Alright, I was finally able to score on my first fox ever last night hunting with my buddy Bill during NJ's Coyote and Fox Special Permit Season!
Our night started off more like an Abbot and Costello act with all the issues we ran into. Bill and I each drove about 45 minutes to the area we planned on hunting to find that Bill forgot his FoxPro caller at home! Ack! It's already 11:00PM, and I suggest we go without it and use hand calls instead, but Bill insists on going back. So, I decide to head to a different spot down the road a ways and give it a try on a solo hunt with just my hand calls.
Well, I park, get my gear and gun packed up and head on in for a 10-15 minute walk on the property. I arrive at the spot, get settled in and flick on my Lightforce 170 to find...well it's not working. I spend a few minutes toggling switches, checking fuses, disconnecting and reconnecting all the points to no avail. Then I check the one adapter and find the dual wire harness broke clean off from inside the adapter. UGH!
So Bill is in transit and we're without the Lightforce 170! Well, we contemplate calling it a night, but Bill won't have any of that either and brings along some of his other lights...less range but will work just fine. I backout, and head back to the spot Bill and I met up at earlier and begin to disassemble the adapter to see what went wrong with my light and also to see if I can patch it for the rest of the night's hunts.
I wind up getting it apart, and to make a long story short, I needed a soldering iron to resolder the contacts. I tried to hack it with a lighter, but was wasting my time...just can't get hot enough to melt the solder and reform the contacts.
Alright, we ultimately concede and settle in on Bill's lights. We head off to another set with the FoxPro and are ready to call in some predators! We hoof it in a little ways to a nice field, wind is a little shifty but should be OK.
We set the FoxPro about 40 yards crosswind and behind us as we watch the field edge cover in front of us, which is where we expect the fox or yotes to come from. We start off with some mouse squeak hand calls but receive no response. We then fire up the FoxPro with some screaming rabbit calls, and again no response. We then progress to a Grey Fox Distress call and about 2 minutes later, a nice red pops out of the woods 35 yards to my front left.
I get the light on him, flip the safety off, settle in and squeeze the trigger. He goes down and is kicking, we figure he's dead, but in retrospect...should have shot one more time to put him down for good. As it turned out, we had to perform a little tracking and finish the job, but it all worked out OK in the end...except for the point blank shooting which hurt the front of the coat (face/legs)...this is where a .22 would have come in beautifully...dispatch shot to the head, game over...instead, a 3.5" Dead Coyote load at a few feet...not pretty.
It was a great hunt, and both Bill and I were stoked to finally score! One down and many more to go!
Here's a few pics of Bill and I with the fox, nice moon background too! ;)
Equipment Used:
Shotgun: Benelli Super Black Eagle II
Shell: 3.5" Dead Coyote #T
Choke: Ported Rhino .660 2" Extended
Call: Knight and Hale Mouse Squeaker, FoxPro FX5
