What got you started?

Just curious as to what got everyone started trapping.

For myself, one fall morning I found some old traps in my grandpas barn while trying to locate the dens oh a groundhog I had been seeing run in and out of there- this was in 2007. I was 12 years old. Later that day, I had my mom help me look up trapping on the internet and this site popped up. I found myself reading “Memories of a First Catch”- since that day, I always wanted to catch a beaver in a #4 Victor DBLS and #44 Blake and Lamb. One year later, I had one of two challenges completed- I just needed to acquire a BL #44 to complete by first challenges set in trapping.

12 years after that boy made those challenges, he made many more for himself in trapping and has been fortunate enough to accomplish them all, except the BL #44 beaver. Three days ago, that changed.

I grew up on the edge of town and had a small trout stream that flowed right through our back yard, we mowed right up to it. It was all woods on the other side of it and that was my playground. I must have been about ten or twelve when I set my first trap. A coil spring I believe and I have no recollection of how it came into my hands. I set it along the stream in the late afternoon and checked it just before dark. It was gone, coon I assumed. Didn't know much about anchoring traps it seems.

That was the beginning of my infatuation with trapping.

When I was about 10 my dad gave me 2 no 1 longsprings. He then showed me what he called a pen set bailed with apples. No mention of scouting or location. After about a month I had caught 4 ducks. Mom was pleased.

I remember one summer night when my mother came storming in my bedroom demanding I go let the raccoon out of my trap. Seems a couple of coon were having at it across the brook and there was no convincing her I wasn't responsible for it.

when I was little maybe 7 or 8 my dad read me the book Where The Red Fern Grows and there were a few other books.

I couldn't wait to go hunting when I was 12 , when I was 11 my dad bought a Ruger 10/22 I had shot a few times at scout camp but that was my first real exploration into shooting.
later that year after my dad took me to a skeet range to try out shotguns he bought a Remington 1100lt 20ga shotgun.

dad had always had just one gun a 870 wingmaster with slug barrel that he used for deer hunting

we went small game hunting and bow hunting that year , I shot rabbits and squirrel in the back yard with my bow.
went deer hunting

I suppose I watched Jeremiah Johnson around about that time.
I also bought my first youth conservation patrons license and it included a trapping license but I needed trappers education , well I knew what Hunters education was and it had been offered by the gun club just outside of town and held at the sheriffs office , but trappers ed I had no idea were I was going to find that , so I trapped with some cage traps and life happened for a while till my own son was about 8 years old I and my wife had read him many of the same books like Where the red fern grows so he was into shooting and the outdoors and fishing as well . by now the internet was around and useful and I found a trappers ed class and only had to drive a little over an hour to get to it , took my son and in 2 Saturdays we were licensed trappers.
then I found trapperman.

I love learning new things and doing everything "the old fashion way" but to be honest I was playing the video game Red Dead Redemption 2 and a good legal way to make money was hunting for animas and selling their hides. The better the animal and the kill the more money you made. I became fascinated the hundred or so animals you could kill and sell and how much the pay varied. So I read a ton on trapping and got on here, then brought some DP's. That was a year ago and still suck lol but love it. I had never seen any of these animals up close in the wild and didn't even know minks existed till I found the small prints. I thought I was an outdoorsman but I had and still do have a lot to learn!

When I was 8 my friend's dad took us along and taught us how to catch muskrat and mink. I loved it and his son didn't. Still that way. That was almost 50 years ago.

Nothing I remember

I was trying to catch birds under a box propped up. At ade 4 wit my neigh friend

And I always read FFGame in school instead of paying attention.

A little later squirrels and rabbits , then Coon

No trappers in my family

My son inlaw introduced me to trapping about 6 or 7 years ago after my second wife passed away. It gave me a reason to get outside and be active. Id turned in a bull tag and was going to turn in a great late season deer tag. Trapping got me back in the out doors and helped me get out of the funk i was in. My kids joined me those first couple of years before they left for college and those are some great memories.

Sounds just about like me. I was always looking out the school window eyeing the groundhogs. It was always about the outdoors with me.

The school librarian in 8th grade gave a fur fish game magazine to read while I was in study hall in the library. The trapline section kept me occupied for study hall. I guess I talked to much. That was on a Friday, that evening we were at a store and they had traps # 1 longs and 110. I asked my dad what the 110 were, he didn’t know. So I bought 3 #1’s and set then in muskrat dens on sat. Sun I caught 2 muskrats and that started it 50 years ago. Still going strong.
Anybody that went to Roosevelt jr high in Zanesville Ohio will remember miss conn. Lol

When I was 14 I spent a summer with my uncle in Idaho. My older cousin had since left home for the army and while poking around I found some of his traps in a box, a few #1 and 1.5 jumps and a couple 110s. I asked my uncle if I could set them on his property for the rabbits I’d been chasing around with a pellet gun and he gave the go ahead. I set them at the entrances of den holes in the lava rock formations around his property, and the next day I caught a rabbit and a skunk! My aunt was NOT happy about how I smelled lol. The next day another rabbit and ANOTHER SKUNK! Lol after that my aunt said no more lol but it was too late, it was already a lifelong obsession.

