Mississippi firm makes outstanding game calls

By By Otha Barham / outdoors editor
Dec. 26, 2003
Because I hunt ducks only intermittently, I was not aware until this fall that we have one of the nations top five manufacturers of duck calls located right here in Mississippi. Flextone Game Calls are the products of Wiley Outdoor Products L.L.C. of Starkville, a long time hunter with enormous ingenuity.
I met Tom Wiley in October and got to know him well during an extended deer and duck hunt on his hunting lease near Port Gibson this month. His Flextone calls, sold nationwide, have a fascinating technology the origin of which is almost inconceivable.
Tom was working in a Starkville hospital as an emergency room nurse when, while cleaning up the trauma room, he became entangled with a chest tube that had been used on an injured man. The tube caught his attention while his mind was on duck hunting, as it often was during his 7 to 7 nighttime shifts. The tubing looked about the right size to hold a duck call reed assembly, so he cut off a piece and inserted a reed from another duck call.
He was looking for a way to make duck calls cheaply. Acrylic duck calls were just coming onto the market and they were expensive. This night shift nurse was already braiding call lanyards during down time at the hospital and selling them to friends.
What Tom Wiley discovered that night was that the call sounded more like a duck than the current calls on the market. He well knew how ducks sounded because he had been a hunter since his BB gun days with his grandfather around Lexington, Mississippi and for several years he had been addicted to duck hunting. He had called in his first duck near Carthage early in his hunting life.
Reality testing
When Wiley began making the "chest tube" calls by hand, he and a friend went on a hunt near Grenada and took a limit of ducks. The year was 1998. By the way the ducks poured in to the duck talk on Wileys calls, he knew he was onto something.
The young entrepreneur tried other materials, but none had the natural sound of his original one with the surgical tubing. "I guess when you think about a duck or a deer or a person, anything that has a hard cartilage voice box, it is surrounded by soft tissue," says Wiley. The tone he was getting from the reed assembly being encased in the flexible tube was better than any call he had used. The sound resonating through the soft tube was more natural than that from hard plastic or acrylic calls.
Demand for Tom's hand made calls grew and soon he bought a key copying machine to reproduce his unique tone board that he was making by hand. Soon a friend who owns an injection molding company began reproducing the tone boards in volume. Flextone duck calls was on its way.
Tom absolutely blows me away with his duck calling. He makes half a dozen very different duck cries with one of his calls. If you have ever heard a duck up very close, those are the sounds he makes on his Flextone calls. There are subtle sounds that make the calling more realistic than any I have heard by a man-made caller.
Expanding products
Eventually Wiley began applying his newfound technology to calls for deer, predators and elk. Next spring his new line of turkey calls will be on the market. They will be marketed under the Remington brand name as are a complete line of his turkey calls. He makes, promotes and wholesales all Remington calls. They are made with a slightly different flexible material but are very much like his Flextone calls in that they use the same technology Wiley discovered in the Starkville hospital emergency room.
Because I pursue deer more often than ducks, I was impressed to the core with Wiley's Flextone All-N-One Deer Call. The call will make all the vocal calls used by deer hunters. Each one is an outstanding imitation of real deer. I was tickled that when I dropped the call against my binoculars or range finder that hang around my neck, it made no clanking sound to scare off nearby deer.
A statement Wiley made to me is one that has become almost a slogan for his company. "Nature designed the perfect game call. We just borrowed the idea."
Wiley Outdoor Products L.L.C. distribution center is located in Pearl, Mississippi, telephone 1-877-We Hunt (1-877-993-4868).
Remington's calls are available at Remington's Country Store at Also see Remington.com. Flextone calls are also available through large mail order catalogs like Bass Pro Shops and Woods and Waters.