avoid those situations and those traps in the future. So when we learn how to set a new trap, that makes them vulnerable again”.  Stahl also talks about how the more things have changed, the more the tactics have stayed the same. You still need to have a good hide, you still need to be where the birds want to be, and you still need to have a decent decoy spread to be able to kill birds. “I want to make sure that I’m setting up where the birds want to be, or at least near where the birds want to be, then I want to make sure my spread looks realistic, my call sounds realistic, and then I want to spend a pile of time on my hide. You can be right where the birds want to be, but if they can see you, they’re going to go somewhere else”. Shawn says that he already has his blinds pre-grassed when they show up to the field, but they still send out a few guys with hedge trimmers and chainsaws to bring back as much grass and as many branches as they can, while a few others set the blind up, and get the already present grass in proper “hiding” order. It’s obviously clear that making a good hide is a top priority to Shawn Stahl.

Going back to the side of contest calling, Stahl had been dominant on a Tim Grounds Guide’s Best flute. That was his bread and butter, until ‘99 when he was at a contest and Jeff Foiles mentioned that he was in short reed country. Up to that point, Shawn had only ever been twice before the third round. However, in this particular contest, he was the only caller to make it to the second round with a flute, and that’s as far as he would go. Kelley Powers won the contest with a short reed, showing some proof that it might be time to switch over to short reed on stage. “My next contest was the next day and I came walking out and Foiles asked what I was going to use and I said I was going to use my flute, and he said ‘here, try this’, and handed me one of his prototype Strait Meat Honkers. It was a snow goose insert with a bored out end, and I had my Super Mag short reed that I’d been hunting with, so I took the guts out of that and slammed them into that Foiles call and walked across the parking lot and ended up winning the contest”. From that point, Stahl says that he put the flute down and ended up winning 5 out of 11 contests that year, and the next year won 8 out of 16, including the world title.

To speak to Shawn’s talent as a contest caller, the world goose calling contest is right in the middle of goose season in November, and Stahl says that he had been blowing a half breed all season to that point, and couldn’t find his contest call. It wasn’t until he was on his way to the airport to fly to Easton that he found it in his glove box. That didn’t exactly leave a lot of time for practice and re-acclimation, but it obviously didn’t get in the way of winning a world title. “I had been using a half breed, which takes no air to blow, to then try to blow my contest call, which takes a lot of air to blow. I was lucky there was no tiebreaker because I could barely keep my lips on the call”. But no tiebreaker was needed, and Shawn won the 2000 World Goose Calling Championship; after finding his call in the glove box on the way to Easton.

When asked about his most memorable contest, Stahl recalls his first contest, for a little unorthodox reason. “I was probably a little arrogant. A lot of guys were pumping me up at the local refuge area, telling me how great I was going to do, and I had never heard a contest routine before. I just figured I’d go there, listen to a routine or two and I’d figure it out”. That didn’t go according to plan. Stahl drew the bullet, had to step on stage first and says he was so nervous he could barely keep the call up to his mouth. “Needless to say, I finished dead last. That one is pretty memorable because I could have quit or kept going, and I’m pretty competitive so I decided to stick with it”. Just the next week after in Pt. Mouille Shawn won his first novice contest and finished second in the open behind Fred Zink. That just kept fueling it from there.”

In 2001 Shawn started using an RNT call, and won the two-man world goose in 2002 with it, and has been riding that horse ever since. Even after the calling contest days were put to rest. Then around 2007, his career with RNT took off. He now has his own signature series of calls called “Stahls Kalls” within the brand.

It can be plainly seen that Shawn Stahl is an incredibly talented goose caller and goose hunter. Having left an imprint that is ever-growing on the world of waterfowl hunting. From winning contests all over the country to killing geese all over as well, there’s no arguing the fact that Mr. Stahl has accumulated quite the resume and wealth of knowledge when it comes to being a successful hunter and caller. And an even nicer guy. Split Reed, and the author of this article, would like to thank Mr. Shawn Stahl for the interview, and all his efforts in helping pioneer forward the world of waterfowling.

When talking about Stahl, Bill Saunders of Bill Saunders Calls and Gear asks “Did you ask him about his fucked up thumbs? They look like fucking toes! I don’t know if that helps him on a goose call or what, but I swear to God, they look like fucking toes!” While The author has not seen Stahl’s thumbs, and we haven’t received any comment, it does leave one to wonder if having “fucked up thumbs” can indeed help your talents on a goose call.