Took yesterday and went to Uncle Donalds funeral.  It was a great service.

Now back to trapping.  Remember that the other day I set a whole pile of traps out.  I now have 106 traps set and ready to catch muskrats.  Those same 106 traps have sat for two nights and with between the number of traps and two relatively warm nights, I really expect to catch a pile of rats today.  I’m saying 30 and that might be conservative.

We will have to wait and see how the catch goes and I’ll update you on how it went later today.

Bears Butt

February 20, 2015

UPDATE:

The weather was cold and windy.  By cold I mean unseasonably warm for this time during a normal year, but for lately I had to bundle up with most of my gear and then by 10:30 I was taking stuff off.  I ended up wearing my coat all day however and the wind was blowing pretty good all day as well.  But, as I ran my lines my blood was pumping pretty good as the traps seemed to all have had some kind of activity.

Back home the count was 40 rats!  That is the most rats I have ever caught by myself in one day!

I had also had 2 raccoons hit my traps.  One was able to back out of the trap because a leg bone had gotten between the door stop and the door.  A second had gotten into a trap and ate the contents of the bail and then left without the door going off.  The reason the door didn’t trip was mud and debris under the trap keeping the trip lever from pressing down to fire it.  I didn’t have any muskrat bodies to rebait with and so I used small boxes of raisins.  I’ve never used raisins before and so it will be interesting to see if they work.

Bob came in with 6 rats and so we had a very good day of trapping.

On the downside is all the time it takes to skin, flesh and stretch and tonight (Saturday) will be the big night for doing that.  My back hurts just thinking about it.

Butt