October 25 – November 1
Editor’s Note: Mark and Terry Drury have been a part of the Mossy Oak family as long as there has been M.A.D. Calls and Drury Outdoors that produces videos and TV shows. But the history of the Drury brothers and Mossy Oak goes back even farther than the history of Drury Outdoors. Mark Drury was a salesman for Mossy Oak in Missouri, Iowa and Kansas while in college, but Mark did more than sell Mossy Oak camouflage. He was one of the early members of the Mossy Oak family. When Mark and his brother Terry founded Drury Outdoors, Mossy Oak was right there for them and with them. According to Terry Drury, “Some of our best friends in the early days were Toxey Haas, the creator of Mossy Oak, and his dad, Fox Haas, Ronnie “Cuz” Strickland, Bill Suggs and the late Bob Dixon. Our company and our family plans to continue with Mossy Oak, until we go out of business, or we pass away.” Drury Outdoors produce “Bow Madness,” “Dream Season,” and “Thirteen,” all TV shows airing on the Outdoor Channel. The company also produces “Natural Born,” which airs on the Pursuit Channel. Also “King of the Spring” may return in the spring of 2015 on the Outdoor Channel. “Our show, ‘Thirteen’ is the way Mark and I have divided-up deer season from what we've observed, documented and used to predict the movement patterns of older-age-class bucks throughout the 13 weeks of deer season,” Terry Drury explains. “In the 13 weeks that the show airs, we’ll be sharing all the information we have and use each season to consistently take trophy bucks all across the United States. We also allow the viewers to see the mistakes and blunders that we make as well as our successes.”
During Pre Lockdown, Phase 4, bucks are expanding their home ranges, their numbers of scrapes and the bucks working their scrapes increases. You’ll hear and see more bucks sparring. Big bucks are looking for the first doe that comes in estrus, and they’ll latch onto that doe. This is the perfect time to call deer. Too, Phase 4 is one period during deer season that we take a lot of older-age-class bucks. We really will knock the ball out of the park during this Pre Lockdown period. This time is when the most mature bucks and the most dominant bucks will be up and moving, hunting for the very first estrus doe. If you know from your camera surveys where that big daylight walking buck likes to travel, this is one of the best times of the year to take him.
The major exception is weather. If your hunting region has hail or really bad, nasty, cold, snowy and rainy weather or a bad wind that won’t allow us to hunt, then those weather problems cause exceptions to this rule. If the moon is coming up in the afternoon, and you know you have good weather conditions - like a high pressure day with a rising barometer – then that’s when we’ll be sitting on a food plot with all our deer calls, including rattling horns, M.A.D. Calls like the snort, wheeze and growl. Also, we’ll be doing some aggressive calling during Pre Lockdown. Decoying deer also works well at this time of year. If a buck is the most dominant buck in the area and hears another buck trying to call in an estrous doe, then that buck knows he has to get the intruder out of his home range quickly. Many times, the dominant buck will come in running during Pre Lockdown. This time of year is when we try to determine the most mature and biggest bucks on the property we hunt to go after and take. After the Pre Lockdown, a lot of these big bucks will drop out of sight. You won’t get any trail-camera pictures of them, because they’re locked down with that first estrous doe. So, from our trail cameras over the years, we know the biggest bucks on the property will move and start hunting the first estrous does during this Pre Lockdown period. Now when the Lockdown Phase happens, you’ll still see a lot of 1-1/2- and 2-1/2-year-old deer looking for estrous does. But you usually won’t see the biggest bucks then, because they’re already locked down with the first estrous doe.
Day 3: Terry Drury Tells about Phase 3 – the October Lull of Deer Season - October 13 – October 25
Tomorrow: Terry Drury Tells about the High Anticipation Phase of Deer Season – November 2 – November 5
