Great info...thanks!

Very cool keep it up

LOVE these sets of the day!

Every swamp has one killer set. The challenge for a trapper is to find it. When that swamp is bisected by a railbed, road or farm lane the killer set is the culvert (or culverts) connecting the swamps. Sometimes this culvert is just to big to block off, but if it is 3 feet or less in diameter I am in business.
The first few pictures are the trap I use. It is 3 to 4 feet long, 6 inches high and either 9 or 10 inches wide. It has 3 doors, one on each end and one 14 inches in from what is the "front" door to make a kill chamber and keep animals from blocking the front door. Doors are cut 8 inches long and the same width as the trap, then I bend 1/2 inch up in a 90 degree angle on each side (see picture). This does 2 things, #1 it makes the door stronger and #2 it makes it tighter so a mink cannot escape alongside the door. Fastened to the front of the trap is a wire pannel big enough to block off the culvert and force the animals to swim through the trap (picture 3)
Now you can use other types of colony traps but these traps will catch muskrats, mink, OTTER and Beaver (up to 25 pounds or so). You can block it off and use a conibear but that means only 1 animal per check. This location is a 300 yard walk so I want to max the catch and not drive there, do the walk for 1 rat.
Ok so now here is the culvert picture, you can see it is completely submerged. I have set this culvert every year since the early 1970's. It is on a rail spur and the swamp is about 10 acres on each side. I fasten the "back" door of my trap shut with a hog ring( this is to keep the door from being opened and held open by a stick or rock inside the culvert ) and slide the trap into the culvert, the wire pannel on the front of the trap blocks the culvert and keeps it from being pushed into the culvert by a big beaver. I cover the top of the wire pannel with some marsh vegetation to keep passerby's from seeing it.
The second culvert is this sequence is on a farm lane and connects a swamp with a river. This one is only about half submerged, but deep enough to get my trap underwater. In these places where there is a current ALWAYS set the downstream side. In case of a flood you do not want the trap to block the culvert and cause road damage. A few catch pictures at the end. One has 5 rats and a mink, another 4 rats, another an otter. A mink in the farm lane culvert. You can see where the middle door keeps the animals from plugging the front door, thus each of these traps was still working when I pulled them out.
A fun way to catch rats in a culvert WITHOUT a trap. I did this some back in the 80's. Take a piece of fine gauge chicken wire that has 2 1/2 inch openings and place it across the underwater culvert opening. Most rats will go into the wire and get caught behind the front legs then drown. It's like gill netting muskrats! I am going to buy me some of this 2 1/2 inch wire and do this this coming winter in some 4 foot culverts I have located. Hopefully I'll have some pics to post with that. It would in essence be a colony trap you could use where they are not legal. Something to ponder.

Thank you, Eric.

Great Stuff!

TRULY appreciate the knowledge you are sharing!

Thanks for doing these posts! They are super!

Thank you sir
Mac

Thanks,Eric great info. Have a few locations like your pictures but NY does not allow colony traps. Conibear and 1 rat only! Appreciated you sharing your knowledge.

When a bigger tree goes down perpendicular to the river or stream the best mink set can be a digunder of the log. It may already be there, as in this picture, if not I take a few minutes to make one. I always follow that up with a snare set on top of the log so once a mink is caught in the dig under and another mink comes by he will hang around a little bit and in so doing will run the top of the log lengthwise, getting caught. Sometimes as in the picture with a dusting of snow a smaller log is elevated 6 inches or so so a mink will go under but a coon using the same trail will go over (or a squirrel too for that matter). Picture 4 shows a root wad at waters edge with a nice hole, but the set that caught the most was in front of the root wad under the base of the log.

Nice sets and locations.
One I use on small to medium sized creeks is I locate old abandoned beaver dams,or old debris wash piles and use a sharpened pole to ream out a hole right thru where the debris meets the bank.
I will either set it blind or shove a hunk of bait up in the debris.

