Best time for Rabbits and Foxes

Varminting and vertebrate pest control. Small game, hunting feral goats, foxes, dogs, cats, rabbits etc.

Re: Best time for Rabbits and Foxes

Post by xDom » 18 Aug 2019, 7:17 pm

Righto, I’m going have to try some of these baiting tactics on my next trip to farm in mid September.
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Re: Best time for Rabbits and Foxes

Post by NTSOG » 18 Aug 2019, 7:25 pm

I suspect the foxes around my place are fairly complacent as they haven't been hunted for about 18months and then only with a spotlight. I'm using an IR night sight and being very careful not to educate them with overly ambitious [read: stupid] shots; I figure that I have all the time in the world to get them as I live on-site and can bait them daily. I also see the odd one strolling through the paddocks when I'm checking the cattle of a morning and I'm in amongst the cattle. I'll remember the tuna oil trick.

Jim
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Re: Best time for Rabbits and Foxes

Post by NTSOG » 18 Aug 2019, 7:40 pm

Dom: ''Righto, I’m going have to try some of these baiting tactics on my next trip to farm in mid September.''

It's working for me. Those large tins of very cheap and nasty dog food seem to be very desirable. I grab a spoon and dig into the ''food'' chopping it up into tiny pieces and then flinging it in the general direction I want them to go for safe shooting. [Over two weeks recently I recently moved one fox off a crown road and well into my property to where he could be safely shot by gradually moving the feeding ''station'' 50-75 feet each night.] I make sure that the pieces are very small as my trail camera pictures showed that large pieces attract magpies and crows which would come in and knock off the pieces. Essentially I just want to give the foxes a sniff and a tiny taste. Off course I do have the time, living on the property. One of the good things about baiting for me is that it gives me lots of time to set up shots as the blighters search around in a smallish area for bits of food. I'm not up to shooting moving targets at present.

Jim
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Re: Best time for Rabbits and Foxes

Post by xDom » 18 Aug 2019, 7:43 pm

I’m only on this trip for four nights, not enough time to bait like that then?
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Re: Best time for Rabbits and Foxes

Post by NTSOG » 19 Aug 2019, 6:43 am

If people on the farm know where foxes have been travelling you could still throw some bait out in those areas. Of course knowing what time they come to dinner helps, that's why I am using a trail camera. My past neighbour, who shot on my property for several years, was of the opinion that foxes do have schedules and fairly fixed travel routes. For instance there is an unmade crown road on my southern boundary and we realised the blighters travelled up that to get to the back of my property, hence I laid bait for a while to bring one into shooting range. I've also noticed that they will travel along the fence lines between two quite large and open paddocks as well as the edges of double-fenced tree lines. In other words they travel on the edges of structure a lot until they find or smell something out in the paddock that inspires them to move out into the open. Many years ago I was an avid spearfisher in Westernport. I never hunted open sand flats, but always along the edge of structure, e.g. reefs, and changes in structure as that is where the fish were. I have approached fox shooting with that in mind. The many foxes I have seen in the open on my paddocks are always travelling and quite fast at that. They are on a mission and clearly going some where. Sometimes even tasty bait seems to have no effect: four weeks ago we killed a steer for the freezer. I staked the head out behind my tractor shed within my shooting range and dumped the guts at another spot near the tree-line and close to a gateway which offered me cover from which to shoot. Two nights later I used my thermal viewer from the gateway behind the house and watched a fox travel 270 yards southwards down the fence-line between two large paddocks. He turned uphill towards the steer's head and looped around it without stopping - to my great surprise. He walked, quickly, and went up to the tree line to turn north and walked to and then past the pile of offal without stopping and back down the hill into the trees. So even the best baits won't distract a fox on a mission. I was stunned that a fox would not take such delicious bait!

I'm continually told foxes are quick to learn and I shouldn't educate them by taking impossible shots and scaring them. The other side of the coin is that they also learn quickly from positive experiences such as finding some fresh bait even a couple of nights in a row. You have the thermal viewer and will spot foxes your first day/night at the farm and could lay bait with some chance of success in following days.

Jim
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Re: Best time for Rabbits and Foxes

Post by bigfellascott » 19 Aug 2019, 7:17 am

NTSOG wrote:Dom: ''Righto, I’m going have to try some of these baiting tactics on my next trip to farm in mid September.''

It's working for me. Those large tins of very cheap and nasty dog food seem to be very desirable. I grab a spoon and dig into the ''food'' chopping it up into tiny pieces and then flinging it in the general direction I want them to go for safe shooting. [Over two weeks recently I recently moved one fox off a crown road and well into my property to where he could be safely shot by gradually moving the feeding ''station'' 50-75 feet each night.] I make sure that the pieces are very small as my trail camera pictures showed that large pieces attract magpies and crows which would come in and knock off the pieces. Essentially I just want to give the foxes a sniff and a tiny taste. Off course I do have the time, living on the property. One of the good things about baiting for me is that it gives me lots of time to set up shots as the blighters search around in a smallish area for bits of food. I'm not up to shooting moving targets at present.

Jim


They love KFC chicken Bones too :D

You might want to invest in some foot hold traps for when you are out there, :thumbsup:
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Re: Best time for Rabbits and Foxes

Post by Elite_Sniper » 07 Oct 2019, 2:54 pm

For rabbits, I've got 6 beagles that will jump & run a rabbit back in a circle to the approx. area he jumped from. If you don't have beagles, that means you've gotta jump shoot them. If it's super cold, they're often underground but if they're not, they'll be in the thickest, nastiest cover you can find. Lap/brush piles, briar patches, under downed trees, in thick overgrown fields/cutovers, etc.
Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you want
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