About Us
Good Evening! We wanted to take a minute to introduce ourselves to our new email subscribers. We are Jake and Melinda Stanisch, two very passionate turkey hunters from Pennsylvania who hatched Longbranch Game Calls in Spring 2024.We grew up hunting turkeys in the mountains of Pennsylvania with our families since before we were old enough to carry a gun of our own. The outdoors have always been a huge part of our relationship. Any available free time that we have will be spent outdoors. From fishing to shed hunting to scouting and hunting, we are outdoors as much as we can. Turkey hunting and scouting is a deep-rooted passion for the both of us. Melinda and I have shared made many memorable hunts, but few as good as Melinda’s first turkey. On a beautiful, chilly November morning in 2013, we set-up on a flock of turkeys we scattered the evening before. A hen flew down shortly after daylight and worked her way into our set up. Once the turkey hit the 25-yard mark, Melinda made a great shot and successfully claimed her first turkey!
The decision to create Longbranch came out of a necessity (and a dream of a young child utterly obsessed with the wild turkey and turkey hunting). Many mouth calls were made of materials that were too thick and stretched too tightly for the majority of the hunters to use well. As I was building calls one night I had an idea for a design for a batwing with a material combination, and stretch that I had not tried yet before. I built one and gave it to Melinda to try, thinking it might be easy for her to run. She put the call in and produced some excellent raspy hen yelps with a clear front end on the beginning of the yelp (something that she sometimes struggled with before using this call). At this point, I had been building mouth calls for well over a decade and was stretching a good call.
Fast forward to that spring, and I was building some yelpers for my buddies to try out that spring (many of that same design). All of the feedback was positive, and several said that we needed to start a business because our calls were quickly becoming their favorites. Our calls were easy to run (requiring little air pressure) and produced realistic turkey sounds. Coincidentally enough, I called in and killed my largest spring gobbler to date with one of my new designs that spring as well, proving that the call sounds great to the real judges; the turkeys! From there it was full steam ahead to register the business and get to work.
Longbranch is a family operated game call business, and often times you’ll see our children and other family member(s) with us helping out at shows. Our family is our everything, and without them we wouldn’t be able to live the life we live. One day we hope to pass this business along to our children, and allow them to create many memories with their families in the outdoors.