Mark and Terry Drury and Their Buck Deer of Brotherly Love
Day 1: Terry Drury on Scouting Before Deer Season
Editor’s Note: Would you give your brother the opportunity to bag a buck bigger than any deer you'd ever seen or killed in your life? Would you scout hard to pinpoint just the right place to take a deer, know that you had a 140-plus class buck to hunt, set-up a tree stand and then let your brother harvest the buck of your dreams? That's exactly what Terry Drury of Bloomsdale, Missouri, the co-owner of Drury Outdoors, did for his brother, Mark.
  "Two months before deer season began, while I was scouting, I followed a trail in Illinois from a cornfield into a bedding thicket," Terry Drury remembers. "Although the trail was very faint, all along the trail in this Mississippi River bottom were some big scrapes and large rubs. Since some of the rubs I saw were old rubs, I knew this buck had been using this trail for several years, which meant he was an older age-class buck and probably a big one. The deer tracks on the trail were huge. From those tracks, I could tell that more than likely two or three bucks were using this little dim trail, about 50- to 60-yards away from a well-worn trail going to the field that a large number of deer traveled. The trail ran through a river bottom with thick vegetation and a number of blown-down trees. Because the rest of the creek bottom was all open timber, I believed that the thick-cover area presented the only bedding site close to the cornfield where the deer were feeding."
  When Terry Drury scouts, he tends to search for bedding cover first and then for a feeding area. Because Drury usually hunts during the pre-rut, he likes to set up a stand to see a buck coming back from his feeding site. "I know that an older age-class buck generally will circle downwind of his bedding area before he enters it," Drury explains. "Therefore I usually check the downwind side of thick-cover regions near a food source to locate a trail that a buck uses to enter and often leave his bedding region."
For more deer-hunting tips, get John E. Phillips’ Kindle eBooks “How to Hunt Deer Like a Pro,”
“How to Hunt Deer Up Close: With Bows, Rifles, Muzzleloaders and Crossbows,” and “PhD Whitetails: How to Hunt and Take the Smartest Deer on Any Property,” or to prepare venison, get “Deer & Fixings.” Click on each, or go to www.amazon.com/kindle-ebooks, type in the name of the book, and download it to your Kindle, and/or download a Kindle app for your iPad, SmartPhone or computer.
About the Author
John Phillips, winner of the 2012 Homer Circle Fishing Award for outstanding fishing writer by the American Sportfishing Association (ASA) and the Professional Outdoor Media Association (POMA), the 2008 Crossbow Communicator of the year and the 2007 Legendary Communicator chosen for induction into the National Fresh Water Hall of Fame, is a freelance writer (over 6,000 magazine articles for about 100 magazines and several thousand newspaper columns published), magazine editor, photographer for print media as well as industry catalogues (over 25,000 photos published), lecturer, outdoor consultant, marketing consultant, book author and daily internet content provider with an overview of the outdoors. Click here for more information and a list of all the books available from John E. Phillips.
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