Trapping can teach you so much

[jaydee2trad]

After my bout with the many strokes 24 years ago, I was left with a lot of uncerainty. My ability to reason was lousy at best and to understand anything new was so terrible. My comprehension was almost none and everything was scary to me. I knew that I had to get back into the outdoors in as many ways as possible and to work on relearning how to do just about everything. I was also no longer working and on limited income so I was trying to figure out what I could possible do to add some money to my income. It was late spring and I had heard my son-n-law talking about hides doing pretty well, especially bobcats. So I decided to learn how to trap. I ordered several books and began gathering traps etc. My biggest problem was just remembering anything important as my memory sucked. I had gotten a book by Tom Miranda on bobcat trapping. it was a small book but I read it quickly. At this point, it didn't tell me anything, well not that I could tell. So, I read this book 10 to 15 times and then wrote what was the main things that he was saying. Holes were important, they hunted by sight and sound so attractors were important to get them to the holes where the sets were to be made. Amd step over sets worked great for them. Then after just watching the house cat outside as it hunted, I realized how particular cats were about where they placed their feet. I quickly figured out how to use anthing natural from pieces of a pine cone to lots of dead blackberry thorny stems on the ground to force the cat to step on the only clean spot around as it tried to look down into that hole. I caught 18 bobcats my first year. What I learned from trapping was that you could catch several kinds of critters with a step over and that you could funnel some into the trap but some required more refined methods. I also began to learn how to read the sign that was left everywhere by each kind of critter. This also gave me a better understanding of game trails and what the critters fed on. This fell over into deer activity as the sign was everywhere. I began really noticing what the deer were eating and what they were avoiding. Suddenly the woods wasn't just the woods but a huge newspaper of animal information. I learned how to pick out those faint deer trails off to the sides from scrapes where the bucks would scent check a scrape safely. Predator sign became more apparent to me and why the deer would suddenly avoid an area. Trapping also made it easier to figure out where and why to place my stands. So I learned more about the animals of the woods as well as the deer.

[Hill billy]

I was a better hunter when I trapped years ago simply because I learned to look at a piece of landscape and see the natural trails and crossings. I still use those skills but when your not practicing on a routine basis like trapping it’s easy to get rusty. Trapping probably taught me more about hunting then any other one thing I can recall! There is nothing like running a trap line!

[Nock]

I have to agree. There’s a lot of small details out there that get missed.