Trapping baits and lures

C

coote

Joined
Apr 3, 2006
Messages
1,465
I am wondering how folks make musk or urine lures for trapping. Gathering the urine from dead animals is relatively easy.... but what else do you do with it to make it useable and give it a shelf life?

I have heard that you add sodium benzoate as a preservative... but how much? And what sort of stores sell the stuff?

The possums I trap are omnivores and they seem to have little fear of man scent, so life for a possum trapper is fairly easy from that point of view.

I use apples for bait sometimes. I also have caught them using bread. In fact I think anything man eats should work.

I make up a lure by mixing flour, icing sugar and a few drops of scented oil or essence. The proportions aren't critical, but maybe I would have about one part icing sugar by volume to five parts flour. I have used aniseed oil, vanilla essence, almond essence, peppermint oil and eucalyptus oil. I've also used cinnamon or curry powder in place of the oil.

But I would like to know more about making animal based lures. Can anybody point me in the right direction? Any ideas or anecdotes would be interesting to read.

Thanks in advance.... Coote.
 
I have used anise and vanilla for coons, but no animal scents I know there are trapping supply houses you can order baits and lures from.
 
Coote,

I've got an anecdote for you. In PA in the spring we have a fish we call "suckers". They're big ugly looking catfish types with a big sucker for a mouth. Anyway they spawn in creeks and you can catch them with your hands.

We got a bunch and decided to make lure out of them for racoons. We just chopped them up and put them in a big jar and buried it in the ground on the back 40. That way come trapping season (winter) this stuff should be a uniform ooze, quite ripe, and nectar from heaven for coons.

Great plan. August came around and one day the entire house smelled like coon lure. My mutt dog had a good nose. He dug up that jar and got the semi rusted lid off and rolled in it. We actully had to shave him to get rid of the smell. Mac
 
That's a good story thanks. Why do danged dogs have to roll in stuff like that?

Anise is getting expensive around here, but imitation vanilla is heck of a cheap. I like to use some sort of scent with staying power. I can generally always smell the lure near the trap shortly after I set it, but I seldom can smell it the next day when I'm doing the rounds. Curry powder is one thing that seems to last... I can smell that the next day. But I suppose it isn't as appetising as the sweeter smells.
 
pict... ROTFLMAO!!!

That is typical. When Lady was alive she'd find the puddle of sludge, no matter how small, and lay right down and get to rolling. Come back looking like a lab. Doh.
 
A day or two ago I mixed up a brew of bait, inspired by a friend's story about how possums tried repeatedly to steal some of his Christmas mince pies when he was camping.

I mixed up sultanas, sugar, cinnamon, mixed spice, curry powder, vanilla, sugar, flour, rolled oats and butter.

If I had been scientific I would have tried the different ingredients separately in a trapping trial to see which was most effective.... or I would have at least kept notes. But I didn't.

Anyway I set fifteen snares yesterday in an area that I have trapped fairly heavily. I wasn't expecting much at all. Well this morning I had five possums. With a catch ratio of about 33% this is about as good as anything I've done with primitive style cord snares.

Funny thing though, they were all males. Generally the gender balance is pretty much 50/50.
 
Coote,

I don't know if it would be asking too much but could you someday write up a tutorial on setting one of your snares?
You obviously have far more experience at this than the vast majority of us on the board.

All of my trapping experience has been with steel legholds and body gripping muskrat traps. Snaring, even for rabbits and such was illegal in Pennsylvania. Not to say that it was never done...:rolleyes: In the past I have eaten my share of the King's game.

Still, for those of us who cannot get out for whatever reason and set snares, your insight would be profitable. Mac
 
I agree. I've setup a snare or two, but never been uber successful, and never as often as you.
 
Mac, I would be absolutely delighted to describe how I set up a snare. I will start a new topic.

I am not an expert by any means. But I reckon I have learned that persistence is the key to success. You just need to start with a strong desire then start setting snares. Sooner or later you will catch something. And if you ask yourself questions as you go along ... and make improvements according to the answers that occur to you... you will get some good results. It's the same with a lot of things I guess.

I will get on to it soon.
 
Coote,

That would be great. I was impressed with your pig snares. That is a very high volume payoff for the work involved.

My brother and I have talked about living off the land back home. We came to the conclusion that snaring white-tails would be effective. Highly illegal, mind you, but the discussion was in the context of long term survival not what to do with our weekend.

