If you trap out in the desert sagebrush areas how do cats react to large baits that they discover like deer or beaver? Do they eat some and then attempt to cover up the carcass like cats do in wooded areas?

Bait in the sagebrush is easily discovered by birds. this in turn brings everything else. A beaver in this situation will not last 2 days/ deer maybe 3 or four. But even if a cat covers it the first night it is quickly devoured by everything else.

Times 10 what monster tom said I have seen whole elk with the hide on gone in a week a couple of beaver with no hide two days is about right even the bones. The eagles, ravens, crows and magpies really work it over.

Times 10 what monster tom said I have seen whole elk with the hide on gone in a week a couple of beaver with no hide two days is about right even the bones. The eagles, ravens, crows and magpies really work it over.

Pretty much giving a free meal to everything that moves when you try that, don't take long either at most a week for big bodied critters, way less for anything else, but you do learn what's in the area pretty quick !

But do cats attempt to cover it?

Dont leave it just laying there.
You want the birds working the jackpot as a long distance call,but not be able to clean it up.Nor do you want animals to clean it up quickly but they need to see some of it,be able to work at it, but not be able to take it away.

Don't matter if they try to or not, its all gone, birds and canine's move it all over, then its a free for all.

Birds will give it attention sure, however it don't take very long and it's just a bare spot !

You can set around it here but have to be away from the pile a bit, for get the amount of length, amount of
birds it will draw ain't worth it for a large draw station, smaller one if better and staked down heavily covered
but that don't last to long either !

I'm wondering about beaver carcasses placed in the entrances of culverts on two tracks in the desert. I know an old trapper that used to swear by this method and would to come over and buy beaver carcasses from me back a couple of decades ago before he passed.

It went over your head,You make it so they CANNOT clean it up,just work a little of it.
There are several methods to accomplish this.

I have maintained up to two dozen jackpots for entire seasons back in the day,If you had to re bait them every visit, it would be retarded.

Wolftrappers use 45 gal drums half full of moose scraps beaver etc with a frozen moose hide over the end is one way.everything can work the frozen hide but not clean up the draw bait.Can do the same with a log pen with gaps in the logs.
Different methods are used in fall before freeze up/

The culvert with a few modifications would work I bet.

Don't set to close

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I've got beaucoup beaver carcasses to dispose of and I'm going over to eastern Oregon anyway so I'm trying to make my system for the woods of western Oregon work over in the sagebrush.

Boco, it didn't go over my head, you got a whole different source of animals up there and climate to deal with !

You do you and until you can come out here in the desert and prove yourself, you got yours and we got ours !!

An old guy I trapped with used plywood to save his bait and took lots of cats.

I have caught a lot of cats Near culverts in arroyo's. I walk away from the culvert a ways. Set dirtholes. That desert isnt sagebrush country but mesquite. Same setting away from the two track where it just goes in and back out. in the sage brush of WY I caught cats near rocky hills. i think every cat wandering in the sagebrush would hunt those hills. Was easier to get a set in front of them. In the big pine covered hills I would chop a froze beaver carcass in half. Tie wire it a couple feet off the ground at the base of a tree. Make a kind of cubby over it for more snow protection. Pinion squawkers, ravens, mice etc did eat on them some but not terrible. I don't think the birds could see them to well. They worked. Put in a culvert I think would be similar. Always going to be other critters find the bait. I would tie it down somehow.

Baits in open country, in the west, in all but the nastiest weather, is just an invitation to have everything you catch destroyed by eagles.

Eagles bad!!

Just part of bait piling/trapping under the eagle migration path,,,,