where do you sell snappin turtles or softshell turtles too?

You can sell em to anyone that wants to mess with the record keeping requirements. And only for consumption. Cant sell live ones anymore, taken in the wild.

Iowa used to have a commercial market but that was awhile back. Nebraska F&G had a sting operation and set up a guy in Nebraska to sell in Iowa then busted him. Since the G&P invests soooo much $ managing and improving snapping turtles in the MO River.

You missed out on it kid. I used to sell 2000 to 2500, mostly painted turtles a year to the pet trade. Catching turtles was one of my favorite things to do. I trapped and netted the same places for years and the population went up, because I took out predators and didn't keep breeding age females. Female turtles can store sperm for years, so few males are needed. Liberal animal whack jobs got selling to the pet trade banned in Ohio.

Keith

Dang, I really did miss out

There used to be some monsters in Beaver lake..

i had on a monster turtle but he snapped my line when i got him to the bank

Next time, instead of trying to pull the snapper out of the water, pick it up by the tail, while it's still in the water. It's much less likely to break your line.

You can make a cheap, easy turtle trap with 4' chicken wire,

Cut a 4' section,
attach it back to make a cylinder
close one end with chicken wire, make it easy to open to take the turtles out.
take a small landing net and wire it to the other side
take 2 strings and tie them them far apart on the net
take the other end of the strings and tie them far apart on the chicken wire closing the other end
cut a slit in the net between the strings, this makes a funnel, that will usually stay closed, unless something is pushing in.
cut a legal size escape hole in the top of the trap, towards the wired shut end
put an empty 2 liter bottle, with the cap on, to use as a float in the back end, where the trap is wired shut.
bait with fish, like carp split in half lengthwise or filleted out gamefish.
place near logs in shallow water or and undercut bank.

In a good location, you can catch 30 plus smaller turtles in under half an hour. Typically you only catch one big snapper at a time, in a small trap like this. The net end should sit on the bottom in shallow water. The bottle keeps the back end high enough up for the turtles to breathe. I used to have 6 traps like this. My favorite way to catch turtles was to net with an 18' long landing net. I would look for their heads sticking out of the moss, push the net deep under them and scoop up. Often I would catch several turtles per scoop, even though I only saw one. This method works great in a canoe, if you face the wrong way in it, if you're by yourself. Turtle catching is great fun.

Keith

Traps are the way to go with turtles. I've had some not so fun times jugging turtles when they get hung up.

Plus back in the days when you could sell live turtles, the buyers didn't like hooked turtles.when looking for breeding stock or long transport.

With jugs and set lines both, I often caught as many large fish as turtles, mostly channel cats and bass. I liked whole, 3" to 4" green sunfish and 2" chunks of venison or groundhogs as bait. It didn't matter back then if there was a hook left in the turtle, when I was just catching snappers to butcher, because there was no size limit. It's now better to trap, net or hand catch snappers.

My maternal grandfather had a long pole with a blunt spike on one end and a hook on the other. He would probe in mud, near springs, in the Winter, with the spike, listening for the thump and feel of a turtle shell. He would then work the hook up and down, until he caught the edge of the turtle shell and then pull them up. He would catch up to 3 dozen snappers at a good underwater spring in a big lake.

Keith

Interesting, you got a pic of the traps you make Keith?

Sorry, I don't have any pictures. I made and used the turtle traps back in the nineties, before we all had cameras in our phones, or mostly even carried phones, long before people photographed almost everything.

The traps are super easy to make. My main target was painted turtles. I used to sell 2000 to 2500, 3 1/4" to 5 1/2 inch painted turtles to pet stores a year. I sold smaller numbers of Sabine (false map turtles), stinkpots (musk turt!es), red eared sliders, soft shells and snappers to pet stores. I used to pick up and sell Eastern and the occasional ornate box turtle too. I supplied the entire Jack's Aquarium Pet chain, plus some smaller chains and independent pet stores. Right before the prohibitive laws went in effect Eastern box turtles were worth $25.00 each and ornates $40.00 each.

I also sold native snakes, tadpoles, crayfish, toads and frogs and invasive mystery snails, goldfish and koi I caught too. It was legal back then. I once caught 16,840 some green nosed frog tadpoles, in two days, out of long straight ditch creek, that I sold for 25 cents each netting over $4210.00 in cash.

I made far more selling to the pet trade and selling pigeons to dog trainers, than I ever did selling fur.

Sadly, because of draconian animal protection laws, you can no longer enjoy and profit from doing most of that.

Pigeons are still fair game though. The best, virtually unlimited markets for feral pigeons are dig trainers, pigeon tower shoots and animal sacrifice/voodoo. You can sell literal tens of thousands, for pretty decent money.

Keith

Very neat, was the turtle traps you made like a colony trap but big?

I don't eat turtles. I move them off the road so they don't get kilt. I spose they all contain DDT from the old days.

Snapping turtle is excellent eating

Lol

My father was a snapper eater, so I've eaten them my entire life. When I was a kid we'd grab up every one we could get our hands on that was at least as big as a dinner plate. My mother fried them up like chicken. I learned to trap snappers from an old Ohio transplant friend of my dad's. I rarely eat it nowadays. A friend was talking to an MSU biologist once years ago when fried turtle came up in the discussion. The fellow loved eating turtle as well as my pal and I did, but his work at the university testing game fish meat for contaminants put a stop to eating snappers after they tested snapper meat. He said every sample they tested was extremely loaded with all manner of nasty chemicals! I quit killing turtles in ag areas after that. I only trap/catch snappers from isolated areas today. There are loads of beaver ponds and sloughs in my part of the state that are well away from people and agriculture.

yes, I try to stay away from farms, and paper, mills and stuff, I trap in fast moving rivers, and fine a eddy,