PORT ST. LUCIE PEOPLE
The Hunting Doctor
28 PortStLucieMagazine.com
BY Alisha McDarris
Dr. Bernard Kurecki’s house
is a museum.
Everywhere you look there are
specimens of wild animals from
exotic locales. His office walls are lined with antelope
and zebra which he insists is pronounced
like Debra. A spotted hyena sits near his front
door with a hint of a grin on its face. Two Cape
buffalo are mounted in his living room.
What was probably once a dining room is now
home to a collection of African beasts, with a 16-
foot crocodile resting where a formal table might
have been. A cougar lounges on an overhead
ledge and dozens of other trophies pepper his
family residence because Kurecki is a hunter.
He may be a friendly, outgoing family physician
who specializes in preventive and wellness
medicine by day, but his heart is in hunting. He
grew up in the great outdoors, hunting and fishing
with his friends, disappearing into the woods
for days, eating only what they could catch.
“That’s what Florida kids did,” Kurecki said.
“It was a way of life.”
As he got older he developed a love of travel,
longing to visit quiet, off-the-beaten-path, faraway
places. Eventually he combined his two
loves — hunting and traveling — and began
roaming the earth with his wife, Samantha, to
hunt and fish.
Together they have scuba dived in Costa Rica,
white-water rafted in Central America, fished in
Alaska and hunted game of all shapes and sizes
in Africa. They’ve been on hunting expeditions in
Canada, Tanzania, Argentina and Zanzibar.
“The traveling is the biggest part and
the people and the cultures you see,” Kurecki
said. “That’s what it’s about; It’s the experience.”
But of all the places he’s been, Africa is his favorite.
It’s a place he calls “magical,” where the only
light at night is the light of the stars and you can
hear lions roaring in the distance as you nod off to
sleep. He has been there six times and can’t wait
to go again.
“There is no place like Africa,” he said.
Kurecki loves retelling stories, gesticulating
for effect, of aiming at a 16-foot crocodile that if
he missed might turn on him, and of the lion his
wife shot that charged at him after it had been
hit. “Those were the two most incredible experiences
of my life,” he said.
Kurecki says that as a hunter he is also a conservationist.
“Hunters are conservation minded,”
he said. “Maintaining land is important to us.”
He says he always followed strict rules like
hunting only older male lions that have been
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PHOTOS BY Ed Drondoski
/PortStLucieMagazine.com