Subscriber Ed Yates reports taking a huge, 10 x 9 Anatolian stag (mid-Eastern red deer) that will likely rank in the SCI top five while hunting the Seben area of
Turkey with
Safari Tours (011-90-533-607-8071) this past October. (See photo in our online
Trophy Gallery.) Yates confesses he got his chance at this bruiser only because he missed a 290-yard shot at a smaller stag earlier. "We saw a really nice stag on the third day. I missed him completely. Nothing went wrong, I just missed," he says. "That miss turned out to be a very good thing two days later when we saw the stag I shot. Aside from moose, this is the largest free-ranging member of the deer family I've ever taken or even seen. He was just huge, close to 700 pounds."
Yates tells us that finding a stag was never an issue. In fact, there were so many bugling in the area that Yates found it difficult to sleep in the fly camp. "The stags bugled constantly, all night," he says. "We saw tons of females but heard more males than we saw because the vegetation was so thick.....
