Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Trapping Beaver quest 2011 - day 2

Ok I'm trying to remove (permanently) so beavers from a friends vacation spot. The plan was to set traps (conibear 330's) and trap them out.

Day 1 - Placed traps at the location I thought the beaver were. There's a foot of snow, and I'm in KS so the beavers tend to make dens in banks vs. making huts. I found a damn with a good size bank hole, set 3 traps, on under the ice with a potato as bait where it stored it's tree limbs, another on the damn where it had sprung a leak so I'd nail one there. And the last in the run to the bank entrance.

Day 2 - Nada Still cold as snot (12 degrees for a 2 weeks now) but we've got a warm up coming.

Day 3- the food source trap was tripped, but the others were un-touched. I walked the stream and found the buggers had moved to a new hole, and now there's sign up the creek on the big pond at an older bank entrance there too. So I moved the potato bait ice set which has now melted (50 degree weather) to the new bank entrance on the stream, and then took the old entrance trap from the stream and set it up on the entrance in the big pond.

Day 4 - We'll see

Can you use snares in KS. In Michigan we can, they work great. I catch more beaver in snares than conibears or leg holds. Pole sets with fresh corn, you will wipe them out. Until they move in from other areas, then start all over again.

You'll be playing muscial den holes....

I am with coyotewhacker. I just set my snares in their paths on land. They are cheap and effective. This usually cleans out the egg eatin coons at the same time. YOU MUST BE CAREFUL AROUND PETS.

Day 4

NUTS!

Unfortunately I think your right

I don't seem to be connecting with the dern rodent

Beavers aren't difficult, you just need to think it out. Snares and 330's are how I've rolled before.

You dont know squat about beaver.................

just ask your last girlfriend......

Roll over and ask her yourself.

Up here in AK some people pour used peanut oil on lodge & dam,bears
will take care of it from there.

Maybe I could send some wolves from the U.P. to KS, we have too many, they put the hurt on the beavers also.

you don't want to place conibears right at a "hole" and you don't want to use bait on them unless you are trapping under a lot of ice.

If they are traveling around already, you want to look where they are going. Look for narrow spots where they are swimming and place your conibears there.

Beaver can get very wise and cagey, especially if somebody is messing around near where they live, and also when they start seeing their brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers dead in traps. So you want to get away from where they live and catch them in what is called blind or travel type sets.

Good advice here. Set the den holes when the other sets go dry.
Think about set locations like bowhunting deer. Cut off their travel in funnel areas.

The feedbed is a fine place to catch critters instead of their leftovers. I imagine even a stupid rodent is easily trained when he gets the skinned toothpick he's carrying slapped out of his mouth by a 330. Wouldn't you? A 330 only works well in an entrance if you catch him the first time. IME there is no bigger waste of time in that position than that. Snares in the tunnels tend not to spook them when they miss. From where I sit, neither potatoes nor corn would cut it as bait, though they may work elsewhere. But I've never baited Conibears for beaver.