It’s time to up our game and move to a larger piece of property. This time we’re going after the coons and possums as well as the yotes too. The foot hold traps are rusted, waxed, and dyed….. and the DP’s have a fresh coat of paint with the triggers greased. I’ve still got to test the pan tension on the footholds and attach some new ID tags before everything’s ready to roll out. Gonna tour the new property tomorrow and study over an aerial for a couple days before setting our traps out. We’ll likely start trapping early next week.

Looks good! I just got my Mb 550s dyed and waxed and added some chains and drags to some of them! Have you found that you are getting more catches when DPs are painted?

Looking good CNC!

Make sure you wear gloves while setting pan tension and attaching your tags. You've gone too far into a cleaning process to risk contaminating your traps now.

Also remember that transporting your traps should be done with scent control and contamination in mind.

I know it seems like a lot but even if you catch coyotes with dirty, rusty traps you're also educating others. Why make it any harder by taking short cuts!

Thanks! I haven’t really tested it enough to say for sure. I’ve read several things that suggest they do use the colored ones more though. One common color is white. I just went with hunter orange because I already had the spray paint. I haven’t noticed it having any negative effects as I’ve caught coons in them the very night after I painted them. It just helps me see them a lot easier and it keeps the traps from rusting more and more. They rust really quick when once you start using them and the original finish gets knocked off. It’s not much trouble at all to put a new coat on one though. Just little “Chhh….Chhh” and you’re done. The next time I bring them in I may try dying them before painting again to see if that dye would soak into the rust as a base.

Thanks! I’ve got a fresh cleaned truck bed waiting on the traps to be hauled in. It just stopped raining here earlier this morning. Hopefully it’ll dry out enough in the next few days so that it’s not too wet.

Toured the new property yesterday…….everything looks pretty promising. The property centers around a 40 acre lake as well as having two other large lakes of similar size right on adjoining property lines nearby. There should be a healthy coon population present and riding around it was not too hard to find fresh coons tracks. I’ve already eyeballed a couple good spots for gang sets. The whole coon trapping strategy on this property is likely gonna revolve around the lakes and hardwood travel routes between them. I believe there’s the possibility for some health catches on this one. On the yote front, there seems to be a least a few present. Most of the tracks we saw though I’m pretty sure were foxes. This was 24 hours after rain so everything was super fresh. There very well may be a lot of things we just didn’t see as well on the ride through. We’re about to find out soon. To be continued…………..

Buy you one of the plastic totes to put the traps in. They will help keep them from getting contaminated.

Alright fellas.....we've got 12 yote sets out and 30 coon sets. Whew!!! Gonna start checking 'em tomorrow.

I saw a little family of geese on the lake when I arrived this morning. How many eggs do geese usually lay? I think its more than three….no? Wonder what got the rest of ‘em?



One of my sets…….I’ll snap pics of a few more tomorrow. The pan is sitting right in that ray of sunlight. This is at an intersection of two roads. I tried to just use some of the natural structure that was already present to make my sets from.

I'm interested to hear how the orange DPs do. I've heard of folks painting them white with good success, but not orange.

Good luck.

Thanks.....I think you could probably paint them about any color.

Day 1.......4 male coons

Tuned in for this one. Good thread and a good start to this tract.

Thanks 3FF…..Hopefully I’ll have us a yote pic in a few days. One downside of trapping right now is the female coons are still pretty non-existent. They must not be feeding at all. Some of these males coons probably do some hardcore damage to the local turkey nests though. That third one from the left was a hoss. He had to be 20+ lbs. That’s the size of a small dog.

Here’s one more of my yote sets. This is deer leg bone with yote pee sprayed on it that’s set up along a roadway. There’s a clothes hanger wire run through the middle of it to anchor it in the ground. The pan is sitting right in front of it next to that leaf. Again I tried to use some natural structure to funnel the animal into my trap.

CNC the set looks good but I'm confused on where the clothes hanger wire is and what purpose it serves.

Here are a few pics I dug up of sets. I've had better success with shorter backing as opposed to using taller stuff like you're using. Just something to think about since you're just starting out.

Thanks for posting the pics. I appreciate that. I'll keep that in mind about the lower backing.

The clothes hanger wire is what jabs down in the ground and holds the bone in place….as well as keeping the animals from being able to just grab it and run off with it. It was a real heavy duty wire hanger that I cut the piece from. There’s a hole drilled in the end of the bone and the wire is pushed up through it as far as I could get it. I reinforced it with a little bit of hot glue. That’s been a few weeks ago now so hopefully that doesn’t hurt me as far as smell. They’ll at least have to work for it to get it out of the ground.

I see! I think you're over thinking the whole issue but if you have time to spend on it then great.

I'll throw my bones into my dog pen for a week or so and let Rio knaw on them and get dog scent all over them then bag them up and use them as I go. I just drive them in the ground and put out a dab of scent.

It’s too late to show now because it got destroyed but I actually caught one of the coons on a yote set I made with a little doe skull. I found a wax myrtle that had some limbs that were making a really nice funnel shape and I tucked the skull back up in it a little. I buried it about halfway and put a little “Gusto” lure in the nose. It was meant to simulate what Trapper Jake was doing with the bone and afterbirth…..which reminds me. My FIL has a lot of cows and I’ve put in an order for some cow afterbirth. Any ideas on what to do with it? I thought maybe just a five gallon bucket with a lid but I wonder if it needs to be preserved or anything. That stuff Trapper Jake put in that bone looked pretty nasty. It must be the shiznik though because he had been trapping 90 years and that was apparently his “go-to” lure. That’s an awful lot of time to experiment.