Life was different for all of us during the COVID pandemic.
Here’s a tale from that sour time of a Wisconsin woman who, with support from friends and family and a world-class teacher and mentor, made the sweet discovery of artistic talent.
During COVID, Heather Van Doorn of Glen Flora, Wis. found herself working less in her job as an occupational therapy assistant and spending more time in her workshop.
She had rudimentary woodworking skills but lots of raw material, in large part thanks to her logger husband, Tom van Doorn. Things changed, though, when Tom’s uncle Corky van Doorn of Tony, an accomplished wood turner, showed Heather how to use a lathe.
She started making bowls. One day Tom asked her if she’d try making a pot call, a type of turkey hunting call.
The van Doorns are avid turkey hunters and Heather had used similar friction calls over the years.
“I tried, and it was pretty pathetic,” said Heather, 50, of her first attempts.
But importantly the calls sounded decent. She kept at it.
“I got a little bit better and a little bit better and I started giving them as gifts,” Heather said.
Word of her call making spread among a tight circle of friends and family, including Scott Bestul, the late outdoors writer who lived in Lewiston, Minn.
I knew Bestul and can vounch that he was as kind and thoughtful as any human on this Earth.
Bestul decided in 2023 to turn the tables and gift Heather with a wood carving course offered by Dave Constantine of Constantine Productions in Durand, Wis.
Constantine is famous in the call making world, especially for his decorative turkey calls. Between 2001 and 2017 Constantine won the Earl Mickel Award eight times as well as many dozens of other awards for his work.
The Mickel is awarded by the National Wild Turkey Federation to the best decorative turkey call in a competition of the world’s top call makers held at the organization’s annual convention.
In 2023 Constantine was inducted into the inaugural class of the Grand National Custom Call Making Hall of Fame.
Constantine periodically holds carving and art classes in his Durand workshop and Bestul thought one would be just the ticket to help Heather in her new-found avocation.
“Scott saw something in me I didn’t see yet,” Heather said.
That something quickly became apparent to Contantine, too.
During the first class, Contantine instructed the students to carve a a drake green-winged teal decoy.
“Immediately, oh yeah, she picked up on it right away,” Constantine said. “She had some experience in wood turning and wood burning at that point and then she took up the carving and improved by leaps and bounds.”
Heather had raised two daughters and had some association with arts and crafts from their school projects. She had also painted plenty of walls.
But she had never really tried to make art.
The carving class with Constantine released her talent.
In 2024 she began making more advanced turkey calls and also took follow-up classes with Constantine. He encouraged Heather to advertise her work and begin entering competitions.
In 2025 she entered the Super Bowl of turkey call making contests at the National Wild Turkey Federation annual convention in Nashville, Tenn.
The event gets more than 1,000 entries each year in various categories. The most coveted award, arguably, is the Mickel.
It’s named for Earl “Mick” Mickel of Beach Lake, Pennsylvania who was instrumental in recognizing turkey call making as a unique American art form. Mickel assembled one of most impressive call collections in the world and published three books on the topic.
Considered one of the true American folk arts, turkey call making has a centuries-old history but gained much broader appreciation in recent decades.
In large measure, that is due to work in the 1980s by Mickel and Charley Burke of Westby, Wis., to create NWTF’s Grand National Custom Callmaking Competition, the world’s largest such event. This year about 1,400 calls were entered in the competition, according to NWTF.
Each year, a panel of judges rates the entries in the competitions Decorative Turkey Call Division and select a Best of Show call, known since 1994 as the Earl Mickel Award.
In 2024 Heather received artistic inspiration while on a fall bowhunt for deer. She saw three jakes, or young male turkeys, sparring in the woods.
She decided to try to recreate the scene with a carving she called “Backwoods Battle.”
She worked more than 100 hours to make the call and entered it in the 2025 NWTF competition. To say her national stage debut was auspicious would be an understatement. She won the Mickel.
“It was a surprise, a wonderful surprise,” Heather said.
And it was no one-and-done, either. This is for real.
In 2026, she repeated, again against the strongest field in decorative turkey call making.
This year her inspiration came from seeing a red fox near her home. The call is titled “Outfoxed.” It shows a fox leaping at but just missing a turkey poult as the bird flaps away. The hen turkey runs away in the scene and another poult escapes at the top of a tree trunk.
Mushrooms stand along the bottom near foliage. A turkey feather is on the side of a stump. All of it is carved and painted by Heather. Most of the call is made from basswood, but the base is from red oak burl.
One thing you must also know: the calls are more than artistic pieces of wonder. They have to actually work.
The striker on “Outfoxed” is the tree trunk, the base of the call is centered in a tree stump.
“I try to get my students to think outside of the box and to come up with a theme,” Constantine said. “And to challenge themselves to pull off that theme not only with good handwork but to compose it so it tells a story. And that’s what Heather’s doing extremely well.”
She has joined her carving mentor on a list of the best decorative turkey call makers on the planet.
Another famed Wisconsin call maker, the late Dennis Poeschel of Milwaukee, also won it, in 2002.
Heather said she doesn’t know exactly where the call making and carving will take her. But she isn’t stopping.
“It’s all happened pretty fast,” Heather said. “But I feel pretty fortunate to be able to learn from one of the best and I think there’s still more to learn.”
Interesting, too, that the occupational therapist assistant discovered a talent in herself that is therapeutic.
“I really love (carving),” Heather said. “You can work on it for hours and not know what time it is. And it’s so rewarding that you can start with an idea in your head and a block of wood and some carving tools and try to make it into a story. It’s really rewarding and I’m grateful for everyone who helped find this in me.”
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Smith: Wisconsin turkey call maker van Doorn repeats with top NWTF award
Reporting by Paul A. Smith, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
