Bear Grease - Ep. 251: This Country Life - Trapping

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

The approach of the fall season has Brent waxing poetic about the trapping experiences he had growing up in rural Arkansas. The time spent on his trapline served up invaluable lessons on a number of things, only one of which was trapping. Brent credits "laying steel" as one of the cornerstones that helped him understand not only the conservation aspects of animals, but also how they interact with the landscape. It's time to go trapping on this week's episode of MeatEater's "This Country Life" podcast. Check out Coon Creek Outdoors on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@cooncreekoutdoors?si=K0MbvUhCmckQ8js6 Subscribe to the MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Connect with Brent and MeatEater MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Shop This Country Life Merch Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to this country life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves. From coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living, I want you to stay a while as I share my experiences and life lessons. This country life is presented by Case Knives on Meat Eat Eater's Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcasts that Airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I've got some stories to share. Trapping.

My trapping started at a young age when I ran a trapline on our farm where I grew up. Those experiences and lessons have served me well in just about every aspect of my outdoor career. I'm going to tell you all about them. But first, I'm going to tell you a story. My Uncle Dob, whose actual name was Troy Alvin Matthew Atkins, was everyone's favorite uncle. And no blood relation to any of us. he was a hunter, a fisherman, and above everything else, a trapper. At least he was to us.

His notoriety as a trapper wasn't solely of our own imagination either because there were a lot of trappers back then. But Uncle Dobb specialized in mink trapping, and a successful mink trapper was revered even amongst trappers as having the extra skill set to consistently add the prized furbearer to their daily take. Now, mink are difficult to catch and have been known to travel as much as 10 miles in a night. They have excellent eyesight, hearing, and depending on who you ask,

either a keen or a poor sense of smell. I found arguments for and against it online, but who really knows? I tend to lean toward the former with mink being the predators that they are, but no one actually knows except the mink. and the only thing they absolutely fail at is talking. Having observed mink in the wild myself, I find them beyond curious and busy, very busy, like full-on hyperactive busy.

They never slow down, and their constant search is for something to eat, and they're good at gathering vittles. I was standing knee-deep in a narrow portion of the Little Red River one day with a fly-rod and losing a sword fight with some, overhanging tree limbs. I was occasionally dropping a zebra midge in the vicinity of some feeding rainbow and brown trout that I could see in the crystal clear water. I wasn't doing any good. I was also seeing flashes of something I originally thought was a brown trout darting in and out

of the shallow water column only to disappear in the shadows from the overhanging limbs they were all about wrecking my rhythm. I started my casting sequence again and eventually all things merged into one. But instead of a river running through it, my fly tied itself in a grounding knot about six feet over my head. And while I stood there staring at the second fly and later that I would be sacrificing to the Lord of the limbs that day

and listening to the babble of the cold water as it rushed over the rocks and around my knees, I saw that brown flash again out of the corner of my eye. It was swimming further out of the shadows this time and it came within a few feet of where I stood. And it wasn't a brown trout. It wasn't even a fish. It was a mink.

And he was swimming underwater like Michael Phelps. I watched him go toward the bank, climb up on the edge, and immediately right back in the water. I stood there like an idiot with my fly hopelessly anchored to its final resting place, a third of my fly rod pointed skyward, while this mink swim upstream against a strong current. I saw him slip up behind a 12-inch rainbow, put him in a half Nelson, and drag him up on that bank and eat right there in front of him.

Mink are killing machines, and it's been said that they'll raid a chicken coop and just murder all the chickens for sport. You know, it's one thing to lose a chicken to a coon, a fox, a coyote, or whatever, but at least they're making a meal out of it. Not these vampiric thieves of the night. They're just biting eggs, drinking blood, and hitting the trail. Uncle Dobb got after one particularly daring specimen that he'd identified by a peculiar track that he made in the mud. That mink was going around his sets, digging him up, and generally becoming a pain in Uncle Dobbs' ego. The crooked foot track was giving him away, and it came down to a battle of wits and skill. He was running his trap line down in the river bottoms every day,

and while catching multiple coons of mink throughout the daily runs, This one particular mink out-foxed him. You see what I did there? On multiple occasions. Most times, but not every time on his sets, they were either passed over or dug up, and he'd find that crooked track. It was his right front foot as I remember him telling the story,

and it was a battle royal of him against this mink, and finally, Uncle Dob got the best of him with a one-and-a-half single spring trap. He never revealed anything different about how he did it, and I'm sure it wasn't a secret. I seriously doubt he changed much of anything. He was just persistent with the tried and true methods that had served him through the Great Depression when a successful trap line was literally money in the mattress and food on the table. His reputation as a good trapper didn't bypass his own understanding either.

He was good, and he knew it. He also liked to have fun, and one story I remember hearing about him was when he and another trapper of somewhat lesser skill were staying down at the cabin on the Saline River. The same cabin that's still in the Fry family that you've heard me speak about before, it was the one where I sucker punch my dad in the belly while he was taking a nap. Anyway, they'd been down at the river a few days, and someone came by and asked if they'd had any luck, to which Uncle Dodd replied, Well, last night I caught five cones and two mink, and my trapping partner here caught an otter that was strictly a coincidence.