The snares we, um, didn't use in PA were the cable type with a locking "L" shaped slider. They were unidirectional, as the animal struggled they just got tighter, murder on rabbits. A similar set-up would work for larger animals.

Our possums back home would respond to rotting meat, they are carrion eaters, prehensile rat tails, human fingerprints, and a face only a mother could love. We considered them a junk animal, worth very little. They would spoil alot of raccoon sets. Mac
 
A while back in my area, (Northeastern Illinois) a poacher was caught using upside down large coffee cans , I imagine large industrial food cans the restaurants use now would be just as effective. He would dig a hole in a game trail, anchor and cover the can with the bottom up cut in a crisscross pattern to catch the deers foot when it stepped through it.
Another poaching trick was to use a heavy spring set to ram a piece of rebar through a deer, pinning it to a tree. Just set it to the proper hieght between two trees, with the trigger wire on the side further from the probable approach.
 
Hmmm....the pig snares being "a very high volume payoff for the work involved". It depends how you look at it.

I set my first pig snare maybe 35 years ago. I caught my first pig maybe three years ago. Sure my first efforts weren't that serious, and I did very little in the way of setting pig snares in the 32 years in between...but I guess my point is you don't always get a pig when you set up a snare.

My first pig.... the one I posted a picture of a while back, was a pig that had moved on to a neighbours farm along with a few others. I spent a long time out with a gun trying to shoot them. A couple of times I was only a few feet from them as they rooted about in the thick scrub, but I couldn't see them to shoot...even though the bushes were shaking and I could hear them chomping.

I tramped up on to that farm maybe twice a day for maybe two or three weeks before I snared that pig. The pigs were moving around a comparatively big area, and there were only a few places where I could set a snare. And compared to some places you would say that the pig population wasn't very dense....and this of course means a reduced chance of catching a pig if that is how you look at things.

At any one time I may have had 10 snares set. I would take bags full of apples on to the property and lay them out in the hope that I could get the pigs returning to certain spots on a regular basis. I set up a game camera, and managed to get a photo of a pig on the first night, but I certainly didn't snare one on the first attempt. So I burned many calories of energy and spread dozens of apples in the time leading up to the capture. I also managed to catch two of the farmer's dogs in spring-up traps that I set....fortunately neither was harmed. I had set the traps to only tighten the noose... not launch small animals into orbit.

The evening of the capture was wonderful. I was doing the rounds of my snares, and when I heard some crashing in the bushes I got fairly excited. I approached the snare and saw the awesome glossy black boar with a noose around his neck. He wasn't struggling much, but he was pulling pretty hard on the rope and had managed to smash off one sapling tree of about two inches in diameter. Anyway, I speared it in behind the shoulder and it died quickly.

There have been pigs in the same spot up until recently, maybe there are still some there although they aren't leaving much sign. A pig hunting acquaintance of mine had been trying to get them. He even built a steel cage trap which he had set for a while without success. Anyway he was having a beer with some mates when a member of the family announced that they'd just seen a pig. So the only guy that hadn't been drinking was nominated the shooter and they took off to where the pigs had been spotted. He shot both of them....and I believe one of them may have been the original one that I got a photo of.

On the other hand, the last big pig I got was a pretty good payoff for the work involved. This was caught on some family land where there can be a relatively dense pig population from time to time. There was a well-worn track that they had been using. I set the snare and caught the pig on maybe the second or third night.

Dang that rebar deer trap sounds dangerous!! I have seen pictures of what I think is probably a similar trap in a book I have somewhere... and on the internet....but in my version a sharpened stick is used and it is referred to as a pig stabber.

Thanks for the info about the coffee can traps. I have long been fascinated with the concept of a foot trap, but yours is the first reference I have seen to one being used for hoofed animals in modern times. I imagine that the poacher probably had a snare laying over the hole in the can so that the leg would be held securely as the deer moved away with the can on its foot.

Here is a similar can arrangement evidently recommended for big cats:
http://wildlifedamage.unl.edu/handbook/handbook/allPDF/ca_c93.pdf - you have to scroll down to see the picture of the coffe can trap.

And I guess the earliest design of a foot trap looked like the one shown here:
http://southernsudan.prm.ox.ac.uk/details/1920.61.2/

I wish I could post the pictures for you directly, but I haven't figured out how to do that yet. Doc knows how to.
 
Lionsnare.jpg

Foot trap for big cats.


Langowheeltrap.jpg

Earliest design.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top