What's the best bait to trap armadillos with

Armadillos

No bait or lure other than natural diller stink has been effective for me.

I find keeping a rag, towel, piece of chamois or a thin piece of plywood (luan) either directly on the floor of a cage or under the cage will give you all the attraction you will ever need. Just keep re-using the same scented materials over and over.I use captured armadillos to treat and retreat "sweeten" my boards and, rags or chamois. Good funneling techniques should get you your first armadillo to get the whole attracting scent thing working for you in the future.

Dedicated armadillo cages when you can afford them is my best recommendation.

I did several podcast that should shed some light on the trapping of armadillos, and addressing the bait question with many other WCO's.

Podcasts with Warrior, Kirk Dekalb, Gene Beck, Jeff Norris and others on trapping armadillos include:

http://www.blubrry.com/wildlifecontrol/612923/how-to-trap-armadillos/

http://www.blubrry.com/wildlifecontrol/1541686/kirk-dekalb-on-armadillo-trapping/

Video using early audio with me and Andy Williams 2008 and info from the Univ of Florida web site.
http://www.anytimewildlifecontrol.com/video/robb-russell-s-live-trapping-the-armadillo

The podcasts will cover all you need to know on diller trapping. I think I said everything I know on the topic in the ones I have participated in.
Over the years I have tried and experimented with most every known and unknown substance or bait purported to work. The list is to long to cover them all but includes the likes of black cherries, bananas from green to rotten, persimmons, fresh to rotten fruit of all kinds, nightcrawlers, red wigglers, meal worms, wax worms all the above in various combinations and stages of taint, anise, cherry oil, black walnut oil and extract, acorn oil, apple oil, sweet corn extract, castor, vanilla extract plus many I can not recall. Drift fencing, walking my yards and reading the sign have been far more educational than wasted efforts on baits this was what allowed me to start catching dillers. But for years I was shooting myself in the foot because when I caught a diller I would remove the diller and the trap it was in and replaced it with a new trap. But when I got so busy that I had to leave the trap on site and just transfer the diller to transport cages that I started seeing an interesting fact, the same trap on a multiple trap set up would do all the catching. It was nothing more or less than the natural funk of the armadillo inside that trap that was acting as the lure. To prove this I even moved the funked up trap to a different area in my set and it still out caught my other unfunked traps. Then I started transferring the first diller caught to other unfunked traps and let it stay in them for a day before resetting the traps and my catch went up even more.
So I say today the hardest diller to catch is your first one but once that is done get to seasoning your cages and materials (Robb's suggestion is completely valid) and you're in the diller trapping business.

BTW, here's a how to to transfer a diller.

First don a pair of good quality leather gloves.
Now stand the trap up on end and try to get the diller into position.
The preferred position is head down tail up.
Open the cage with one hand and grab the diller by the BASE OF THE TAIL.
Not the tip, the shell or anywhere else. A full solid iron grip on the BASE OF THE TAIL.
Now with one hand firmly on the cage and the other locked down with a death grip on the BASE OF THE TAIL rip that son of a buck out of the cage. This takes some doing as it will undoubtably hook them long diggers into the wire.
Now HOLD ON for dear life as it will do the twist on you and several pounds of gyrating diller and a tapered and smooth tail isn't much to hold onto.
At this point it will become obvious that you should have had the forethought to point the pizzle in an appropriate direction as they will spray as they twist.
Eventually it will tire of this long enough for the transfer to be made.
If you must you can drop the diller to the ground on all fours and pin it solid with a firm hand to the center top of the shell but expect the twist again when you lift.
And if all else fails they are not as fast as they seem and can be run down.

I would advise you not to try the last option.

It ain't a pretty sight watching a fat scotsman round down a possum on the half shell.

Rick, you ever had the squirrel in the fireplace make good it's escape across your face and shoulder? Try that with a diller bolting from a cage, that ain't pretty either.

Ron Jones

I know Rick, David and I have all promised you armadillo glands. I open one up and tried and I can't stand the way they smell.
They don't even look right from the insides either.

I hope my GA friends do better then I did.

Okay, there's a line I can use: opossum on the half shell.

Rick, I had a lady customer on the outside of her garage yell "Mr., there's a squirrel out here on the door. Do you want to net it?"

My reply from inside of garage; "Yeah, I actually have one sitting on my head and I'm trying to decide if I should net that one."

Below is a link to one method of armadillo trapping that has worked well for me; it also works for other critters. If not already a member of that forum, you will probably have to register to view it http://adcnetwork.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=predators&action=display&thread=216

Ron, I use the exact same method and I hit on the rolls when I started having huge open yards to trap. It's not uncommon for me to unroll 300' of fencing just to block off whole areas of the yard to drift into an area covered by multiple traps. Double doored traps are ideal for this type of setting as you can cover two approaches with one trap.

Ron I would love to get away with lots of drift fencing but I always had problems with HOA's.

Most of my customers require some very stealth armadillo trapping methods unless I am trapping on their ranches.

Some home owners associations its easier to get in and out and not get permission from the architectural committee at next months meeting for a 4-5 day job 30 days from now. I can tell you the rich and famous near Sarasota Florida live in some pretty bad neighborhoods when you consider all the rights they give up to live in some of them places.

Gainesville has its own bad neighborhoods with HOA's too. I like places alot more like your side of Daleville !!