He was a good trapper, and my brother Tim followed in his footsteps. He learned a lot from trapping with him when I was just too little to go, but he passed those lessons in some of his own down to me and his sons, Matthew, named in honor of Uncle Dob and Will, both of which are pretty good trappers themselves. But Tim told me his mission growing up had always been to best Uncle Dobbs record of a 100% catch night. He'd put out 10 traps in one day and when he ran them the next morning,

he had 10 Coons caught. That was the standard. If you wanted to beat the record, you had to have a minimum of 11 traps with 100% catch. All in the same night, Tim came as close as easy. anyone ever did in the family long after Uncle Dobb had passed away.

He set his 11 traps many days through that winter, and finally, after coming close, several times with eight or nine coons out of 11, then one day as Tim put number of 10 in his basket. He walked around the next bend in the creek to see that number 11 had chewed the limb. He'd wired his trap chain to into a small piece of wood, and he climbed a small tree, his foot still caught in the trap, close to where the set was made, and there it was. The record staring at him from eight feet off the ground, the chain hanging with an easy reach, like a light chain, along with the record.

And all he had to do was literally reach up and grab that coon and the record. He grabbed the end of the chain of the one tug, he pulled the trap off the coon's foot as he bailed out of the tree running away with his hide and the closest anyone ever got to Uncle Dobbs' record. Some things are just meant to be. Some things aren't. That Tim broke in his record that day and had Uncle Dob been there to witness it,

I'm sure he would have been proud of him and told everyone around that Tim had bested his record and it was strictly coincidence. And that's just how that happened. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest.

It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? that's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut and I hunt with

Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls dot com. I think you'll be glad you did and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy to use cut for beginning callers who just want

to start making good turkey noises and getting action. Trapping has been a great pastime of mine and being inspired by my brother Tim and other members of my family like my Uncle Dobb. My brother Tim actually got to trap with him when I was too little to go. Coons were the main target, and back then the fur prices were good. A fellow can make a good amount of money trapping through the winter, even in the south where the winters didn't get as cold, and the quality of the fur lagged behind the northern states. The animals down here don't get as big

as they do up there, which limits how much fur you have wants the animal to skint. Obviously, you're going to get more usable fur from a larger source. It goes along with what's known as Bergman's Rule. If you're not familiar with that, allow me to pontificate. Bergman's Rule is an eco-geographical rule that states that within a broadly distributed taxonomic clade, populations and species of larger size are found, colder environments, while populations and species of smaller size are found in warmer regions. The rule derives from the relationship between size and linear dimensions, meaning that both height

and volume will increase in colder environments. Now, in non-nerd lingo, that means the further you go up north, the bigger than animals get, and the weird of the folks talk. I'm just kidding. Not really. The hardier they have to be to withstand the winters of them. there. The critters, anyway.

Now, looking on a map, once you reach the top third of the continental U.S., you're going to start seeing the size of the animals get bigger and the fur get thicker. It's simple as that. Now, I know people who hunt and trap in the northern U.S. who've sent me picks of seemingly huge coons and beavers that we would count here in the south as extra large when presenting them to the fur buyer that would grade out as an average or large up north. I recently gotten acquainted with Jake and Riley Debo from New Hampshire,

and I mentioned them on here an episode so ago, and I'm completely intrigued with their way of life and how they represent the world of trapping to the rest of the world through their social media. Social media is a descriptor like jumbo shrimp. It seems to contradict itself. I can only imagine how much grief they get from the antis that troll around on the internet, looking to duke it out virtually,

with someone over something they don't agree with. I've said it before. Folks that verbally attack others the way they do while hiding behind the keyboard should have to list their address in case the attackee wants to drive over and have a meaningful exchange of ideas. Anyway, they have a business

selling fur items that they produce from fur. But a sales pitch is the last thing you'll see on their social media. It's one advanced level class of instruction after another, on how they prepare their equipment all the way to the end, where they prepare the fur harvested for the market, and folks like Jake and Riley put a great and true face on what trapping is and the benefits of the practice. It's absolutely one of the best and closely regulated renewable resources

on the planet that builds a stronger environment for all of nature when the populations are held in check. Beaver's, for instance, everyone knows that when a beaver sees a free-flowing Creek, his first thought is, I'm going to stop this nonsense immediately. In doing so, he creates a wetland habitat that benefits dozens of species of insects and wildlife, all of which coexist and depend on the other for survival. But if they're left to dominate the space, they eventually are going to do more harm than good. When the numbers are held in check, say, by trapping, that's called wildlife management,

and all you listening probably already know that, it's a simple concept that. works and is based on nothing other than science. Simple science at that. Also, it's fun. I love the trap. Historically, there's always been a conflict among coon hunters and trappers, and where I grew up, there was no shortage of either. The dog hunter's main argument was they didn't want to get one of their dogs hung up in a trap. I agree. I don't want to have to go get old whaling. I don't want either, but with the invention of the dog-proof trap, that has become a non-issue. A coon has to reach inside and manipulate the mechanism that springs the trap and a dog's foot just won't fit in there, as opposed to stepping on a pressure plate that releases the jaws on a

standard foothold trap. It was patented in 1984 and is an excellent method of targeting nest predators like coons, scunks, possums, and not dogs. This trap allows hounders and trappers to coexist at the same time on public ground where both are legal. Now, that used to be a recipe for a fist fight. I've had traps sprung, hung in trees, and just outright stolen by folks who didn't want to share the space. And it could be they just didn't like the idea of trapping. However, during that time that I'm referencing, there wasn't a lot of anti-anything associated with hunting and fishing, and if there was, no one said it out loud.

