By Keith Wood
When I first saw a Turtlebox, I didn’t get it. Why would anyone pay $400+ for a Bluetooth speaker? Then I stepped back and realized that I already had a speaker that cost that much and it couldn’t play AC/DC, only dying rabbits and fawns in distress. To add insult to injury, my high dollar predator calling setup was relatively fragile and worthless if I left the remote at the house.
A Turtlebox Original (Gen 3) comes in at roughly the same street price as a decent predator calling setup and it’s a heck of a lot more versatile. Since it hooks up to your phone, you’re always going to have the remote handy. Its 6×9-inch speaker puts out 120 decibels of sound, so it’s plenty loud to bring in predators from a distance. The battery life is five times longer than a comparably priced e-call.
The Turtlebox’s greatest attribute is being built like a brick shithouse. My 11-year-old son, who has the destructive force of a Category 5 hurricane, has not been able to break mine. I accidentally hit it with my pickup in the driveway, and it merely scratched the outside case. I threw it in the pool after telling my wife how much it cost, and it simply bobbed around like a fat man in a life jacket, Van Halen continuing to blare.
There are downsides, of course. The Turtlebox uses a Bluetooth 5.4 connection, so the range between your phone and the speaker can be somewhat limited depending on the terrain. A tech-savvy nerd could probably engage some type of extender, but I’m not that guy.
The biggest challenge is that the Turtlebox isn’t designed as a predator call and doesn’t come pre-loaded with the sounds of suffering mammals. The good news is that these horrific audio clips can be downloaded and streamed easily from your phone to the speaker.
The Turtlebox makes some sounds when it powers up or connects to your phone, so make sure that the volume is turned down until you’re ready to start calling in ‘yotes. Once you’ve got those little tricks figured out, it works like any other calling setup.
I’m not going to pretend that I’m an expert predator hunter. Truth is, I pretty much suck at it. I blame my local terrain, which makes it really easy for a coyote to slip downwind of me without my ever knowing it. This fact does not diminish my lack of enthusiasm for heading into the woods with NVGs and a thermal, though. And when I head back from a stand in my side-by-side after an unsuccessful hunt, I can do so with a cold one in my hand and Bon Scott’s voice echoing through the woods. Try that with your predator call.
Price: $430.
Pros: Rugged construction, versatility.
Cons: Limited Bluetooth range, lack of built-in calls.
