My daughter is also the driving force behind us starting to eat beaver
She read Natives and mountain men liked them and my wife and daughter reminded me one day when skinning a young beaver so I keep the meat off the quarters and back strip to try it. Used to feed it all to the dogs before that now we eat the few beaver I trap. Found out its great.

My granddaughter and I made our famous baked pheasant and mushroom dish last weekend. I asked her what she wanted to do the next time and told her we had venison, beaver, muskrat and pheasant to choose from. She chose beaver.

I asked her how she wanted to prepare them and she said she thought we should make a pulled beaver barbecue type dish. So I brought three packs with me to camp to give it a try and use my hunting buddy as a guinea pig.

This way I’ll be able to tweak it if it needs it and be ready to make a big pot of it with her when I get back home.

Starlings provide us good income in the Spring with our Wildlife Business. They love dryer / exhaust vents and any soffit panels that may be missing.

That's great she wanted to eat some starlings Lugnut, ive never had starling, but I ate part of a red fox rear leg and also didn't like it.
My trapping buddy, Aalaiya, made us muskrat stew this winter. You and I are blessed to have these girls in our lives.

"Training European starlings anyone?"

I thought you had made another typo and meant to post; TAINTING European starlings anyone?

We really are blessed to have them.

In a survival situation, starlings, sparrows and other small birds are a great food source, that are very easy to catch in huge numbers.

My friend Sandy had a sparrow sized gap, version of the Swedish Crow trap that worked fantastic. She usually caught around 12,000 to 15,000 sparrows and starlings a year in it. It was basically a wire box, 6' tall on the sides, sloping down to 5' in the middle, with a 3" framed gap in the middle. It's footprint on the ground was 6' by 6' The birds would land on the peaks on the sides, hop down the wire to the gap and drop in. They could not fly back out. She rarely baited it. She took out the dead sparrows and starlings once a day and the live ones continuously lured more in. She often would catch a few hundred birds a day during the fall.

Here's a video of a Swedish Crow trap. They are called ladder traps too.



Sandy"s trap didn't have the rungs and worked fine without them. The gap should be sized for what you're trying to catch.

I just quickly put a trap together, out of some existing chickenwire panels, for my friend Ralph once, where I just left the top flat with a gap in the middle, to catch pigeons and it worked to.

You need to make the door big enough to easily get dead or live birds out, if you want them live, but small enough that you can block the bait birds from escaping.

During the migrations, you will have to take birds out several times a day or it will get so full you won't catch any more.

Cowbirds and Cooper's hawks frequently got in Sandy's trap too.

Keith