The Management Trapper: Starting Out on the Right Foot

 

By Steve Bartylla

As I write this, I just finished spending the day with three young men, ranging in age from 14 to 16 years of age. My friend and I invested four hours into turning those young men into trappers, before they were allowed to set their first traps on the ground.

Photo courtesy Steve Bartylla.

For those just breaking into trapping for any reason, but particularly those with the ultimate goal of managing the furbearers on their property, learning from seasoned trappers should be priority number one.

The Risk Factor

When trapping any animal, it is our responsibility to do it the right way, every time. Few, if any, head out with the goal of causing animals to needlessly suffer or to eventually free themselves from our traps. That almost always occurs through basic ignorance, which is caused by a lack of experience. Proper training can help us avoid an awful lot of the purely ignorant kind of mistakes that are mostly made by inexperienced trappers. Frankly, we owe it to the animals to avoid that, whenever realistically possible.

There’s another risk at play, as well. That’s educating the animals that we are trying to catch, which happens through toe catches, improperly bedded traps, contaminating traps with attractant scents and many other trapping sins to be avoided at all costs.

Remember, our trapping efforts literally have the ability to train the animals that we are trapping. Have that coyote come to a dirt hole with a “tippy” trap. He steps on the jaw and it moves under his weight. You can bet he will dig up and snap that trap.

Now, a couple days later, he runs into a flat set. This time, he steps on the pan of the trap, but the pan tension is way too loose and depresses well before he puts his full weight on the pan. He pulls his foot back, just in time for the trap to snap on a couple claws. Some painful yanking later, he’s free, minus a claw.

That is both a very realistic sequence of events, and exactly how one creates trap-wise ‘yotes, ‘coons or any other furbearer.

Learning From Others

My mom drilled many lessons into my head growing up. One of them was that it is indeed a smart person that learns from their own mistakes, but the truly intelligent learn from others, so they never make them at all.

Photo courtesy Steve Bartylla.

Speaking for myself, nowhere is that more true than in trapping. A few hours sure won’t teach a new trapper everything they need to know. But that’s still plenty of time to show how to properly make various sets, point out high-odds locations and cover the basic rules, like bedding clean traps properly, showing the importance of pan tension and a host of other basic, yet critical methods.

Conclusion

The very first time out, a new trapper is almost always better off learning from experienced guides than blazing a new trail. Although I was only able to spend four hours with the boys, that’s a great start. The more time an inexperienced trapper can spend learning from those with many years under their belts, the swifter they become truly intelligent trappers.

— 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.

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