By Steve Bartylla
Truth be told, hunting didn’t so much make me a better trapper as trapping made me a much better hunter and manager. There are large areas of overlap between them, where an extremely beneficial approach in one is often every bit as beneficial in the other.
One I’ve found that fits that description is embracing diversity. I worked at a factory when I was in high school. It was easy to see that repeating the same tasks all day just didn’t fit my personality, as that factory work served as an insurance policy to be certain I went back to school each fall. Even more convincing was that diversifying my approach improved my skills as a hunter, manager and most certainly as a trapper.
What we’re going to talk today is diversifying our sets.
Land Trapping
Growing up on a turkey farm offered some disadvantages, but talk about outdoor opportunities galore. One of which was bounty trapping on the area’s turkey farms.
As a preteen kid, the farm manager allowed me to tag along as he ran his bounty line. It was pretty straightforward, as he merely set the runs going under the fences. Set every run and they couldn’t get in or out without getting caught.
He didn’t love trapping and didn’t hate the idea of turning it over to a kid. The next year, I was running the line myself. By the following year, I was running very early spring lines on all of the turkey farms in the area, getting both the bounty and then selling the still-prime hides.
Unfortunately, several years later, I was told I couldn’t bounty trap for them any longer, as I was obviously cheating them, somehow. My catches on every farm had greatly exceeded the adult farmers’, and a 16-year-old kid obviously couldn’t be better than a bunch of adults that trapped those farms for years. Yeah, right.
Honestly, I’m not sure if I was a better trapper than them or not. I can tell you why my success was so much higher than theirs, although it very likely would have gone down after a few more years.
It was because I set the runs just like every one of the turkey farmers did, and then I made a bunch of dirt-hole sets, flat sets, scent-post sets, pocket sets and blind sets beyond the fence crossings. In about a month, I’d catch more fur than the farmers had all year. Diversity was the key, not cheating.
Water Trapping
The same theory applied to longline bridge trapping my way through college. Blind sets under bridges are great, particularly once a trapper figures out they can often do some serious remodeling and make killer blind set locations under most bridges.
With that being said, I always scouted beyond under the bridge the few yards to the fence lines, setting any trail, exposed roots or slide sets, as well as slipping in a pocket set or two.
Sure, it was the blind sets that delivered the most mink each year, but the rest upped my mink catch by another 10% to 20%, while also greatly increasing my catch of other furbearers.
Conclusion
Blind sets or any other type of set may turn out to be your true difference-maker when management trapping. With that being said, embrace diversity and refuse to let go. I’ve yet to find a situation where one isn’t benefitted by using more than one type of set on a property or trapline.
— Steve Bartylla is one of the country’s most respected experts on land and habitat management for whitetails and turkeys. He has been a land-management consultant and outdoor writer for more than 20 years, and grew up trapping in Northern Wisconsin throughout his youth and on after his college years. He is also host of “Grow ‘em Big” and “Hunt ‘em Big” shows on Pursuit Channel and YouTube.