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First Trap Set...

StickersNKickers

StickersNKickers

Camo Up!
Well, I finally did it. Bought a trap and got out and set it Sunday night after family events. Used a Revenge Quick Set trap at the most recent mound. Dug down about 6" from the plug to make an opening above the tunnel to put the trap in, and actually had to make the tunnel a little bigger since the trap was a little wider than the tunnel. Wired the trap to a stake, set it, placed it, put a baby carrot behind the trip plate, covered the hole with a shingle and covered that with dirt...and then waited! I was pretty excited as I retrieved my prize Monday night. It is about 7 1/2" long not including the tail. Longest claws were about 1/2" and has about 3/8-1/4" front teeth. I have been chasing this thing (and possibly some cohorts) for the last 3 weeks with poison, but to no avail...or at least none that I could see as more mounds kept appearing.

Now the question is...what is a gopher pelt worth!
 
nice.. we used to trap gophers when I was pretty little. Just put a small foothold in at the bottom of the hole.. We got quite a few that way but had to check them often because they would chew their foot off if we weren't quick enough.
 
Yeah, this trap grips them around the midsection. I was going to go with a black box type, but couldn't find one. This one was on sale for under $3, so I thought I'd give it a try. Seems to be a good investment.
 
Nice! Used to do a bunch of that when I was a kid. Do one little thing wrong and the damn things would plug the hole on you. Back then the county was paying 25 cents for a bounty on them, but have no idea if that's still the case.

NWBuck
 
NWBuck said:
Nice! Used to do a bunch of that when I was a kid. Do one little thing wrong and the damn things would plug the hole on you. Back then the county was paying 25 cents for a bounty on them, but have no idea if that's still the case.

NWBuck
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Hope it would be more than that now, or it probably isn't worth it with gas prices the way they are! Also, I'm guessing I had a little beginner's luck with catching it in one day.
 
I've been told there really aren't near as many gophers nowadays as there used to be because of knifing anhydrous into the ground.
 
Has anyone tried to snare gofers? I have a big gofer problem and some snares laying around in the garage but not sure how well it would work.
 
Hoyt Freak said:
Has anyone tried to snare gofers? I have a big gofer problem and some snares laying around in the garage but not sure how well it would work.
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I haven't, but I hadn't tried any poison or traps until this year. I suppose if you could make the loop just smaller than the diameter of the tunnel and place it at an open mound hole (if any) or dig down to the tunnel like I did and hang it vertically and then cover the hole you dig up, it could work. Here's a link I found for snaring groundhogs, which the same methods could help? http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles2/easterly98.html
Let us know if you try it!
 
Have a lot of fond memories trapping gophers when I was younger! Learned how to drive in the wide open hayfields with my dad when i was about 8 years old when we were trapping. In Iowa we would get 25 cents per pair of front feet. I don't know if they still do that in Iowa anymore or not. It was always fun to bring our jar of frozen gopher feet into the the county recorders at the county courthouse and let the old ladies have to sort them out on the counter and count them out for us and give us a bounty! Back then in the middle '70's when i was about 10 bringing home $20-25 in gopher feet bounty's you felt rich!!! When i started trapping with my best friend Joe we use to let our jars of gopher feet sit outside the freezer a couple days and let them get really smelly and then bring them down to the court house and warn the laddies that they smelled pretty bad and to "trust" us when we told them how many were in the jar so as to tell them there were actually more in there that really was so get more money...When i moved to Minnesota in my early twenty's it was really nice cuz up there they would give us $1 for a pair of front feet. Thats how I got my beer money for about 6 weeks every spring...
 
Been stacking them up in my front yard also. If you want to skin them, I'll mail them to you.


Side note, don't put so much work into it. open up the tunnel, place trap. They sense the air coming into the tunnel and come to fix it and go right through the trap. No need to cover it or bait. Save you some effort.
 
gundog870 said:
Been stacking them up in my front yard also. If you want to skin them, I'll mail them to you.


Side note, don't put so much work into it. open up the tunnel, place trap. They sense the air coming into the tunnel and come to fix it and go right through the trap. No need to cover it or bait. Save you some effort.
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Good to know. Haven't had any more mounds show up since I got the one, so hopefully I took care of the problem. Good learning activity...if I have more in the future, maybe it won't take as long to get them!


Oh, and I'll pass on skinning them, but maybe someone else on this thread would like them?
 
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