How to build your own cricket trap
When I was a kid, my father would pick a weekend for a cat fishing trip to Lake Texoma, giving me enough notice to catch a lot of trotline baits. The pond I liked to bait out of was full of black perch and blue gills 3 inches at 3/4 pound each. They liked crickets. Many crickets.
It took me an hour after dark to chase and catch a dozen crickets to fish the next morning. Then the perch ate them so fast that I was out of it in half an hour or so. I had to find a better way to stock up on enough crickets to catch enough perch to run a 100 hook trot line at least four times. That requires a lot of perch and even more crickets.
I noticed that the crickets I needed were on the ground, dead, at the gas station on the corner every morning. They were huddled together under the light that stayed on all night. Nowhere else were they so numerous.
That gave me brainstorming. I went down to the store and begged him for a box of oranges. Don’t laugh … the oranges arrived in wooden boxes in the mid-1950s. The slats didn’t cover the entire bottom of the box, but they did allow air flow. I covered the box with window mesh wire on the bottom and sides to prevent crickets from escaping. I then made a snug frame covered with the same mesh wire for a lid and hinged it into the box.
The box was half filled with lettuce leaves plucked from the grocer and placed outside against the garage wall with the lid open. This was the catch.
The lure was a simple invention … an extension cord with a garage trouble light plugged in. The key was the red light bulb. The red light was positioned so that the light fell on the bed of lettuce in the box.
The crickets swarmed in the red light at night, falling on the lettuce where they remained chewing happily all night. All he had to do was quietly turn off the light and close the lid of the box at dawn and he had thousands of free crickets.
My live tank in the pond filled up on schedule and many church fish chips received fine catfish from that Lake Texoma fishing line.