I found an old #1 1/2 long spring nailed to a chunk of plank in our shed when I was 7 or 8 and asked dad how it worked. He set it for me and I put it in a groundhog trail that came into our garden. I caught the groundhog and dad let me shoot it with his .22. I was hooked from then on.

I had a strong desire to catch a coyote and I did

I grew up hunting and did so until I graduated high school and went off to college. I enjoyed the days off from school but didn't really enjoy sitting in the cold woods all day. When my son was old enough to hunt, I became a hunter again - briefly. He had the same revelation that I had when I was young, there's a fine line between hunting and just sitting in the woods getting cold.

But trapping seemed like a better alternative. More moving, less sitting. So, this is our first trapping season. We trapped a few days over his school's Thanksgiving break and trapped 10 days over Christmas break. We caught a couple of raccoon in DPs but pulled them after a few days. Turns out we like the challenge of snaring better. We're still learning but have managed to snare two raccoon, one house cat, and a squirrel. We released the cat unharmed. I hope I never catch a cat again, they don't' believe you when you tell them you're there to help.

The pursuit is in my blood. From the first time i had any self awareness, i knew what i needed. Doesn't matter if hunting, fishing, or trapping. For me trapping a little on the side is just hunting while i sleep.

10 years ago I started dating my wife and the beaver s were backing the water up on her property. I sat in the swamp a couple evenings with a rifle but quickly saw that was not the way to get rid of beavers. So I watched YouTube and bought 4 330 conibears. I caught a beaver the first night and that started my addiction and love for trapping. Probably 4 years into trapping beaver i jumped on the coyotes and I enjoy trapping both.

Late in the 1970s, I got married on a Saturday, and the mine I worked at shut down on Monday. I heard a fella could get $35 dollars for a coon an the carcass, $8 for a muskrat. Bought a dozen 1 1/2 Victors, and 2 dozen 110 B&L. I made $1200 in the next three weeks.

My first memory of trapping was Pappaw talking about catching rats (nutria)in steel traps . I was probably seven or eight . He died when I was nine. I have vivid memories of hunting and fishing with him , but unfortunately I don't remember ever trapping with him . When I was 12 we moved from town out to the farm where he had lived and his traps were still hanging on the wall in the potato shed . I started setting them because that's what he did

$3 muskrat and $20 mink and coon in 1974

I can't tell ya lol. I wrote about it not to long ago with the intention of sending to one of the trappers magazines but keep going over it because it always seems like it needs tweaked. I am the only Trapper in my entire family, a few love to here stories as they consider me the storyteller lol, that cracks me up. For the most part I'm the good ole, down home, backwoods brother, uncle etc. I've mostly always trapped alone with the exception of a few buddies, I'm the last one of my hunting party, and I thought maybe someone out there would like to read my first go around with trapping. Someday lol.

My grandfather trapped, I went with him when I was 8,9,10
He caught red, gray fox, beaver, muskrat, coons, bobcat, possums, skunks and weasels.
No yotes much around back then, 1968,69,70
He was a self taught trapper, a darn good one.
Never looked back..
It gets in your blood

So you married for trapping privilege?

My grandfather was having issues with a beaver in his spring knocking down trees. I sat out there for hours with a shot gun waiting for the dang thing. He never showed. I thought there HAD to be a better way. Lot of internet research and made my first 2 snares with washers and some scrap wire I had laying around. Threw them on a couple trails and the next day I had my very first beaver! Can't explain how excited and surprised I was to walk up and find a tight line. My grandfather was so happy and proud. Biggest beaver he's ever seen he claimed, although I am sure that was more for my ego then actual truth. He sure is missed.

I visited Yellowstone and then read Corps of Discovery about the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Decided to try to catch a beaver on a friends farm. Bought two 330 traps and caught two 40 lb beaver the same night.

Enough said. Hook was set. Something to do outside after deer season closed. Tried coon buckets and they worked. An otter swam through a 330. Wow. Then I started buying stuff on eBay and mail order stores. Never turned a profit but sure enjoyed the experiences.

After a knee replacement failure, I donated everything to a Cape Hatteras park ranger office and took a write off.

