How to Build Your Own Cricket Trap
Posted: Tuesday, December 06, 2005
by tkishkape
Oklahoma Catfish Charter Service
How to Build Your Own Cricket Trap
When I was a kid, my father would choose a weekend for a catfishing trip to Lake Texoma, giving me ample notice to catch lots of trotline bait. The pond I liked to fish in was full of black perch and bluegill from 3 inches to 3/4 pound each. They liked crickets. Lots of crickets.
I noticed that the crickets I needed were on the ground, dead, at the gas station on the corner every morning. They were piled up under the light that stayed on all night. Nowhere else were they so numerous.
That gave me a brainstorm. I went down to the grocer's and begged an orange crate from him. Don't laugh... oranges came in wooden crates in the mid 1950's. The slats failed to cover the entire box bottom, but it allowed air flow. I covered the box with window screen wire on the bottom and sides in order to keep the crickets from escaping. Then I made a tight-fitting frame covered with the same screen wire for a lid and hinged it to the box.
The box was half-filed with torn up lettuce leaves from the grocer and placed outside against the wall of the garage with the lid propped open. This was the trap.
The lure was a simple invention... an extension cord with a garage trouble light plugged in. The key was the red lightbulb. The red light was positioned so that the light fell on the lettuce bed in the box.
The crickets swarmed the red light at night, falling into the lettuce where they remained chomping merrily away all night. All I had to do was quietly remove the light and close the box lid at daybreak and I had thousands of crickets free of charge.
My live tank at the pond was filled on schedule and many church fish fries were supplied with fine catfish from that Lake Texoma trotline.
Submitted by Albert McBee. Copyright December 2006. The author is a 100% disabled Viet-Nam Veteran operating Oklahoma Catfish Charter Service as a catfishing guide and maintaining several websites including http://www.okcharters.com, http://www.precisioncaster.net and http://www.bigboyztoystore.com.
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Top-level comments on this article: (9 total)i wish that there were pictures to help me understand.
Sorry... there were no digital cameras in 1956... and I haven't built a cricket trap since then. ;)
i found your discription easy to follow...cant wait to try it out . i need crickets for all the lizards,snakes & frogs my kids bring home. thanks
do you have to use a red light?
thanks for writing this, i hope tha all is well. i'm going to try it out...although it will need to be a milk crate in leu of the orange crate. i'll need to pull a "mcgyver"...exuse me pull a "mcbee" in order to fashion a lid. i'll let you know how it turns out.
that was alot of help in my kids at home they enjoy catching lizards so they feed them to the lizards you were alot of help to me.........thanks
Thank you sooo much :) I'll never have to spend another dime on crickets for my son's tree frog, thanks to you.Yep! A LIFETIME supply of crickets for bait or reptile feed... and all for near FREE!There are so many crickets everywhere, they'll never run out. Be wary of the "jerusalem cricket" in the south... they're a very large cricket, possibly weighing a ounce or more. They Bite!
be careful of fertilizer when feeding pets its in and on them
How do the crickets get in the box??? Thanks
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