New Traps, New Methods !

With the new swim through Comstock beaver cage traps, quite understandably, trappers are coming up with new ways to use these devices to adapt to the environment, making sets that were not possible with existing equipment. Dan Gates was the first to pile grass and mud on top of a cage set in a foot of water with castor on top to take beaver in places where there were no channels or runs, only open shallow water to work with. We made the dam break set by placing the traps on the dam with a trickle of water running through. As well as setting cages side by side in deep runs, some trappers, including myself, have stacked the cages on top of each other. Because these traps have a large footprint and can often be set in muck, a trapper need only drop them in where other traps would have been engulfed, buried in mud.
The other day I came upon some really soupy diarrhea like muck, muck that was all but suspended in solution as it were, common in some Adirondack ponds all across the northern tier of the U.S. The depth appeared to be correct for a set, but upon testing I found that the trap simply sunk out of sight. With that I thought, why fight it? Why not work with it? After I placed the first cage, which sank the full 12 inches into the muck, I realized I now had a solid platform with which to work from for the second trap. The water above the muck was the height of a 12 inch cage, so I simply set the second trap on top of the first cage, done. This covered the entire run while leaving the top of the cage even with the water level. Black muck with a black cage did the trick. I put some dead cat tail blades on top and nabbed a 40+ pounder in a couple of days. It was a great place for a set, but only for our wide swim through cage traps. I can think of no other trap that could have blended in so well, set so easily, and done the job so quickly. In a situation where the water was deeper and the bottom solid, I have stacked traps which in one case resulted in a muskrat taken on top and an otter on the bottom.