Patience is a Virtue
Government Nuisance Trapping - Part II
Early the next Saturday morning as the sun broke I was optimistically headed down river to check the two areas where I had set my traps. When I got to my first sets, where I had placed the foothold and conibears, it was plain to see I had not had any activity the evening before. There were no new tracks in the snow and a quick peak through my binoculars confirmed that all three of my traps were untouched.
This is not an uncommon occurrence and is why it is better to leave your trap lines out for extended periods of time (checking them regularly of course — Idaho law sets the minimum time to 72 hours, though I usually go every 24), because sometimes it takes a while for your target animals to come back to the areas you set.
Knowing that I still had one more day before I needed to pull my traps (I would be going out of town the next week), I put my binoculars up, left my traps for one more night, and then headed back to town to check the set I made by our electrical dam.
When I got on scene I could see that my trap was not in the area I had left it! This was a pretty exciting moment as the last time I had set a trap in this area and came upon my moved trap it had a beaver in it... Yet, when I got a little closer I could see that my trap had been moved, but was not set off and did not have a beaver in it...
Those wiley little beaver had managed to move my anchoring sticks and gently nudge my trap out of the way... Hopping into the water a bit confused as to how that happened, I decided to reset (with some bigger sticks) my trap to sit out for one more night...
After this quick mornings work, I downed some coffee and headed back to my house to knock out the rest of my weekend chores and wait until the following (and last) morning to go check them all again!