Gray Fox season designated

A new Gray Fox hunting season is designated with a new law Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed Monday.

House Bill 3760 establishes the seasons and allows the Illinois Department of Natural Resources director to adjust the length of the season to adequately manage the Gray Fox population.

Quoted fromTheCentersquared.com

Are you serious

I haven't seen a gray fox in years
they need to just close the grey fox season and let us take some more cats

Id hazard this would of been deen for practical reasons.

Might be shorter then before it’s IL.

Crazy!

Is this so that the department can shorten or close the season?

Years ago they shut down the coyote season during the deer season it’s a SMH place.

I have never seen a gray fox in my life here in Illinois. I've only seen red foxes maybe a total of 25 times.


As a side note, I've never seen any of the weasel species or a badger either. But, we do have badgers around the southern state line few and far between apparently, a guy a few miles up the road had one on trail cam a couple years ago.

Chicago suburbs held a lot of grey fox 45 years ago.

Cats all over the dang place where I'm at too. The bobcat regulations here are absolutely crazy. The IDNR really covets the bobcats.

There were quite a few badger in west central IL.

Sounds like someone high up in Illinois DNR is a predator hunter and wants to kill a grey fox if one comes in to the call.....

This bill is indeed having to do with the population of the gray fox,, because there’s a lack of them. The gray fox could very well become a protected species in Illinois because they are almost nonexistent.
The Illinois Department of natural resources has tried to do studies on what is happening to the greys, the problem is, they can’t find any to do any studies.

The only real study I know of, that has a population that is observable, is in Iowa.
I can’t remember where I saw the article. But hopefully there’s something available in that study, that can help determine what happened to the greys.
Some argue that it is coyotes,, but greys usually hang around brush and can climb trees. I dunno,, distemper?

… coyotes do put a hurting on them … plenty of trees here in East Texas and I’ve watched their decline due coyotes… they started ripping them out of my traps in the early 2000’s … been downhill ever since…. Only find them here or there around deer feeders hangin with the coon anymore

… I’ll catch 20 coyote to every one gray fox these days

Ohio is doing a new study on grey fox right now. We had alot, at least in my area, of distemper outbreaks in the mid 00s and that was about the last time people saw numbers of grey fox. Theory that was put forward by the one of the biologists was that habitat segmentation was leading to inbreeding in the population leading to weakened immuse systems

The last one I have seen was back in '86 in Lake County ( Mundelein area).
I was out rabbit hunting with a high school buddy jumping on brush piles and his Beagle kicked 2 rabbit and the fox out of a huge tangle.

They made it our state wildlife animal, closed the season (any bycatch has to be reported), and I haven't seen even a road kill in a couple of years. We have almost no coyotes compared to other states so that isn't it.
Shame... they're a pretty neat little critter IMO...

Never seen one here in central SD live never heard of one being caught or shot or sighted even yet I’ve picked 2 off the side of the roads, one off I-90 1 on the edge of town. The one near town looks like she pupped that year the habitat is there in the river breaks just no reports of them if someone caught one everyone would hear about it.

Haven’t caught a gray in over 30 years and never see one in high school I’d always catch 6 or so without even trying. I miss those cool little guys