CAREFUL BUCK MANAGEMENT PRODUCES BETTER BUCKS QUICKLY

More Trophy Bucks

EDITOR'S NOTE: In three years, Mark Drury, founder of M.A.D. Calls, a division of Outland Sports in Neosho, Missouri, and active member of Mossy Oak's Pro Hunt Team and video producer, went from having few if any deer on his 2,100 acres of land, to producing 150-point-class Boone and Crockett bucks. His amazing story demonstrates what quality wildlife management can do for a deer herd when sportsmen willingly invest the time and money to produce better bucks. In 2001, Mark and his brother Terry harvested five bucks that scored 150 points or better from property almost completely devoid of deer three years earlier. Can you accomplish this feat on the lands you have to hunt? Let's see what the Drurys did to the land to produce trophy bucks.

Jared Lurk, Mark Drury's nephew, played an active role in the farm's management system. He earned the right to take one of the trophy bucks that the farm had produced during the 2001 hunting season.

"Jared had put as much sweat equity into the farm and the deer-management program as any of us," Mark Drury says. "And he put in four years for a deer tag and never drew a deer. He'd watched the herd grow and develop and never had a chance to take a buck. So, I really wanted him to take one of the nicer bucks on the place."

On the day of Jared's hunt, he and Mark went to a field that required a northwest wind to hunt it. A high-pressure system also had moved in, and the weather was warm with the temperature only about 30 degrees. The Drurys saw a lot of bucks come onto this field that had four different food sources. There was a half-acre of BioLogic's Clover Plus, an acre of standing corn, four acres of soybeans and a quarter acre of BioLogic's Fall Attractant, and the field had some oats as well. All of these different plantings came together at the shooting house so that regardless of what the deer were feeding on the day you hunted, you could see and take them. Just at dark the deer began to pour into the field. The Drurys saw a buck that Mark really wanted taken because the buck had a spike on one side of his rack and four points on the other side. However, Jared had waited four years to take a buck off the property.

Jared knew there were some real trophy bucks on the property, and he didn't want to spend his tag on a cull buck. So even though the deer passed with 20 steps of the shooting house, he let that buck pass. Too, there were many does filtering onto the field. Finally, as the light was beginning to fade, a tremendous-sized buck walked out onto the field. The two hunters in the shooting house waited and let the buck come all the way into the field. He walked out into the patch of Clover Plus and began to feed 25 yards from the shooting house. Jared took careful aim with his Remington 700 ML muzzleloader and took down the deer. The deer-field dressed at 235 pounds. The buck had six points on one side and five on the other, making the buck a legitimate 11 point. The rack grossed 165 points on the Boone & Crockett scale. Steve Coon of Pevely, Missouri, always helped the Drury brothers with the management of their land -- the deer management, doe management and all aspects of the management system that the Drurys had implemented on their farm. He had purchased tags for the two previous years and used those tags to harvest does off the land. So, in the 2001 deer season, the Drury brothers agreed that he could take one of the trophy bucks on the property.

"The deer weren't moving well in the evenings," Mark Drury explains. "The weather had been hot, and they weren't feeding in the green fields until after dark. So, we changed our game plan from hunting in the afternoons to hunting in the mornings. One morning, I hunted with Steve 'Coondog' Coon. We hunted on the edge of a soybean field that dropped off into a deep drainage. The drainage was really brushy and extremely rugged. At first light, we saw 10 or 12 does; then we saw a really big buck. Terry and I had seen this deer and hunted this deer before. He had extremely large hooves, a really big neck, a short face and short legs. But the deer's feet were so big that we named it Clyde, short for Clydesdale after the draft horses in the Budweiser commercials. Coondog was using a Remington 870 shotgun and shooting copper-solid bullets. He decided to take the shot when the buck was 125 steps from the tree."

When Coon hit the buck the first time, the buck took the bullet and started running. Coon fired again when the buck was at 140 yards, and then the buck vanished. Drury and Coon then left the area, went back to camp and studied the video footage they'd made of the hunt. "We could tell by what we saw on the footage that Coon's first shot hit a little far back from the deer's vitals. But his second shot seemed to be right on target." So, the hunters went back to the area where they'd last seen the buck and immediately found the deer. "This buck grossed exactly 150 Boone & Crockett points," Drury reports.

To learn more about M.A.D. Calls, call (800) 922-9034 or visit www.outlandsports.com. For information about Drury Outdoors' Videos, call (800) 990-9351, or visit www.druryoutdoors.com.

TOMORROW: TROPHY BUCKS AND THE SECRETS TO HARVESTING THEM