Fur trapping season ended the last day of February. The trapping season like it was 50 years ago has changed.
The traps we used were keg traps. Trappers were trapping for muskrats, mink and raccoons. In Kentucky there were few, if any, beavers, otters, coyotes or bobcats. If there were, you seldom ever caught one.
It seemed for several years trapping was a thing of the past that you seldom heard of. Raccoons exploded. Skunks, no one wants. Opossums and coyotes were plentiful. Bobcats were coming back. Beavers were damming creeks. River otters were being caught.
A friend, Kenny Boone, had to have some Daniel Boone in him. He got interested in trapping as a hobby and would have fit in Daniel’s time.
With the different kinds of traps you can get now, it’s a little different than back in the ’50s when I trapped a little. The conibear traps, the new snare traps, are made to trap and hold coyotes and bobcats.
Boone works during the day but checked his traps every morning and evening after work. Most of the time, he told me, he has 50 to 60 traps out. Checking that many traps every day takes up a lot of his time, but he enjoys every minute of it.
Trappers are different. Today you couldn’t make a living trapping. You do it because you like getting out and to help control the animals to keep them from overpopulating and spreading disease.
Boone’s trapping made a difference of 95 raccoons to help the farmers’ cornfields. He got 18 beavers, four river otters, three bobcats, three foxes, 13 coyotes, 40 opossums, 10 muskrats, and one mink. He would have been right at home trapping alongside Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone in the frontier days.
His trappings are cleaned up, stored and waiting for the 2012 season to start.
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