No Luck Required

Certainly luck can come into play when bagging a big whitetail buck, but there’s no substitute for experience and preparation. Outdoor Channel veterans Terry and Mark Drury hope to bring hunters new luck with “Drury’s THIRTEEN,” starting July 1.

In each episode, the Drury brothers utilize a lifetime of hunting experience in order to break down their whitetail season preparation and the season itself into different phases, 13 of them in fact, in hopes of helping viewers improve their hunting success.

The Drurys have been at work on the new show for about a year and a half. The show premiers July 1, Tuesday at 10pm ET.

“It’s a little bit different perspective, a little different strategy as far as we’re concerned. It’s something we’ve never done,” Terry Drury said. “We’re just using 30, 40 years of experience, trying to divulge that information and try to help someone else.

“When we go to a tree stand and pick a spot and plant a food plot, there’s a multitude of things that run through our head as far as access, wind direction, wind speed, how’s the wind going to hit that spot, barometric pressure, shooting lanes, back cover – a lot of stuff that maybe we take from granted that someone else may not even think about.”

Matt Drury, Terry’s son who both appears on the show and works behind the scenes as a chief producer, said each phase is detailed to how it can help the hunter.

“It’s little light switch events, little triggers that they’ve noticed that will change the deer’s habits and patterns throughout the deer season,” he said. “It’s about how we adjust and how we change our tactics to be able to harvest a deer during that phase.”

Counting this season, its 12th year with the network, Drury Outdoors has produced 403 30-minute episodes for Outdoor Channel. Shows airing this season on the network are “Bow Madness,” “Dream Season: The Journey” and “Drury’s THIRTEEN.’”

Mark and Terry Drury, hosts of Drury’s THIRTEEN.

---

“Mark and I always say, we’re not pretty and we’re not funny. All we’ve got is our knowledge,” Terry said. “We’ve tried to learn from mistakes, and we’ve made every mistake in the book over the years. We’ve just become a little more efficient and a little more proficient at harvesting mature deer. It took a lot of mistakes and a lot of experience to get to that level. We’re to the point that we’re doing it with regularity and consistency. There’s only handful of people in the industry that are doing that with mature deer.”

“We call it ‘info-tainment,’ ” Matt said. “It’s presented in an informative, entertaining way. Everything is at a high level of production, but you’re going to learn. When you sit down to watch a 30-minute episode of this new show, if you don’t go away learning at least three new things, you’re not paying attention. It’s very informative. Every time I watch one of these episodes, I pick up something new.”

The show is filmed on Mark and Terry’s farms in northern Missouri and in Iowa, and while “Drury’s THIRTEEN” deals with tackling deer and issues in the Midwest, it translates to hunters and their challenges in other parts of the nation as well.

“It may be a little different out West or in the Southeast or in the Northeast, but we’ve identified 13 clear, definitive phases that a whitetail goes through,” Terry said. “We identify the personalities that the deer take and the natural, instinctive differentiation between an early season food pattern vs. the peak of the rut vs. the lockdown vs. late season – all of those are drastically different.

“We’ve learned to change our hunting technique and our style of how we’re going to hunt that animal during each phase. All of those are a little bit different and in the show we clearly spell those dates out where they hit in the Midwest and how we approach that. We’ve learned that over the course of time and it’s really, really helped out success rate.”

Also appearing on the “Drury’s THIRTEEN” are Mark’s daughter, Taylor Drury, former major league slugger Jim Thome, who is seventh on the career home run list with 612, and Gary LeVox, lead singer of Raschal Flatts.

Throughout the season, the Drurys battle through and address a series of challenges with their deer herd, including deer disease, drought, changing moon phases, scorching heat – all of which are delivered by who Terry called the show’s chief star: Mother Nature.

“We’ve brought Mother Nature to life,” he said. “She’s one of the characters on “Drury’s THIRTEEN.” It will be interesting to see how she’s received. She is the ultimate (opponent) when you talk about a chess match when you’re hunting whitetail. You live and die by Mother Nature and what she dishes out every day.”

"Drury’s THIRTEEN” show page