Nice love these sets learning a lot

Mink snares, being low to the ground compared to canine or cat snares, can be put out of action by as little as 3 or 4 inches of snow. Where I live ice storms are frequent. These ice storms can freeze up your snare or cover it with ice heavy limbs, weeds or grass. For years I tried all kinds of covering over my mink snares to keep them working. I used bark, made wooden box "tubes", empty pizza boxes, etc but nothing worked more than half of the time. Then I stumbled on an old metal 55 gallon drum that had the top off and the bottom completely rusted out. It had washed up out of the creek and was on the bank only a few feet from a mink trail that I had been setting for a few years. I rolled it over and centered it on the mink trail, put some sand and leaves on the bottom and set my snare in the middle. The next night it snowed 10 inches then rained putting a crust on the snow. That morning I had a mink in the snare in the barrel. He had run on top of the snow crust and then into the snare that had been protected from snow and ice. Back at the home farm we had an old piece of steam boiler pipe about 12 feet long and 20 inches in diameter. I cut that in half making two 6 foot lengths. In the first picture is one of those lengths that I placed alongside an old mill foundation. I do not know the exact year but I do know we were still raising domestic mink at the time so it was before 1986 (it is still there to this day), as the first mink I caught in it was a cross between a wild mink female and an escaped domestic male. Only one of those I ever trapped, I sold it as a domestic with our 25,000 other mink pelts. Floods over the years have filled the "tube" almost halfway with silt. I have a snare at the corner of the foundation (pictures 2,3,4) and then the 2 in the tube about 4 feet away. It is just a guess but I would estimate that I have snared over 300 mink at this location over the years.
I got used pieces or road culvert and cut them in 6 foot lengths, placing them in some of my best mink trail locations. I place a snare about 12 inches inside the tube on each end. The 6 foot length does not allow a mink to knock down the other snare so doubles are common. Once placed I leave them there year round. Many times when I go to set them there are mounds of mink droppings inside.
The key is use a large diameter culvert piece. I do not mess with any that are under 15 inch diameter and prefer 24 inch ones. Small (4 to 8) inch diameters do not work well. Bigger diameters are not snowed under by 8 or 10 or 14 inches of snow, infact they are made better, more mink attractive, by it.

I appreciate you taking this time to share your knowledge with us.

Thanks for posting such useful information Eric.

Thank you for these sets! Very interesting.

thanks for the Education, Mr. Space!

You da man eric, thank you!!

Awesome. When you put the snares 12" back do you block the bigger diameter pieces down much at that depth? Or just set snares along the sides?

RV6: I block the pieces down and put the snare in the center. Blocking can be what ever is handy, grass, bark, sticks or snow. Guess I should'a included this picture, it shows the blocking (done out front so it would show up for the photo)

There are times that are life changing moments. After Thanksgiving in 1970 my girlfriend Ann and I were doing our usual weekend camping trip in the Snowy Range Mountains outside of Laramie (we both were freshmen at U of Wyo) and we stumbled upon a snare that was setup for bobcats. It profoundly changed how I looked at trapping and got me hooked on snaring. Ann and I had big plans to graduate and move to work and trap in Alaska but she was killed in a car accident in early 1972. It was 43 years later before I got to even see Alaska.
ANYWAY: Before I got hooked on snaring and for all the years I trapped in New York State (I live in New Jersey but only 6 miles from NY so from the 1970's until about 2005 I trapped in both states and NYS does not allow snaring) this was my winter time canine and bobcat set. I was taught it by my grandfather Ralph Space who was the first NJ State Trapper. He called it a Spring Hole set but most know it as a Water Set. Properly done it is a great freeze-proof set mostly used east of the Mississippi.
To make the set you need a #2 or bigger foot-trap, fastened to a drag (the oldtimers always used a "notched rock" called so because notches were tapped in it with the back of a hatchett so the trap could be wired fast and the wire not slip off), a short handled hoe and a pair of needle nosed pliers. Picture 1
Locate a spring, walk up the spring run to the source and using the hoe make a small pond, 2 1/2 to 3 feet across and just deep enough to put the trap underwater. You can do this in other waterbodies but water flow at a spring is constant and a spring will not freeze in even the harshest weather. Picture 2
Place the trap as close to shore as you can and the rock drag out in the middle. Using the needlenose pliers cover all the trap except the pan and all the chain with water soaked leaves. Picture 3
Using the hoe cut 2 pieces of sod/and or moss down the spring run a ways and place one on the trap pan, the other on top of the rock. Picture 4
Place a small bait and lure on the side of the sod on the rock closest to the trap, then cover the bait with a water-soaked leaf to hide it from birds. Picture 5
The set is completed, walk back out down the spring run for at least 10 feet so as not to leave any tracks in the snow.
Most trappers quit trapping when the ground gets to freezing and the snow gets to be a hassel, lets say just before Christmas. But with a few of these sets you can continue trapping right thru fox and bobcat mating time when the animals are on the move. As a kid in the late 1950's and thru the 1960's I was bounty trapping from 20 to 70 fox a winter with maybe a dozen of these sets.