By Tom Kuglin
We came from all corners of the country to Idaho to learn from the most accomplished elk caller on the planet.
Urging us to close our eyes, Corey Jacobsen brought the bugle tube to his lips and sent a seamless call across the camp, hitting three pitch-perfect notes bookended by purposeful growls that faded into the Idaho forest.
“Now if you’re in that herd bull’s bubble and he hears that location bugle, he’s probably going to take his cows and leave,” Corey told us. “But now imagine if he hears this.”
The screaming challenge that followed left no questions about the intentions behind it, exuding the anger and unfiltered confidence of a would-be bull that had come to take the herd of cows.
“If the herd bull hears that, it’s almost an involuntary response,” Corey said. “It’s like he doesn’t have a choice but to come in and put down a rival.”
We’d come from all corners of the country to a ranch outside Donnelly, Idaho, in late July for Corey’s inaugural Elk 101 Elk Camp. For three days, 24 of us would be under the tutelage of the most decorated elk caller on the planet, with days filled with instruction, friendly competition, good food and great people all sharing the common goal of learning to talk to elk.
Education of an Elk Hunter
Corey, the 11-time winner of RMEF’s World Elk Calling Championships, is a veteran of the outdoor show circuit. He also offers instruction through OutdoorClass, Elk 101 and the University of Elk Hunting online course.
“Elk Camp is really the next level of what we’re able to provide through videos and diagrams online or through seminars,” Corey says. “Besides being out there in September when the bulls are bugling, this camp gives us the best opportunity to share our experience and tell you exactly what I would do if I was in the field hunting.”
As a new opportunity, Corey and other organizers including his longtime hunting partner Donnie Drake were unsure of the response, so when the first Elk Camp sold out in only two hours, they quickly moved to offer a second session. That too sold out—a testament to the desire for hunters to learn and Corey’s and Donnie’s enthusiasm for teaching.
“I grew up in a time when people were so secretive, it was ‘Don’t tell anybody where you hunt, don’t tell anybody how to hunt, because if they go kill an elk, that’s one less elk I get to kill,’” he said. “But there are so many people out there who don’t have a mentor, who didn’t have a parent teaching them how to do it, and they’re hungry for a resource. (Call maker) Will Primos once told me, ‘If you teach somebody to love something, they’re going to want to protect it.’ I feel like it’s my responsibility to go out and get all these people to love elk hunting.”
The son of renowned outfitter Rockie Jacobsen, Corey grew up in the Clearwater region of Idaho where elk roamed right out his backdoor. Because his dad guided much of the fall, as a kid Corey learned the ways of wildlife largely through trial and error. His mother would often drop him off in the woods bow-in-hand after he attended class in a one-room schoolhouse.
Yet as he grew older and honed his elk calling, hunting success did not come easy. Corey bowhunted for nine years before getting his first elk. Even when he won his first World Elk Calling Championship at the age of 21, he was still a year away from killing his first bull with bow and arrow.
“That did come with a little bit of pressure to be successful, because my dad’s an outfitter and as I got a little older, I started competing in elk calling contests,” he says. “I would beat adults and everyone’s saying, ‘this guy is such a great elk caller, but he must not be a very good hunter.’ Then after I got my first bull and I think I’ve got it figured out, I didn’t get an elk again the next year and it just felt like that pressure was coming back.”
Corey’s first appearance on elk calling’s biggest stage, RMEF’s World Elk Calling Championships, came at the age of 14. He won the adult division in 1995, the men’s division in 1998, and won his first of eight professional division titles in 1999. In 2013, he won RMEF’s Champion of the Champions Invitational, a competition between the champions over the event’s first 25 years.
As Corey stacked up championships, his elk hunting success took off as well. He graduated from the University of Idaho with a degree in mechanical engineering, and he says the education became instrumental in how he has come to understand elk and elk behavior. Engineering teaches breaking down processes, figuring out how things work, optimizing for efficiency and then being able to replicate that system to do it again and again.
“Mechanical engineering teaches you how to solve problems—here is a challenge and here are your potential solutions. What is going to be the best one in this situation?” he says.
The challenge in the case of hunting was how elk responded to calling, and solving it would lead Corey to an ultra-aggressive approach aimed at forcing a bull’s hand. He first found success with this tactic in 1999 during a hunting scenario lived by thousands of elk hunters each fall—the bulls were bugling but not interested in coming into his calling.
“I don’t know if you’d say it is self-taught or elk-taught, but one day I just said, ‘We’ve got to try something else,’” he says. “We got closer than we meant to and he bugled and I immediately reacted by bugling back. But I was kind of out of breath and forcing a lot of air, so it came out as this big aggressive bugle. Next thing there’re sticks breaking and logs rolling as he’s just running down the hill at us. When I saw the reaction, I knew it wasn’t by accident.”
Corey continued to find success calling in bulls, mastering “location” bugles to see if a bull will answer, “display” bugles indicating a bull has a herd of cows, and the emotion-packed “challenge” bugle from a bull that’s ready to fight. Not to mention his spot-on cow calls that are often enough to get a bull to investigate.
Corey’s calling prowess on the competition stage and in the woods caught the attention of the hunting world, from being a respected voice in Bugle to his Elk 101 hunting videos to representing the products he is proud to use. He’s learned much about elk behavior, how they use mountain thermals to avoid danger, how they approach calling locations, and how their habits change depending on the stage of the rut. That deep understanding has led to techniques that often buck the advice of other successful bowhunters. He advocates hunting during the middle of the day and isn’t afraid to go into bedding areas, telling the crowd at Elk Camp that 1 p.m. is a magical time to call elk by sneaking into bedding areas where an aggressive call will trigger a bull.
