Wingshooters Product Review

Western Rivers "Predation" electronic caller

I'm a fairly new hand at predator calling, having just gotten into it within the last few years.  Most of my calling has been done with an old Johnny Stewart cassette tape caller, but this year I upgraded to something a little bit more modern. 

The Western Rivers Predation caller is a moderately priced MP3 unit.  It's about half the price of the more expensive Foxpro line of calls, yet it offers many of the same features.  The unit comes with a 32MB hard drive and a 64MB expansion sound card.  It's worth noting that while you can purchase additional expansion cards from Western Rivers, they are nothing more than standard SD cards which can be bought at mass market electronics retailers for a much lower price than the $70 tag found at places like Cabela's and Bass Pro Shops.

I've wavered a bit in my rating of the product, going in between three and four stars, so ultimately the caller ended up with a three and half star rating.  The unit itself is pretty solid and well designed.  However, the first time I tried to fold the antenna down on the caller I accidentally pushed too hard and broke it.  A call to Western Rivers yielded an unsympathetic operator who sold me a replacement antenna for $14.95 with no apologies or willingness to replace it free of charge.  The caller immediately lost a full star in its rating.

While I was waiting for the new antenna to arrive, I found that a larger antenna from one of my old transistor radios fits perfectly, so I replaced the broken one with that and will use the replacement from Western Rivers as a spare.

The sound files preloaded on the caller were good choices, but some of them are just plain bad.  The three crow calls, for example, are horrible and called in no crows the first few times I tried them.  Fortunately, it is a simple matter to replace them with better sounds.  The predator distress calls and coyote calls, however, are excellent.  Although I called nothing in the first time I used it, the sounds were much better than those on my old tape caller.

The only other downside to the caller is that when using the remote control, it's up to you to remember which call is which.  The controller does not have a screen on it to tell you which call you've selected, so the best practice is probably to buy several SD cards from Best Buy and then load each of them up with similar sounds so that you don't suddenly hit a crow call when you meant to do a coyote pup whine.  It also helps to keep a list in your pocket to remind you which calls are which.  The caller does include slots to hold several SD cards so that you don't have to keep track of them yourself.