Call and response

Patrick Hook focuses on some of the techniques required to call in a fox and passes on his top tips gained from years of experience jousting with this wiliest of quarries

You should by now have undertaken your first hunting missions and will – if you enjoyed them – doubtless want to step up the pace and take more control of what is going on. I have already briefly touched on calling as one of the best methods of attracting foxes but this time I will go into it in more detail.

There are basically three types of callers: those made by blowing on the hand; mouthblown mechanical devices; and electronic callers. It is very rare for me to employ either of the first two as my local terrain is so hilly that it’s only too easy for wily foxes (and how many of them aren’t?) will simply sneak around on the wind, sniff human and vanish. Such use is fine when you can see your quarry and track it all the way in, however. As for the high-tech versions, there are many different makes and models to choose from these days, with new ones appearing on the market all the time.

Location, location

My favoured method of using a caller is to start by finding an appropriate location. This will be where I know or suspect there are foxes nearby, where I’ve got excellent visibility, a safe backstop, something behind me to hide my silhouette, and the wind is blowing either from my right to my left, or vice versa. I then count out 50 paces and position the caller facing away from me. The idea being that a fox that has been attracted by the caller will usually come in, but not always, from downwind. Its hearing, nose and attention will be focused on where the caller is, not where you are. This is the electronic caller’s biggest advantage.

When my quarry gets into the preferred killing zone – i.e. where there’s a safe shot at a sensible distance, I’ll mute the caller. Most of the time this will cause the fox to pause to work out where the sound went. That is my cue for taking the shot. The moment the trigger has been pulled, I’ll do three things:

• Check with the thermal that the shot was a good one and that my quarry went down • Check that there aren’t any other foxes coming in • Reload