Coming out of trapping season, how many of you have more questions than answers?

Wonder how the market will hold up next year ? Beaver market, coyote market, grey fox? What to put my time into.

Dang beaver darn near turned my brown hair grey this year, they can sure humble a guy.

I think the market will be better in 2025.

Beaver should be good considering pelt & castors. I will be doing mink & fox also no matter the market cause i do my own tanning

I always hit a point where I slow down and reflect. I go through my notebook for the season and think back to sets that didn’t catch that I knew should’ve and ask myself what I could have done better or wonder what I could do better next year. I think about what this year taught me, but also know there’s still some questions out in the field that I still need to find the answers to.

The woulda shoulda couldas
Hind sights always 20 20.
But if you can't look Back and see room for improvement, or have learned from more experience then trapping would start to become boring to me anyway.

My first 10 years or so of trapping i kept detailed notes.

It teaches you a lot

I didn't use to until a couple years ago, I agree with you though. Then I put in notes to look at for the beginning of the next season.

I definitely have more questions than answers after this season. Nearly half of my coyotes this year came on blind sets. Couldnt hardly get them to work something with bait or lure. All the time I spent in the off season trying to find out which of my baits/lures were most attractive seemed pretty pointless.

Now my goal is to learn set construction to take the highest percentage of the ones that come in. Even if they are only interested enough for a one sniff visit. Probably will never achieve it, but should have fun experimenting anyways

Sometimes the more you learn the more questions you have. At least for me. But I'm the kind that needs to know why.

Don't know about your situation but a few years ago our coyote population took a pretty good dip compared to normal. Lot less pups in the population. That year I was definitely dealing with a higher percentage of population that been through a season or to and had caught on to the game so to speak.
I've done a fair amount of testing and am a strong believer it's easier to get a coyote to work a test set that a real set. Not that testing isn't valuable and they will definitely show you what they like the best but they sure aren't as easy to get caught as they are to share their opinion.

That has definitely been the case here lately for me and studying the animal behavior. Why the animal does what it does or didn’t do what it should have done, other than the fact it’s just instinct sometimes.

I definitely still have questions from lessons the critters invoked but likewise I have great information that they taught me.

Something was definitely up. I talked to a few local folks who are way better than me at trapping coyotes and they acted like their numbers were about normal. I do know that at least one of the places I trap with excellent habitat (various age clearcut) seemed to have a lot fewer coyotes than last year. The tracks in the road told me they were coming through every 6-10 days instead of 2-3 like last year. As much as I would like to chalk it up to putting a hurting on them last year, Im not sure that I believe in myself that much. Rabbit population seems a lot lower here this year as well if that plays into it for any reason.

DH still made up the bulk of my catches, but they were probably 90% of my total sets so I would expect nothing less. Last year I couldnt keep animals out of dirtholes so I just kept pouring it to them. This year made me rethink the need for a backup plan