00:00:05 Speaker 1: 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 Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast the airways had off. 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 trap line on our farm where I grew up. Now, 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. The first, I'm going to tell you a story. My uncle Dobb, 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 fishermen, 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 fur bearer to their daily take. Now mencher difficult to catch and have been known to travel as much as ten 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 ben 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 slowed down, and their constant search is for something to eat, and they're good at gathering victials. 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 the zebramage 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'd 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 that 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 the grounding, not about six feet over my head. And while I stood there, staring at the second fly and the leader that I would be sacrificing to the lord of the limbs that day, and listening to the babble of the cold water as it brushed 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 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 the twelve inch rainbow, put him in a half nelson and drag him up on my bank and eat it right there in front of it. The mink are killing machines, and it's been said that they'll raise 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 coyoder or whatever. But at least they're making a meal out of it. Not these vampiric thieves of the night. They're just biting next, drinking blood and hitting the trail. Uncle Dob 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 them up and generally becoming a pain in Uncle Dobb's ego. The crooked foot track was giving him away in 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 found that crooked track. It was as right front foot as eye as I remember him telling the story, and it was a battle royale 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 and the mattress and food on the table. His reputation as a good trapper didn't by pass his own understanding either. He was good and he knew it. He also liked to have fun. In 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 punching 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 Dob 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 travers themselves. But Tim told me his mission growing up had always been to best Uncle Dobb's record of a one hundred percent catch night. He put out ten traps one day, and when he ran on the next morning he had ten coons caught, and that was the standard. If you wanted to beat the record, you had to have a minimum of eleven traps with one hundred percent catch all in the same night, and Tim came as close as anyone ever did in the family. Long after Uncle Dob had passed away. He set his eleven traps many days through that winter, and finally, after coming close several times, was eight or nine coons out of eleven. Then one day, as Tim put number of ten in his basket, he walked around the next bend of the creek to see that number eleven 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 grabbed 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 Dob's 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 it and told everyone around that Tim had bested his record and it was strictly a coincidence, and that's just how that happened. Trapping has been a great pastime of mine and being inspired by my brother Tim and other members of my family like my uncle Dob. My brother Tim actually got to trap with him when I was too little to go. The coons were the main target, and back then the fur prices were good. Fela could make a good amount of money trapping through the winter, even in the South, where the winners 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. Once the animal is skin, obviously you're gonna get more usable fur from a larger source. It goes along with what's known as Bergmann's rule. If you're not familiar with that, allow me to pontificate. Bergmann's rule is an eco geographical rule that states that within it, a broadly distributed taxonomic clade. Populations and species of larger size are found in colder environments, while populations and species of smaller size are found in warmer regions. Now, 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 word of the folks talk, I'm just kidding, not really, the heartier they have to be to withstand the winners up there, the critters anyway. Now, looking on a map, once you reach the top third of the continental US, you're going to start seeing the size of the animals get bigger and the fur get thicker, as simple as that. Now, I know people who hunt and trapped in the northern US who've sent me picks of seemingly huge coons and beers that we would count here in the South as extra large one, presenting them to the fur buyer that would grade out as an average or large up north. I recently got an acquainted with Jake and Riley Debo from New Hampshire, and I mentioned them on here in episode or so going. 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 Jombo 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 attack e 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 the nature when the populations you're held in check beaver's for instance, everyone knows that when a beaver sees a free flowing creek, his first thought is i' muna stop this nonsense immediately. In doing so, he creates a wetland habitat that benefits dozens of species of insects and wildlife, all of which coexists and depend on the other for survival. But if they're left to dominate the space, they eventually going to do more harm than good. When the number are held in checks, say by trapping, that's called wildlife management, And all you listening probably already know that it's a simple concept that works, and it's 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 in 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 foot old trap. It was pattented in nineteen eighty four and is an excellent method of targeting that's predators like coons, skunks, possums and not. This trap allows hound hunters and trappers to coexist at the same time on public ground where both allegal. Now they used to be a recipe for a fistfight. 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 coon hunting as it was the battle over the hides themselves. The fur prices were still good then, and finding a dead coon a beaver or especially a fox or an otter 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 twenty dollars coon laying on the side of the road nineteen, which was what the average coons were back then, is like seventy six dollars today, which is almost a 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 thirty seven 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 harvest and animals by trapping for fur and food far out weigh 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 thin in 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 no less about the animals they chase than any other group of hunters out there. And I one hundred percent agree with him. We depend on the dog to do all the work. The old hay 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 him 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 coons in 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 over 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, and I took mental notes of what worked and what didn't. I came up with a list of dues and dons for each set, and I made that was successful or not. There's 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 called Tim's house before bedtime and asked him either fur wood started night, which what I was asking was if he thought the animals will be moving. 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 helps me to this day when trying to estimate on whether Whalen 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 they'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 Bob or older brother Tim like I did, and that's to take a look at my friends 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 shared him with everyone. Highly recommended. He can snatch 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 again, and I ate a lot of squirrels too, and I try not to miss an opportunity to eat eat it one of them. REEVEA. Hanson, the Pride of Autubon, Iowa and requisite engineer of all things this country Life, is going to put a link to Stud'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 shows up and running every Thursday at eleven am Mountain time. And I just hosted the last two episodes of those and you can see them on the met 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. There's also lots of bear grease hats in this country live shirts and talk with so many folks that support me and oklay Bow. 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 gonna do it for me. So until next week, this is Brent Breeves signing off. I'll be careful

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