No ,the reason people got upset was there was NO biological reason to shut it down. Every land owner and road person was thankful for the trappers helping to thin the rats. There was plenty of room for all and places that never saw a trap in the spring not to mention ponds that a road didn't intersect. I f I was a resident I would have had more ponds to trap by getting permission on the 100s of ponds off the road that never got trapped, and yes I was there.

I agree that it was a greedy few that got the law you have now.


My question is who is the greediest--The anti NR trapper or the ones who want to come and take fur from that state??

Million dollar question.

Being there were more rats that died of old age than got trapped the answer is pretty easy.

very well put
i will say again i think this is the united states of america !! not special set of laws here and there to protect a few. im all for full resprocity laws . agree no reason to shut it down.
not sure how much gdp we all added that year or 2 to the nation but it was in the millions...and was renewable resource.

I feel like I need to edit the title to this thread to "Blah, Blah, Blahh"

hey now we gotta keep the story of them rat years alive... just like whisky is for drinking and water is to fight over

The SD rat boom will live in the memory of those that were there.

Still not connecting the dots between rats and game bird depredation.

No connection to the OP just a troll jumped in with the intent to bash the thread is all it happens about every time the same trolls and the same BS it's never ending.

That was about the trapping restrictions we have a lot less rules then out East I have lived in several States and SD is by far the least restrictive on trapping and the 2nd amendment you guys are buried in the liberal BS you get out of NY that's just a fact was the point. I have nothing against you NY guys but that's what you have to live with and we don't, I hope that cleared things up a bit.

rats=marshes = water= cover for game birds
no water = no marshes= no cover= no birds = no preditors

Coyotes are not a furbearer in MT. You can come and trap all you want.

Has nothing to do with the OP

Sooo did you guys hear about how we arent gonna have any coon to trap when theyre prime after a couple years of bounty?

its my understanding that the bounty will be in effect year round. as to whether or not it will help is questionable. while it is true that habitat loss is the leading cause in our bird decline, one of the reasons habitat loss is so bad is because it concentrates the remaining nesting hens into certain areas, making them extremely vulnerable to predation. if youve got one 40 acre piece of nesting ground per section, then a single coon could wipe out the nests in a night. i dont agree with it, needs more thought put it into it, but i see where theyre coming from.

and the whiners. they want what we have. greed had nothing to do with it. its because the out of staters flooded in so thick, that a resident couldnt find a puddle of water to put a float in that didnt already have three. then the NR's had a habit of upsetting the landowners with attaching things to fences, crossing fences to get to more huts, tearing up field approaches, and the trap theft was out of this world. To be blunt, i dont think south dakota cares enough about non resident trappers to pee on your head were you on fire. the seasons were changed so that residents, people who actually live here and have a right to the states resources, could do our thing in peace. then you people can come. greed. cmon. like theres money in trapping.

I am surprised that no one brought up another debacle from SDGP. Two years ago they shut off access to a majority of the lakes that were made back in the 90s by flood. The SDGP stocked all of them with license money. Land owners got paid from the Feds for the loss of land and then they shut the public out. Well that lasted about a season and the residents in SD somehow got that bad idea overturned. How? They had skin in the game and could not get on the lakes that everyone has fished since they were made.


Disclaimer: I love the state of SD. I hunt and fish there and would love to trap there. I have lots of friends there and most SD residents are good folks. My friends up there will not let me bring my boat or truck to the lake because they don't want anyone knowing they are fishing with someone from IA.


Also I see where someone wrote that it was greedy for someone to want to trap the easy season for the most money. My question is who don't? Who waits for the hardest time to go trapping the least amount of fur for the least profit? LLL

LL, the GFP has become a disaster but that fishing deal wasn't really on them. That happened in the courts and state government and to my knowledge unless I missed the news it still has not really changed. If a landowner puts up buoys and signs a lake can be cut off. I saw a lot of buoys when I was trapping and I wasn't even in Day County. I can't imagine what it looks like up there.

I don't think mrats make water. A couple of tings happened starting in 2011, the deep drought of '12 started in late summer of 2011, in my neighborhood the spigot got turned off in early August and in the next year, we only got about of third of the normal precip. A lot of still mostly "unaltered" marshes dried up and stay mostly dried up until this year. On the other hand, land-use practices have been changing where typical marshes, many of them the larger ones in the neighborhood, that used to go occasionally dry (cattails need a dry period for the seeds to get ready to germinate) are now shallow lakes (some of them not so shallow) because of increased ground and surface water flow changes. There may still be small rat pops in such waters using bank dens but the aquatic veg for large scale hut building (a proxy for an increasing or booming pop) just isn't there. A lot of tiling going on in my region of e. SD. I cross creeks now that are flowing hard this winter even though there hasn't been any precip percolation for 2+ months now. Almost all of that flow is base flow coming from ground water infusion. As I said earlier, rat huts are showing up again in my county because of the wet year has cattails growing again in many places that were dry so we'll see what the state reports for critter take estimates for this season.

My trapping license costs $35 plus $4 "agent fee" even though I buy it directly from the state. I'd be willing to pay another $20-25 "marsh restoration" stamp to have funds deciadted soley for wetland rehab. If non-residents would be willing to pay another $25 on top of the fairly heavy $250 non-resident furbearers license, I'd be willing to fight for resident/non-resident same season change even if their state doesn't allow SD residents to trap or has more restrictions on us than we do them.

The low lands have always been farmed I the years when they dry up and then will hold water/wildlife when it's wet, the drop of the bird numbers seems to parallel the drop on CRP acres and the increase in acres being planted like wheat that is planted fence to fence with no grass buffer. Big or corporate farming operations clear cover for maximum harvest yields removing trees and filling in wetlands and cover.

GFP went to bat on those lake closings in court they fought the fight on that issue it was the Courts that ruled against them.