Suburban Foxes Still Pay the Bills

Story and photos by K.D. Pritts

I’m a predator trapper. But while I like the idea of trapping coyotes, bobcat or lynx, they’re just not a backyard commodity for me. I own perhaps an acre parcel near a subdivision. According to the new litter of eager young realtors, I now live in the Philadelphia suburban sprawl. But, I grew up far away in Appalachia and I’m a mountaineer at heart.

Photo credit: K.D. Pritts

Where I live now, I do have a little spit of creek with a bantam piece of wildlife paradise. I have grown the vegetation high enough to have red foxes calling on me, but I still mow enough to keep the local constabulary from calling on me.

In the early 1960s I caught my first fox — a gray — when Pennsylvania paid a $4 bounty on every fox. Four bucks was a pretty nice payday for a young lad and fox season was open year-round. The bounty system went away, years passed, and college found me at Penn State when the price of a prime red fox was $50 or more. Fox trapping helped pay the college bills and more.

There I used the proceeds from one red fox pelt to buy an old 1964 Chevy Nova with a finicky clutch and a sticky “three-on-the-tree” shifter.

More years passed and these days I’m just a retired pensioner. So I roam the suburbs seeking out fields or woodlots in small farmsteads that are still hanging on, gaining a trapline foothold anywhere I can get the go-ahead to set a foothold trap.

Now that I’m on a fixed income, short-line trapping needs to put my bottom line in the black. The fox, in particular, suits my needs. It has adapted well to a suburban lifestyle. To take foxes by the dozens I’ve adapted my own tactics and homemade bait for suburban fox trapping success.

Sometimes fox travel lanes are much closer to houses than is permitted by trapping regulations. So, I need to change their normal routes and have foxes veer out to where I can set traps legally.

Main Homemade Bait

To pull foxes out away from swing sets and tree houses, I spike a spot with my homemade bait out in an area where I can trap. Scent will make foxes curious, but snacks of good red meat on a regular basis can change their travel habits.

Photo credit: K.D. Pritts

For my bait, I use muskrat combined with cottontail rabbit as the base. They are each easy to come by in my area. Rabbits and muskrats are both a bellyful of real meat for corridor-hunting suburban foxes to enjoy. And foxes like to dig holes and nuzzle pieces they can’t consume into the ground. I simply replicate suburban fox reality.

I field dress both rabbits and muskrats after removing the fur since I don’t want internal organs in my bait. They liquify quickly, add nothing to the odor I’m aiming for, and they make bait thin. So, I chunk the meat, keep the fat and grind the meats together along with the fat.

Small feral cats and unsuspecting courtyard cats have become a very real part of the suburban fox’s diet. So I also want some catty flavor in the mix. But I’m not putting my kitty, Mittens, through the grinder.

Instead, I add about ½ ounce of bobcat gland per pound of ground meat. To make it come out right without glopping my postal scale, I pack it in pint mason jars using the old adage, “a pint’s a pound the world around.” I dump it back into the grinder in manageable amounts, mix it well and then grind it all again until I have a paste bait. All is packed back into the mason jars for storage until needed.

With this mix, aging the packed mason jars for a few weeks in the cool basement works great. Then the jars go into an old refrigerator to slow any further deterioration until use.
When a smear of my bait has a mild odor to my nose, it’ll smell to high heaven to a fox. I don’t just want foxes to smell it. I want them to drool and eat it, not rub or roll on it. And I want them to dig at the site looking for more.

Location, Location, Location

Before and during the season, I drop globs of my bait along with scattered hay to start a “breadcrumb” trail leading out to a legal trapping area. I use the hay for several reasons. Cut hay, along with meat, has an intriguing sight and scent for foxes. Out away from the houses I also sprinkle some birdseed around the hay to attract other critters that naturally smell good to a fox. The hay then marks the spots where I can come back and look for tracks, scat or digging.

