Saturday Night Fox Hunt

[MG5150]

Saturday Night I was sitting on the roof of the shed waiting for a deer to walk out of the forest and into our paddock.

I wouldn't have been up there for 3 minutes when a fox came trotting through the front paddock, and I was able to shoot it and drop it on the spot.

15 minutes later things had gone quiet and decided to have a whistle on the 'silva fox' and another came running in from the creek. He came straight towards me until he hit the scent line of Fox 1 and pivoted, giving me a nice side-on shot.

After an hour of nothing I decided to do a lap before calling it a night and spotted a 3rd one in the back paddock that had just come through the tree line. I think he saw me duck down and take aim as he hesitated, but still came forward and wasn't put off by my safety clicking. I took a shot and blew his front legs off, and gave him a finisher from 10m away a few minutes later once I'd found him in the corner of the paddock.

I messaged the family letting them know there would be no more shots unless one was dumb enough to walk out while I was scalping the other three...

Sure enough, I was collecting the first two from the front paddock and fox 4 came trotting out.

I'd seen a few foxes come up on my trail cameras, but never slow enough or in enough detail that allowed me to figure out if there was more than one or the same one over and over. Despite dozens of nights where I'd hours on top of the shed with a thermal waiting for something to walk out, I'd only ever seen two foxes (one last year and one about a month ago).

I never thought we had so many kicking around and was surprised I'd gotten four in a single night.

I wonder how many more I would have gotten had I stayed out longer.

These were all shot with the new Mars 1000 Thermal Scope by Oneleaf attached to my Lithgow 223. It felt amazing not to miss any!

You can check out the footage here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDrMDk7bmvWcQB-2DuOUfAEKvN0-BCmAN

[Billo]

Good shooting MG5150, looks like you on your way to removing all members of the family