Now, in reality, it may not have been such a disagreement over trapping versus coo-hunting as it was the battle over the hides themselves. The fur prices were still good then And finding a dead coon, a beaver Especially a fox or an auditor on the road Was like hitting the lottery They normally got scooped up Like a hot grounder to the shortstop

And taken home Some of them might still be kicking And maybe a good vet could have saved them But a $20 coon laying on the side of the road 1980, which was what the average coons were back then, is like $76 to date Which is almost a time. tank of gas for your lawnmower.

So why do people continue to do it? Why go to the trouble of such a labor-intensive investment of sweat equity in the fur market that crashed 37 years ago and shows no signs of ever coming back? That's your answer. That's the why, because it is going away and it doesn't deserve the maligned face that anti-trapping community has placed on it. The benefits of harvests and animals by trapping for fur and food far outweigh any argument to be made against it in the management space alone. Want more ducks?

Limit the nest predators on the landscape. Want more quail, turkeys, and any other ground nesting bird, you guessed it. Put a thinning on the stuff that eats them. It's just that simple. My friend and coon hunting partner Michael Roseman has said a hundred times that coon hunters as a whole that's hunters who chase coons with a dog, know less about the animals they chase than any other group of hunters out there, and I 100% agree with him.

We depend on the dog to do all the work. The old, hey, that ain't my job phrase, may have been coined by a hound hunter who was just sitting around waiting for the dog to bark. The ones who have taken the time to educate themselves and study what they do, and when they do it have always been more successful, and I learned more in one season of trapping coons than I ever have from hunting them with a dog. Not only was I learning about coons, but I was also learning about every other critter that roamed the same woods that the coons did,

not by catching them, but by looking for coon tracks and being curious about what all those other tracks were. And I asked questions and I read books, but mainly I paid attention to Tim who already knew. some things he wouldn't tell me. I had to find those out on my own, which is the best way anyone, regardless of their age, learns the quickest when they take on a new task. The anticipation of finding the coons of my traps would keep me awake at night

and getting up before the alarm went off the next morning. I ran my trap line before I caught breakfast or the school bus. I was creeping out of the house with a flashlight before daylight to go check my traps, and every empty trap was. a lesson in observation and application. I took mental notes of what worked and what didn't. I came up with a list of do's and don'ts for each set,

and I made that was successful or not. It was just as many lessons in failure as there is in success. If you can accept it quickly and get past the fact of what you did, it just didn't work. I'd call Tim's house before bedtime and ask him feed off the fur with stir tonight, which what I was asking was if he thought the animals would be moving, and he'd give me his prediction. Most times he was right. I don't remember a time when he didn't catch more than me,

but I learned what to look for, and it helps me to this day when trying to estimate on whether Whelan and I are going to have a bunch of action or if we're going to struggle to put a coon up a tree because of the conditions, the time we're going, and where we're going, and everything else that goes along with it. I learned a lot of that initially from trapping. It's a great way to introduce young folks to the outdoors,

and it'll put them on the fast track to learn about everything that lives on the landscape where you're doing it. There's another way to learn the principles of trapping if you don't have your own personal Uncle Dobb or older brother Tim like I did, and that's to take a look at my friend Stu Miller's at Coon Creek Outdoors YouTube and social media pages. He has got a ton of how-to videos on his page with some great lessons he's already learned that he's sharing with everyone.

Highly recommended. He can snatch a catfish up out of the water too. I sampled some of that last weekend at the World Championship Squirrel Cookoff. I know who eats fish at a squirrel cooking. Well, I eat fish every chance I get, and I eat a lot of squirrels too, and I try not to miss an opportunity to eat either one of them. Reva Hanson, the pride of Audubon, Iowa, and requisite engineer, of all things this country life is going to put a link to Stu's videos in the podcast

description that you'll see on whatever platform you listen to us on. Just click and watch. Meat Eaters Radio Live show is up and running every Thursday at 11 a.m. Mountain Time, and I just hosted the last two episodes of those. And you can see them on the Meat Eater Podcast Network channel on YouTube if you missed the live version. We had a great time at the World Championship cookoff last weekend in Springdale, Arkansas. I saw lots of bear grease hats and this country life shirts and talk with so many folks that support me and old Clayboat. It's always such a blessing to be able to just stand around

and visit with old friends and make new ones. What a day. That's going to do it for me, so until next week, this is Brent Reeves, signing all. Y'all be careful. On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get dark. I've seen something in the road.

I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag. And there was a pool of blood. Oh, my God. He doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors. Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper.

From cold case files to whispered suspicions. From remote mountains to frozen backwoods, each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season two of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever.

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