Photo credit: K.D. Pritts

When I’m confident that foxes are veering out into legal trapping areas, I can make good use of my limited number of traps. While I’m waiting for foxes to start working a new area I’ve created, my traps are out elsewhere. When fox sign is evident near my hay markers, I can then pull traps from other areas I’ve been trapping and expect fox catches right away in the spiked zone.

It really does take this type of effort for successful suburban trapping. Using homemade bait that I’m also going to place at trap sets is an inexpensive way to make it work.
The best place to set a trap is not necessarily the best place to trap. Another consideration I have to take into account is other people. A small ravine in nondescript turf that is hidden from a roadway is a better trap site than a foxy-looking hayfield within a commuter’s sightline.

Inside the urban sprawl, I’m always on the lookout for corners and bottlenecks that may connect to tree lines or small fields as travel lanes. One August day I discovered a smidgen of wetland surrounded by strip malls and highways. The cattails had caught my eye from a four-lane highway, so I went in with a rangefinder.

The marsh water had to drain somewhere, and I found a nice size culvert outflow from the cattails. I was also more than a little intrigued by a long field with a tree line that stretched out to a dead-end street. Behind the street was a long-forgotten, weedy, overgrown tractor lane.It looked foxy.

When I showed up in November with a trap pack, things had changed a bit. Now, at the end of the field sat a new medical marijuana dispensary. Who in the heck would put a pot palace in a perfectly good trapping field? At least they paved a nice place for me to park.

In a slight crease in the field out away from buildings, I put in several dirt hole sets with my muskrat/cottontail bait using two traps at each set. Between each of the two traps I stuck a tall stem of goldenrod. It worked as a guide stick and also a flag post that I could check with binoculars from a small rise. If the goldenrod was down, I went in. The goldenrod was down a lot.

I pulled a half-dozen red foxes from this small drop in the land that connected to the old tractor lane. As an added bonus I caught a nice buck mink in a blind set at the culvert. I did switch some of the sets to my second homemade bait, which is poultry based. It worked just as well as red meat. I didn’t want to over-trap this honey hole so I pulled my traps after nine days.

Poultry Bait

For my poultry-based bait I use chukar partridge. Chukars are not native to Pennsylvania, but a friend of mine belongs to a sporting club where he hunts chukars. He pulls the breast meat out for grilling, but doesn’t use the thigh or leg meat. He gives me the chukars with breasts removed and I fillet meat from the unused parts. I usually get six to eight ounces of sliced meat per bird.

I’ve found that a light egg odor adds to the bait’s attractiveness to foxes. I hard-boil a fresh egg and mash it thoroughly with a fork. I sprinkle this lightly over the chukar meat pieces and then run everything through the grinder. Then mix the entire blend of meat/egg again and make a second run through the meat grinder.

The meat is packed into mason jars and aged lightly in the basement, the same as with muskrat/cottontail bait, then placed in refrigeration until needed. It makes a nice poultry paste bait that doesn’t turn insufferably rancid because I keep it in cool areas until use. Adding a small amount of commercial bait solution adds additional layers of odor. This can make an irresistible attractant for older, warier foxes, and even shy beta foxes.

Gear

Over the years I’ve developed a preference for #2 coilspring traps for suburban land trapping. I’m now adding some square jaw traps in Duke and Bridger styles, both dog-on and dogless. They are fine for fox and raccoon, and can hold a coyote that might come across the trapline. The winter weather in my area is often an unpredictable mix of snow, sleet and freezing rain, and the #2 coilsprings can muscle up through icy muck to catch and hold a critter.

Timing Is Everything

I don’t trap my down-the-road hotspots nonstop throughout the season. Instead I tie them into a larger trapline, and then pull my local traps as the catch dwindles in the suburbs. Later in the season I’ll trap those spots again.

