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John's Journal... Entry 158, Day 3

CAREFUL BUCK MANAGEMENT PRODUCES BETTER BUCKS QUICKLY

The First And Second 150-Point 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.

The first 150-class buck that the Drurys harvested off their land after three years of management was taken during bow season. "My nephew, Jared Lurk, had sat in a shooting house watching a green field at first light on opening morning of bow season," Mark Drury says. "Terry and I were hunting somewhere else, and Jared told us that he'd seen a 1-year-old 6-point buck, two does and a monster buck feed right under where we had hung a bow stand and a camera stand on the edge of this green field. So, at lunch, Terry and I decided to hunt the spot where Jared had seen the big buck. We put Jared in the shooting house where he had sat that morning with the video camera. I got in the camera stand over the spot where the buck had come out, and Terry got ready to shoot the buck with his bow."

They had seen this buck the year before, entering this field at the same spot. Mark and Terry Drury thought this buck might be a shooter. So, before the season, they had hung a bow stand and a camera stand where the buck always came out. According to Mark Drury, "We had found the buck's sheds after the 2000 deer season, and the sheds scored 119 points on the Boone & Crockett scale. Since the buck measured about 16 inches between his main beams, we decided to try and take him this year."

The buck came out of a big, brushy draw through the corn just as he always had. He moved along the rows of corn and headed for the soybeans out in the field. The deer approached the stand from about 80-yards away and spotted a doe feeding right below Mark and Terry. The buck began to charge toward the doe until he was about 20 yards away from the stand. Terry Drury drew his bow and released the arrow. The arrow struck behind the front shoulder and punctured the deer's lung and the liver.

The next morning, when the hunters went in to track the buck, they found that he only had gone 150 yards from where he'd bedded-down the previous night. The Drury brothers realized that their management system and their willingness to wait to grow trophy bucks had paid off in the kind of buck they had dreamed of one day harvesting.

The Drury farm borders several other large farms in the area. To keep bucks on the property, Mark planted a 6-acre green field right on the edge of his property. During the 2001 deer season, his neighbor had left 30 acres of standing corn because the ground was so muddy that he couldn't get the corn out of the field. The Drury brothers had noticed that there were a lot of trails, scrapes and rubs coming from the neighbor's corn patch through a hardwood bottom that contained a number of cottonwood trees. The second morning of gun season in Iowa, the hunters decided to go to this spot and hunt from two tree stands they already had erected to look for the bucks coming out of the corn on the neighbor's place into the drainage on their property. From where the hunters had put their stands, the deer had to travel about 300 yards from the corn through the woods. On this hunt, Mark planned to take his deer with a muzzleloader.

"Before good shooting light, we could see the buck out in the green field we had planted," Mark Drury explains. The buck had come from the neighbor's corn field and decided to munch on some soybeans. This is one of the big advantages of having a wide variety of food planted for your deer. Even though the buck had fed on corn all night, he still decided to stop off and get some soybeans before he went to his bed. However, since we didn't have enough light to video, we waited for the light to get brighter before I decided to take a shot at the buck."

When Terry Drury told Mark that he had the light he needed to produce good video, Mark aimed his Thompson Center Encore at the buck. Mark shot two 150 and one 30-grain Pyrodex pellets with a 275-grain Parker Hydra-Con bullet. When the rifle reported, the buck went down.

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: MORE TROPHY BUCKS

 

 

Check back each day this week for more CAREFUL BUCK MANAGEMENT PRODUCES BETTER BUCKS QUICKLY ...

Day 1 - How The Process Begins
Day 2 - Drury's Planting Regiment
Day 3 - The First And Second 150-Point Bucks
Day 4 - More Trophy Bucks
Day 5 - Trophy Bucks and the Secrets to Harvesting Them


John's Journal