Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Trapping Any Spring "Rat" Trappers

Any one out there taking Spring Muskrats?

Used to hit them pretty hard.

Man, some of them can really get chewed to pieces; never was able to figure out why some really got worked over. They were always dead. Don't know if they were dead females and frustrated males but something triggered them!

Used to set a new swamp during the spring break-up and then run the traps backwards after finishing setting. Often had 40 to 50 percent catches which shows how active they are during the ice-out breeding season.

One time I made a run about 10:00 at night after a sharp temperature drop and heavy frost. Every thing out of the water had a slick of ice from one end to the other. Apparently every rat climbed onto the log, branch or whatever and ran the full length. After that I would set a spot heavy with three or four traps on the logs. Lots of times every trap would have a rat in it until they got thinned out. Didn't bother to set the whole swamp any more just set real heavy in one area. Saved lots of walking and rowing. Apparently they are in constant motion once the spring break-up breeding season starts. Just some things I learned trapping spring Rats.

yoodledog
Welcome to the campfire! Where are/were you trapping the 'rats?

We used to hit them very hard also... at least a thousand each spring... Had some years of nearly double that. Spread stuff out a lot, never thinking to let them come to the sets. Believe I read someone else's logic in that idea also... they said they got fewer small 'rats, though most any spring rat in the North is going to be fair-sized.

We used to go into the interior of AK each spring and shoot them with 22s. A canoe paddled around the edge of the ice made quick retrieval easy. Those rats tended to be pretty cut-up and not worth nearly as much as the trapline-run ones though.
art

Washington State when it was still legal to trap; also too crippled up with Arthritus (the long line water trappers curse---every long liner water man suffered severely from arthritus). Too many hours of being wet. When I started trapping Coyotes, I called my self a dirt farmer---but I wasn't wet the whole season!!!!

Yes, you will save lots of leg work by setting heavy in one spot for Spring Rats. Had it proved to me the hard way. Once had a large marsh open up in one spot, and I caught a lot of rats. Thought, Wow!!!, I'm really going to kill them when this marsh opens up. When it did, I set the marsh hard and caught very, very little---I'd already caught most of them. From then on I only set small areas and covered lots more country and caught a lot more rats. Rats were my favorite. They are tough hombres! Just catch one going cross country (which they do, at least in the Spring) and see how he or she reacts. No fear, and ready for a fight.

Have bitten pretty good by them three times, but those are whold other stories.

Spent many a week in the spring on Frenchmen Hills, Winchester WW and Crab Creek hammering spring rats. Went to school at CWU, though it was CWSC when I started.
art

Sitka,

Did you ever sell on the Washington State Trapper's Association Fur Sales in Spokane, Washington? I ran it for the first seven years with the help of a lot of very fine trappers.

Don't know if I would have had the guts to run it again if I knew then, what I know about the fur buying and buyers now. Most were good, but some bought the fur, wrote the drafts, and rushed home to sell the fur and cover the dratts. In those seven years we only had three bad checks, and one trapper got hurt pretty bad. That buyer went belly up and took the trapper's check with him. No, I just wouldn't do it again. A person can be pretty gutsy when you don't really know what is going on.

The other side of the coin---the buyer was also a gambler. With the exception of Goldberg in Seattle, most buyers didn't have deep pockets. Turned out most of the buyer's road led to Goldberg. But we got a bigger piece of his money with the fur sales.

I believe we did sell at those sales, but may be confusing memories from other similar auctions in other states... was just looking through fur receipts a while back and have a few dandies. Trying to remember the name of the Goldberg buyer in the '70s... seems Richard is right... dark hair and heavy black-framed glasses. He always came by the house to buy our fur and we always made a point of not selling all of it to him.

Always felt those guys left a lot of money on the table... Stirring the rats up always led to very different grading... we always tried to break the furs into different lots and make him bid on it more than once. The prices always seemed to vary but not neccesarily improve.
art

With rats going in the $5.00 range at NAFA now I think I just might hit it hard this spring. Course' with my luck the price won't hold and I'll be stuck with 150 $2 rats... then again it's fun to catch em' and the little guy should be able to handle some skinning.

Rat market should hold up well into next Fall unless the world enomy goes to hell! Very short catch this season, and the economies of the fur using world are in good shape.

Sitka, we used a sealed bid system, and buyer who didn't buy the lot knew more than the successful buyer. The successful buyer only knew what the trapper's bid price was after the sale and what he had bid. The unsuccessful bidder also knew what he himself had bid.

Wild mink was the fur that drove the buyers crazy; the bids were always all over the place for wild mink. The other fur seemed to have patterns, but not wild mink. Sometimes there were spring mink in the trapper's lot, and some buyers never picked that up.

Once saw a lot of 100 fine Montana Coyotes that the trapper wanted $80.00 counting noses, and he got #125.00 counting noses! The sale did a good job for the trapper's. The buyer's were always asking us to go to a hammer auction, but we stuck with the sealled bid. All the buyer knew when he looked at a lot was the lot number and what was in it. Worked very well, but it got a little scary for me when one of our small sales grossed over $ 125,000.00. That's a hell of a lot of responsibility for rank ametuers!!!

Yoddledog
Would have sold during my later college years of '75-80... But I remember sealed bids as you describe them.

My sister just sold 198 marten and the price blew her away! They only had a few dozen river otters, but they have not gone down! Fur market will be bringing a lot of folks back into the creeks...
art

I'm going out next week to help my good buddy who just bought a bush trapline adjoining our elk camp. Haven't trapped rats for more than thirty years, looking forward to it again! Runoff is going full blast here today, and camp is about one week behind so we should catch the season about right. I'll take the .22 hornet and shoot a few beaver too, they need thinning out in our country and they're a common bonus while rat trapping.