End of December....shipping to auction:
Rest of my fur at the end of the season:
Most of my trapping was in NC with no fox season so didn't full much with predator sets. Here's a few more pics from the year.
I caught these to coon together around Christmas in Bedford. The one on the right is the biggest I've ever weighed at 20#.....the other was 12 or 13.
grey on a field edge
grey on a pond dam
Noticed some otter tracks in a creek bottom while coon trapping, so I blocked off the channel and set a 330:
Here's the result, hard to tell but it's an otter:
Caught another otter with a foot trap in a beaver slide but no pic of that.
This was my first year beaver trapping and it's a lot of fun. I trapped a few problem areas on Camp Lejeune. Coincidentally we have a pond on our farm in Bedford. Had a beaver problem in 1988 but none since. I was back home to plant trees in March right after the season ended, and some beavers had just moved in. Can't wait to go for them next fall
Neighbor told me there's a huge dam on a river less than mile away. Anybody with problem beaver in Bedford or Rockbridge let me know and I'll see if I can get to them next winter (or coyote or fox, raccoon, etc).Here's a castor mound set on a creek below a dam. The trap is out of the bed and a 44# beaver at the end of the drowning rod (you can see the top of the rod going into the water on the left):
And here's the rod pulled up with the beaver on the end:
Beaver trapping is a lot of fun, but when there's beaver in an area it's obivious due to the sign they leave. And that led to my first encounter with trap theives. Got cleaned out of several expensive traps at one location and that hurt both the pride and the pocketbook. All in all I had a lot of fun and looking forward to next year!
