President — Tom Peterson, phone: 918-241-2677
Vice President — Shannon Sheffert, 1301 Old Bumpy Rd., Stillwater, OK 74074; cell phone: 405-742-7884; e-mail: ssheffert@odot.org
Secretary — John Weygandt, 4720 S. 26th W. Ave., Tulsa, OK 74107; phone: 918-645-5667;
e-mail: j.weygandt@maccor.com
Treasurer — Vivian Scott, P.O. Box 179, Alderson, OK 74522; phone: 918-426-6918;
e-mail: littlerockmeme@msn.com
FTA Director — Terry Thornton, Rt. 2 Box 71, Hartshorne, OK 74547; phone: 918-297-2073
NTA Director — Leo Farmer, phone: 918-616-7662
Membership Options:
• 1-year membership including subscription to Trapper & Predator Caller — $20
• Family membership with subscription to Trapper & Predator Caller — $25
• Lifetime (Over 70) with subscription to Trapper & Predator Caller — $150
• Lifetime with subscription to Trapper & Predator Caller — $300
• Youth membership — $10
Complete membership application on first page of association section and send dues to:
OFBA, Treasurer
Vivian Scott
P.O. Box 179, Alderson, OK 74522
918-426-6918; littlerockmeme@msn.com
PRESIDENT’S REPORT
Once again, I sit down to write the newsletter not knowing what fur prices will be for the 2010/2011 season. Our first fur sale was canceled due to the massive snowstorm and blizzard that we received during the week of the sale. It was hard to do, call off the sale, but I believe that we made the right call as we had folks still snowed- in the day of the sale, and we even got another couple inches during the night before the sale. Then in typical Oklahoma fashion, we wait a minute and it changed from record low of -31 to record high of 81 degrees in a week! Where else can you get a 110 degree temperature swing?
Now all of our eggs are in one basket, the sale that will be held in a couple days at Okmulgee on March 5th. Again, I plan to have a summary of the sale in the next newsletter. I don’t think that a snow storm will be the reason to call off this sale, temps are going to be in the 40’s and 50’s during the day. There should be quite a bit of fur there, mine included. I hope that prices are good as the gas prices have jumped $0.25 per gallon or more in the past couple weeks.
I just pulled sets yesterday for the last of the general furbearer season, and made a pretty good run at the coons and even a bobcat right at the last minute.
Surprisingly, the coons, coyotes and other critters show no signs of rubbing all the way up to the end of February this year on my trapline. Sometimes I see rubbing on furbearers as early as mid January but this year is different. I have caught beavers as late as early May that are still good furred, but usually they start to rub in mid March. Even the deer at my friend Joe Shelton’s place are odd this year. In the past years, I have seen most of his bucks dropping one or both antlers as early as January 5th. However this year, on the 21st of February, almost all of the bucks still had both antlers! These critters are probably a better predictor of the end of winter than the famous Ground Hog in Pennsylvania.
A few other notes to pass along in this newsletter, include a warning on shipping and our spring/summer workshop campout.
Per Reginald Murray, it is illegal to ship smelly stuff like trapping lures and especially skunk scent through the US Postal Service. Even if it is packaged correctly (sealed, protected in packing bubbles and boxed correctly) the post office can still manage to cause the package to leak and therefore cause a shut down of the postal facility and expensive fines and clean up costs to both the shipper and receiver. These regulations on shipping are a result of the terrorism scares in postal packages. If you are shipping anything smelly, be sure to check with UPS or FedX for packing and shipping instructions. Also, contact your recipient to let them know when to expect a package and not leave it sitting in a warm office or other facility. Per another friend, prom dresses in a box next to a box of coyote trapping lure in the mail is not a good thing! (name withheld to protect the guilty).
And finally our spring/summer trapper workshop. We do not have a spring meeting, but we make up for it by holding a weekend campout in June. This year our campout which we call our Trapper’s Workshop, will be held at Rocky Point on Ft. Gibson lake. The campout will be on June 3rd- 5th, 2011. We have reserved campsites 61 and 62 for the main group so if you want to camp near by, you better call for reservations soon. The contact number for reserving sites is (888)448-1474 or by website at www.recreation.gov. I would expect that we will have lots of good food throughout the weekend, trapping demos all weekend, fishing, hopefully noodling, campfires and plenty of story telling. Please plan to bring your family for this fun event. Please watch our website www.oktrapper.com for more information or feel free to contact me or one of your directors.
Thanks for reading and I hope that you have a successful spring fishing and gardening season.
God bless each of you and your families, and remember our troops abroad.
— Shannon Sheffert