No joke. This site. I got started at a very late age. Had a great father he just did not have the time to get me outdoors. Found that place myself. Paul is my trapping dad! lol

When I was fifteen one of my buddies at school told me he was trapping. It was another thing to do outdoors, and like hunting, so I went out and bought one #1 long spring. My friend showed me where to set the trap, in front of a hole in a creek bank. I now recognize it was an old muskrat hole with no sign of fresh activity.

The next day I pulled the chain out of deep water and saw something long and furry in the trap.

"A mink!" my buddy yelled. "You lucky dog, you got a mink!"

Although he'd caught some muskrats and 'coon, he'd never caught a mink.

It was a small female mink, and I sold it in the round for $2.00 to the local fur buyer. My Dad thought I'd been ripped off and called the fur buyer. The guy convinced Dad that's what the fur market was at the time, and offered to sell me back the mink.

That was November 1971, a few years before the mid-70s boom.

Jim

I think it was a Disney movie back in the mid 60's. The story line was a father got sick and couldn't make it out on the family trapline that winter so his young son step in for him ans went out into the wilderness and had a successful winter on the trapline.
Got me thinking about trapping.
Can you imagine a Disney film like that today? I think they must have burnt the film, I've looked all over for a copy of that movie; nothing to be found.

I bought feed for the cows, had it in the back of the pickup. I went in the house to eat supper and coons tore open 6 bags. That was 3 years ago. I had never trapped before, learned here and watching u tubes. Still have a lot to learn.

As a kid in 6 grade I trapped with a friend for a year then gave it up . At almost 40 was walking my kids to bus stop across neighbors yard and found a lot of blood and a leash the wolves had eaten there dog in middle of night . I decided them wolves needed to pay for eating Fido and they are one at a time.

When I was little my Grandma used to tell us stories of how her dad trapped through the depression and how she would help him "work" fur. I guess I was a trapper before I ever set my first trap.
I got to trap the same marshes and ditches my great grandfather trapped. Dad was a coonhunter but didn't trap but I learned quick how to put up coon.

I found a cage trap at my uncle's house that had a dead possum in it. I was absolutely intruiged. He told me I could take it home and use it. So my cousin and I set it in a dry Creek bed and baited it with corn and with a week's time and a little luck we caught a coon then a squirrel and a rabbit I was hooked forever.

Well, son, you've done well - lol.

I started when I was around 8 a friend an I found some traps in a barn on the property he an his mom rented, we set traps an caught a coon , we try to skin an put it up on some wire we had , we took it to fur buyer an he through it in the garbage , my friend quit but I was hook I started reading fur fish an game , an learned from the school of hard knot people back then would not show or help at all, dad did not trap , maybe that's why I try to help as many people I can get into trapping !!!

The movie was Those Calloways. I ordered it several years ago because i liked it too. It's still available from Amazon. Sorry, it don't know how to post a link

Some of my story isn't good. When I was nine years old, I lived next to a golf course. One November day, myself and some visiting cousins were out on the golf course looking for who knows what, when we found some traps in the creek that was a water hazard on the course. Not really thinking it through we took them home to my house. Did I mention that there was snow on the ground? A couple of hours later, two men who were friends of my stepfather, knocked on the door of our house. They had followed the trail that three kids had made, right to our door. I paid a high price for those traps, believe me, and I didn't even get to keep them! The following year my stepfather gave me two Victor #1 stop loss traps and told me " I guess you know there are Muskrats in the Golf Course creek". It took me all season to catch one Muskrat, but I was hooked. This was in 1962 and I haven't missed a season since.

My old man trapped his entire life and his father as well. So was taught at a young age he carried me across beaver dams from the time I could walk. Been trapping ever since and now showing my daughter how to. She will make the 4th generation hope she passes it on to her kids someday and so on.

High school friend trapped rats. Water trapping is still my favorite. Love being on the water, hate being in the water. Plan on dying dry.

When I was 12 my father had a massive heart attack at the age of 38. Back then there was no paid leave and our family struggled. I had hunted all my life and grey foxes were plentiful. I had killed one squirrel hunting and sold it for 28 bucks. So read how to trap them and went from there. Caught 7 my first year with 4 1 3/4 northwood traps the neighbour gave me. Checked them before school each day on my bike. Next year I figured out I could watch their dens and right at dark they would come out and I shot them. With 6 traps and watching dens I killed 31 and sold them for 30 bucks apiece. It kept my family afloat until my Dad got his disability.

Next 3 years I caught over 50 foxes with one dozen traps checking before school . About half and half reds and greys. No yotes around here then and foxes where every where ...

I started dating Jerry.

Its been a great buncha years.

Ive learned alot 0