The success and notoriety also came with a different sort of pressure. At one point Corey had a streak of 15 years of filling every elk tag—sometimes two or three in a season.
“You know that started to take some of the fun out it when I would put that pressure on myself of ‘you have to make this happen, I have to fill this tag’ because you’ve filled every tag to this point for the last ‘X’ amount of years,” he says. “It wasn’t anybody else expecting that and it wasn’t like I was going down a dark road or anything like that, but I’m thinking I’m going to lose my credibility if I fail to fill an elk tag.”
Then a hunt in 20XY with Randy Newberg on his show Fresh Tracks changed Corey’s perspective for the better. Despite several close encounters, neither killed an elk on that Montana hunt. It felt like a weight had been lifted off Corey’s shoulders.
“It was truly the best thing that ever happened to me,” he says. “I realized that’s not why I hunt, it can’t be the reason I hunt. It gave me the chance to say, ‘You know what, the streak’s gone, and I have to hunt because I love it and enjoy it.’”
Corey’s time in the elk woods these days are spent with his three kids, Isaac, Jessi and Sam, and his close friend and hunting partner Donnie. He still hopes to fill an elk tag each fall, but that pales in comparison to spending time outdoors with the people he loves. And his desire to teach others what he has learned about elk has grown into one of his greatest passions.
Next Level Lessons
We spent our first afternoon at Elk Camp learning the basics of calling before graduating to more advanced techniques. Corey, Donnie and Sam fielded questions with patience and offered advice from their wealth of experience. Delicious barbeque, time on the archery range or a game of corn hole helped everyone get to know each other, share hunting stories and relax in the Idaho mountains.
We awoke to a bugle the next morning, filled up on breakfast, and then it was off to the surrounding ridges and meadows for our next-level lesson. With Donnie and Sam playing the role of bull elk, Corey took us through each scenario. We called to bedded bulls and bulls on the move. We watched the thermals closely and anticipated their shifts. And we positioned a caller to bring a weary bedded bull right into a shooter’s lap. All the while Corey broke down his rationale for each bugle and cow call he made, how he moved across the mountainside and where he positioned the caller and shooter.
“To actually be able to spend time with Corey, pick his brain and seeing these scenarios how he sees them is priceless,” says RMEF member Kirk Eddleman, who traveled from Weatherford Texas to attend Elk 101 Elk Camp. “I told myself if I learned one thing from this course it’d be worth it, but I’ve already learned so much that it’s going to truly change the way I hunt.”
Following an evening of great food, conversation and a calling contest, we retired to our tents until another bugle raised us early the next morning. It was time to show what we’d learned. Only this time instead of having Corey with us, he would be the “elk” we had to outwit.
Our group hiked to each location as Corey sounded off. We played the thermals as he moved and responded to each bugle or cow call just as he anticipated a real bull would do. The first three tests went fairly smoothly. Then it was time to see if we could entice a late-rut raghorn into bow range.
Corey-turned-elk responded little to our calling as he stood near a ridgetop. With the shooter placed out in front, the caller held back and moved as Corey repositioned himself trying to bust our setup. Suddenly, he was gone. We continued until we caught movement from the deep underbrush only 20 yards away and Corey emerged downwind of the setup. While not successful on our last test, it was a lesson in elk hunting none of us will ever forget.
A lifelong hunter, Jacob Spaur works as an outfitter packing in backcountry hunters in his home state of Oregon. Last spring he saw an RMEF posting for a chance to win a spot in Corey’s Elk Camp. He knew of Corey’s videos and decided to enter.
“I work remotely a lot, and my wife started sending me messages saying I got an email that I’d won, and it looks legit,” he says. “I didn’t really know what to expect, but I knew it wasn’t an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.”
Spaur enjoyed meeting fellow hunters from across the country and the question-and-answer sessions and lessons from the field brought him a wealth of new ideas for calling elk. Even for someone that has spent a lifetime hunting, there is always still more to learn, he says.
“The one thing I would tell someone that might be on the fence about signing up for this and whether they’d learn anything, is that I think you should go for it because it was such a great experience,” he says. “The food was good, the company was great, just the overall experience was really great.”
Better Bugling
As the hunting editor for RMEF’s Bugle Magazine, I went into Elk Camp knowing that in my 25-plus years hunting elk, I’m a much better sneaker than I am a caller. I’ve called in my share of bulls, but I’ve had far more success getting close or ambushing than I have bugling or cow calling.
Corey told me the one thing he hoped attendees of Elk Camp would leave with was more confidence in their elk calling.
“A lack of confidence is really what I think is the biggest thing that leads to a lack of successfully calling in elk,” he says. “It’s a big animal that makes a lot of different noises and as hunters, they don’t know exactly how to handle each situation. Hopefully what we’ve done here is given them those tools that they can be confident when they’re out there in the field, and when they are successful, it gets them excited and keeps them coming back.”
Like Kirk, the time I shared with Corey, Donnie, Sam and everyone at Elk Camp will change how I hunt elk. I left Idaho knowing that my calling, while at times incorrect for the scenario, is good enough to match wits with bulls. Plus I have a new commitment to practice what I learned with the confidence that it will be well used this fall.
Before I left, I asked Corey what is it about elk that makes people so passionate, that makes us all spend the year waiting for fall, that inspires us to join organizations like RMEF or spend our hard-earned money to attend Elk Camp? He didn’t hesitate in his response.
“It’s the bugle,” he says. “I mean they’re a majestic animal, their antlers are awesome, the country they live in is beautiful and it’s magnificent. But for me and I think all these people here, it’s the bugle, that vocal interaction and being able to get close.”