Mike Marchewka wrote a great article talking about how to determine when it's time to pull beaver traps. You can read the article on the MTP website HERE. He always does a great job.

Luke

I pull them ...when the fresh piece of poplar at the waters edge..

Hasn't been touched after 2 days

Depends if you are fur trapping or nuisance trapping.

The article is about nuisance trapping.

A fresh piece of any food source at the water's edge won't catch many beaver down here.

Pretty much the same over here.

Baited sets here are a waste of time

Nessmuck's beavers must be hungry.

Yeah........but his bait sticks might smell like sourdough. Could probably catch most of the guys on here with a loaf or two. G.

If nuisance you never pull traps until all the beaver are gone and water is restored to natural flow rate.
For fur trapping minimu, 1.5 per live house and no more than 2 per live house for maximum long term sustainability.

The only time I caught 1/2 a beaver was when something ate part of it.

Me too. That 1/2 a beaver must be a Canadian thing......lol.

If you have 40 live colonys on your line you take minimum 60 beaver maximum 80 off your line.

It is impossible to count colonies here on west coast. Every high water they move. No ice so they can get a bite to eat anywhere.

Yea I hear the west coast is weird.
But where I am and across the vast swath of NA that is boreal as well as the deciduous prime beaver habitat that is a proven method to manage the resource.
If you cant find a colony then obviously your sool
Easy to find the colonys in the habitat represented in the pic at the top.Classic beaver habitat.

A little different down here. 40 colonies would be spaced out on 30 to 50 or more different landowner's properties.

I knew what you meant Boco, I couldn't help myself.

So Uncle Swamp.....down there...how can you tell when you got the last one ???

Nessmuck,
I use most of the same ideas that Mike writes about, but it is never a sure bet. Access is a major hindrance....not who owns the land, but very rough, thick vegetation. Some of the wetlands down here are hundreds, and some a thousand acres of swampy mess. Even with no beavers many of the areas here are still swamps.

Tough to get to where you need to set traps.

I wish we had defined colonies of beaver in our area. However, most of the areas I have trapped in Eastern Washington and Idaho have bank beaver. Occasionally you'll find a feed pile but most of the rivers stay open year round and food is always accessible to them. It can make it difficult to manage harvest on a water trapline.

My first year out of the Army I trapped a stretch of river that I could access with canoe. The first several miles were public ground but after that was private ground and the river was not considered navigable so technically the landowners had ownership of the river. And the ground immediately upriver of the public ground was heavily posted. So I concentrated on the public section.

The first season there was seemingly endless numbers of beaver. And many were badly bit up. I trapped that section almost to eradication that first season. I knew there were more upstream and I felt it was over populated in the public section. No one had trapped it in a few years and fur prices were really low at the time.

The next season I caught a lot of beaver in that same stretch. Not as many as the previous year but they were in much better shape. This river drained into one of the major rivers or the NW and the section I trapped was from the mouth upstream several miles. So there was always a resupply from both directions. For several years I took a pretty consistent 20-30 beaver from that stretch of river. And mostly adults. Very few kits. When I started catching a kit or two and few adults, that was my cue to shut down. It isn't always that easy to plan your take, especially is there is competition.

In a another area I was contracted to remove beaver from a huge hybrid cottonwood tree farm. They did have dams and colonies there. The small stream that flowed through the ranch was slow and the banks were sandy and easy to dig. I would go in and remove all the beaver, or least to the point that there was no new sign for a couple weeks. Within 90 days I'd be getting called back. The stream emptied into the Columbia river which was only 3-4 miles away. It has always amazed me how quickly a new bunch of beaver would find their way to the trees.

I'm not sure there is a reliable formula for managing beaver catch in areas like I have. I try to avoid kits but on a lot of big rivers it seems inconsistent at times. I do pull if I start catching kits and no adults.