There will still be young foxes moving around looking for new territory along with a few older foxes that may pair up late in the season. I use the best lanes from the early season fox trapping for sets in January, as parcels of snow rise and retreat during the gloomy freeze-thaw cycles of winters in southeast Pennsylvania.

Photo credit: K.D. Pritts

In a bold January move, I put out 17 fox sets attached to drags within sight of roadways when 8 inches of snow was forecast. I used all of my two-prong steel drags and then went to natural logs as drags, and also as backings for my sets. With the logs, I pounded fencepost staples through links in a few extra feet of chain attached to my traps. I varied dirthole sets and hay sets during a rough day of trap setting. The snow started in the afternoon and turned very heavy around dusk. By midnight, however, the snow stopped and the chill air drifted to stillness.

The next morning was magic. My traplines were crisscrossed with drag-marks in the snow. Red foxes were bouncing in nearly every brushpile in sight. From 17 sets, I took 14 reds that morning. The day went into my trapping logbook as my best fox catch percentage ever in the urban sprawl.

Other furbearers, such as muskrats, mink, raccoons and coyotes can also put fur in the shed with some consistency. The Eastern coyote, for example, has greatly expanded its range, yet it is still not very common everywhere. The expectation of a ‘yote interdicting my line on any given day is not particularly fruitful. But, suburban foxes are relatively plentiful and stress-free to find, trap, skin and handle. At today’s prices, the worth in time and traps disbursed, along with time spent skinning and fleshing other fur, might not consistently add up for me.

All fur prices move up and down based on buyer interest. Fox pelts, both red and gray, are no different. But in my neck of the woods, year-in and year-out, foxes still pay the bills.

Speed Dipping Tips

I recently started to use petrochemical based speed-dip for some of my land-based traps. By trial and error, I’ve come up with a method to get a strong bond with “petro” speed-dip on my new traps, while getting rid of the petrochemical distillate odors.
First, I run my new traps through the dishwasher. Then, I use only Naphtha – white gas – to mix with speed-dip. Automobile gasoline contains solvents to clean a vehicle’s fuel line and those gasoline stenches are impossible to cover. The most common name in commercial Naphtha is Coleman camp fuel readily available at Walmart stores. But, you can save over $4.00 a gallon by purchasing the Crown brand of camp fuel, also at Walmart. Don’t confuse it with Crown alcohol or kerosene. I use Crown White Gas – Naphtha – with excellent results.

I did have to dabble with the label instructions a bit. The directions are one quart speed-dip concentrate in one gallon of white gas. I use a little less than a quart of speed-dip per gallon. I can’t give you the exact recipe, but I leave about 1 inch or so of the concentrate in the bottom of the speed-dip quart can.

After dipping my traps in a bucket of the mix, I use a funnel to pour the speed-dip mixture back into the metal Naphtha can and tighten the lid securely. This dip will do a lot of traps, and keeping the mix in the original Naphtha container seals it. There is no re-mixing needed, just shake the container a few times. This allows me to dip or re-dip traps throughout the season.

Using petro speed-dip with more dilution gives my traps a hard coating that dries a bit tacky rather than gummy. A gummy trap is the most common complaint I’ve seen in online forums with the use of petro speed-dip.

A word of warning – there’s nothing speedy about speed-dip. It takes at least several days for the traps to dry down to just a little tackiness and odor. I always keep a pot of logwood dye on hand through trapping season, so I experimented when the speed-dipped traps stayed tacky for two weeks. I dipped the tacky traps in barely lukewarm logwood dye for a few minutes. As expected, the logwood dye did not adhere to the speed-dip coated traps. But, I let the traps air-dry and found that the odor and tackiness had disappeared.

I plunged the traps into Full Metal Jacket trap wax and by the next day I had a strong, hard, odor-free veneer on the traps. That extra step of dunking tacky speed-dip-coated traps into lukewarm logwood dye just worked, I don’t know why. My speed-dipped traps are brown and my logwood-dyed traps are black so I can tell them apart. But the foxes can’t.

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