Sound Producing Device
Inventor: Ed Sceery
Day job: President, Sceery Outdoors

His all-time favorite invention: The steam engine.

How his invention could affect our lives: It can be used as a toy or to attract coyotes.

What the actual patent says: “The disclosed novel device can produce a wide variety of musical and desirable sounds of considerable volume and has applications to hand-held musical instruments, toys, novelty items and wildlife attraction devices.”

Meet the inventor: There are three main wildlife call companies in the world. One of them is Sceery Outdoors, housed in the same building as a UPS shipping station in south Santa Fe.

Past the nondescript entrance, where a door sign reads, simply, “Ed,” there is a small warehouse full of game calls. Moose calls, elk calls, deer calls, birdcalls and something called, “Hot cow in heat.”
Ed Sceery is the president of his namesake company.

“I am an entrepreneur,” he says, “a true entrepreneur. It doesn’t make any difference to me what a product is. I always look at it with the idea of making it better.”

That attitude has helped make Sceery a big name in the obscure industry of wild game calls. These whistles, of which there are scores, attract critters with one of three main types of sounds: mating, socializing or food.

Patent number 7,384,323 falls into the latter category. Dubbed a “double barrel high pitch predator call,” the sound-producing device mimics a wounded animal such as a rabbit. Hunters use this device to attract coyotes.

Sceery, 60, has studied the art of game-call making for 30 years. He began by recording sounds while hunting and then going home to invent something that sounded like the animals he heard in the wild.

Coming up with the idea, Sceery says, “is just 1 percent. People call me an inventor, but there’s so much that goes into it after you come up with these things. You have to be willing to follow through and see it to completion.”