Keep up with these creatures of habit

Don't leave fox control until it's too late - learn their behaviour and use it to your advantage to gain the upper hand

- Liam Bell

There are few things more frustrating than finding kills and puffs of feathers where hen birds have been taken off the nest. When the grass is short and the crops are relatively low, catching up with the fox or foxes responsible is pretty straightforward. A shine around with the lamp or a sit with a thermal sight or image intensifier will usually bring results; maybe not immediately but certainly within a couple of nights. Foxes are creatures of habit, after all.

When the cover is up and the crops are waist-high, catching up with them is less straightforward although thankfully not impossible. And it is their being creatures of habit that lets them down. A fox will almost always move off in the same direction when it starts to get dark. Where it goes then will very much depend on what it finds and whether or not it is disturbed. Resident foxes will have their routes and their favourite hunting spots. They will head to these favoured spots first and will usually turn up at around the same time.

Learning the ground 

Sitting out with a decent scope at dusk will pick a lot of foxes up, but only when you have learned the ground and their routes. Randomly sitting out is better than not sitting out of course, but as you learn your ground it gets easier. The more you do, the more foxes you’ll bump into, and an evening sat out, even if it is unproductive as far as fox control goes, is seldom wasted. There is always something to see.