I usually Trap a couple dozen beaver a year. I trade the skins green to a taxidermist and freeze the beavers to use for jackpots for snaring coyotes. A couple of years ago when coyotes were worth ninety to a hundreds dollars a fella could make good money by selling the castors or trading them to a lure maker and selling the tails and using what was left over for coyote bait. I have heard there is a market for beaver skulls but I donate them to the FWP for education packets.

The beaver I plan on putting out for bobcat bait have the pelt on them.

Beaver. Wire it to an evergreen and cover it with boughs. Block it hard from the sides. Flag it if legal, lure it. Once they find it, they'll keep coming back.

She must not like fat healthy dogs

Cool. As long as it isn't sight exposed I can try that. If sight exposed I can set, but must be 25' back. Maybe I'll just put it in a cubby.

I pulled a 16 lb beaver out of the freezer today, hit it with an axe about 10 times, & drug it over a bunch of the trails I made that I plan to set for bobcat. It didn't realease blood, but hopefully still left an aroma

Here's a picture of a 45 lb beaver I chunked into 7 pieces for fisher & bobcat bait

Looks like you forgot to skin it and remove the castors,lol.
Summer nuisance?

With blanket beaver pelts worth $20 as hatters why wouldn't anyone skin them?

And castors at 8-10.

hear 20 dollar beaver but havent seen a collection of small to blanket average 20 yet but i guess if your good enough trapper to just catch blankets you will be alright

In my opinion, skin it and then chop up the liver, heart, etc, into small chunks for bait. And I know very little about beaver but what is castor?

Joe, the picture showed a 45 lb beaver chunked up. That should have made blanket.

As far as averages go, if you include the castors nobody should be averaging under $20 for their beaver collection, regardless of section.

Will summer beaver sell as hatters?

They make great trapline bait. Almost everything will be attracted to beaver meat. My water spaniels loved beaver meat.

I'm sure they are sub-par for what the hatter industry wants but you will recall the mountain men trapped beaver about 9 months out of the year for the hatter market.

So I say they would still be saleable.

In MN you aren't allowed to keep any part of an out of season beaver, nuisance job or not. They'd rather you just dump them and leave them rot.
They aren't smart enough to know that a summer-caught beaver pelt is pretty much worthless.

So you are saying he ruined a good in season beaver,or you are saying he is breaking the law by keeping a out of season beaver?

used to get good pices for fur then if you sold caster skulls meat and other parts it was just extra icing on the cake now it takes all of it just to get a decent or close to break even price true with all fur today

I never experienced it but drool at the dollar-an-inch prices reported by some of the older beaver trappers.