When choosing a place for trapping you should take into account number of beaver population and its distribution in the very unpredictable basins and to inspect the nearest rivers, lakes, cutoff meanders, channels, pits and so on. Maybe you won’t need to go far after all. However the closeness of inhabited area may be not good as anybody can take your trap off. Taking into account the possibility of trap stealing you should be careful when placing a trap, not make any noises and not attract anybody’s attention. Hunter ethic when trading hunters never touched someone else’s traps is being put aside by profit lust, especially at someone else’s expense. Only in remote placed when there are few strangers no one can dare take off someone else’s “iron”; pay-off comes quickly – one may be shot or mutilated.

When I started beaver hunting it was believed that a beaver is a super-careful beast and can be easily frightened even by loud voice. And after that a beaver can hide in the burrow for the whole week. It’s not at all true. Watching beavers over many years I’ve noticed many peculiarities in their behavior. Yes, a beaver is a careful animal, it has a quick ear. But only serious aggression towards it can make a beaver hide for a long time. For example, when several beavers get into traps the rest of them disappear mysteriously and may not show up for 2–3 weeks. Even members of All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Hunter Sector and Breeding Animals couldn’t catch the whole beaver colony (they did it with the purpose to settle animals in a new place).

But there are methods to catch the whole beaver settlement. If only the aim is not an alive beaver but skin or meat. I’ll tell about that a bit later.

For each animal there are its own natural noises. They may frighten young, inexperienced animals, but the older ones even don’t pay any attention to such noise. The sound of man’s steps is easily recognized by the beasts. And that is the sound of danger for them! That is why trapping has got an advantage over gun hunting. If, approaching the bank you can scare a beaver away, the “iron” will lie quiet…

Beaver trapping begins in October. At that time beavers start to store food for winter and it’s easy to find beaver settlement. It’s impossible to miss tree trunks gnawed by beavers. This method to fall trees is only a beaver’s feature, so if you see fallen trees with stubs sharpened as a lance, it means that the beaver lives somewhere here!

Sometime “production” meadow can be situated 100–200 m away from the bank and nibblings may remain unnoticed. In this case beaver crawling-outs can be useful. They look like trampled paths. The more trampled is the soil, the more often beavers crawl on that place, so the chances to catch an animal are bigger.

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If you decided to start hunting a beaver I recommend you to begin with trapping. This will let you learn more about the beaver, its way of living, experience joy of the first trophy, and in the case of failed catch you shouldn’t be very much upset – many beavers may live without one leg. For trapping you don’t need gun registration, a trap is not very expensive if compared with general expenses. Average cost of the trap N 5 in 2008 was 350 rubles.

Many people underestimate a beaver’s strength. Once two friends of mine were rafring. They managed to catch a beaver and wounded it. One of them, probably in excitement, forgot about danger and grabbed the beaver’s tail. Never do this! A beaver dodges easily and its front teeth (incisors) are very sharp! It can bite your finger off at once or cut veins on your arm. So, one fellow grabbed the beaver’s tail, the other started to row to the bank with all his might. But the beaver managed to drag them with their boat across the river to the opposite bank! There it was finally caught. I saw the picture of that beaver’s skin. My friend stands and holds the upper edge of the skin with his arm stretched up. The lower edge of the skin touches the ground. That beaver was, rough guess, not less than 35 kg and its skin area was about 80 dm2. I haven’t heard or seen anything similar and reliable about such sizes of the beaver since then. It was a rare specimen.

I have distracted though, let’s go back to traps. They differ by the type of clutch: clenching and pressing. And surely they differ by the size. Each size of the trap has its number – from 1 to 7. The bigger is the number the larger is the trap. The traps larger than N 7 which I saw were self-made, for bear hunting. The size was impressive! Such traps have only one specific feature – arches in them do not meet at trap event. It’s made to prevent an animal’s leg fracture – not because of humanism, but because the beast can leave broken leg in the trap and go away. It is widely believed that an animal got in the trap can bite its leg off and leave. Well, it’s not true. Being caught in the trap animals gnaw not a leg off, but skin only, as a leg is already broken and there’s no need to gnaw it off.

As I’ve mentioned above, a beaver is a very strong animal, that’s why apart from the trap N 5 or N 7 you need a very strong leash for this trap. This leash can be made from multifiber metal cable with section 1.5–2 mm. I use such leash usually. I didn’t have any runaways because of torn cable.
Then, you should strengthen the trap. For this purpose I cut down a stake about 1.5 m height, and make one end sharp. Depending on thickness of the bottom and the method of trap placing the cable should be tied to the stake at the following height – after the stake is drove in the ground the cable is supposed to be on the ground (bottom) level or a bit deeper.

For convenience the ends of the cable may be clamped and loops may be made. It’s easy to fix the cable both to the trap and to the stake through such loops. For clamping I use small (2-3 cm) pieces of copper (brass) tube. Such tubes are sold in car spares shops; they are used as a part of car break-gear.

To prevent cables and traps from mixing up they can be carried separately and be connected only at trap placing.

If the trap is new you should wipe it from oil. It’s better to make it with the rag wetted in gasoline. Gasoline dissolves oils well and vapors quickly. If there’s enough time after that you can place the trap in water for several days, it will let the trap become an “ordinary” iron with which a beaver will be more careless than with the trap which makes oil circles on water.

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I’ve already told how to place a trap on a beaver dam. To trap a beaver on its crawling-outs, near the lodge or in channel is not less effective. Apart from that a beaver can be caught with a decoy.

Beaver crawling-outs are easy to notice, I’ve mentioned that. Usually there are 2-6 main crawling-outs per one settlement. Apart from that there are up to 10 smaller ones, besides a beaver can crawl out wherever it wants to. But during winter food storage they usually use the main exits; that’s why these paths are so well trampled.

Approaching a beaver settlement (you can judge it by occurrence of fresh nibblings) you should not run hither and thither trying to find the biggest crawling-out hole. You should instead promptly, without extra noise go along the bank, examine, evaluate the possibility of trapping and mark the crawling-outs you like most. If you have got such opportunity you can place 2-3 traps in one settlement. Herewith the chances of a beaver falling into a trap become stronger.

What should you pay attention for when evaluating a crawling-out? First of all, it is terms when tracks were made. Second is the size of tracks, this allows to define a beaver’s age. Third, it is the convenience of placing a trap: if the bank is flat there won’t be any problems. But if the crawling-out goes out to the very steep bank, as a rule it means that there is a precipice under the bank and it might be quite difficult to establish a trap.

Then you should move aside for not to scare the beavers away. As I’ve mentioned beavers live in burrows. So, picture yourself that somebody above your head is stamping his feet, cutting trees, clicking irons and so on. Would you have a desire to go out for the next two days? That’s it! That’s why we must move aside when we want to prepare pegs for traps, cables and charge the beaver traps.

Having approached a crawling-out we should measure depth and repeat the procedure described in the article “Placing traps on a beaver dam”. For a picket we should choose such a place that the length of the cable could not let a beaver to get out to the bank. To raise the chances of a beaver’s trapping we can make an artificial barrier in the form of branches stuck into the bottom. They can form a semicircle from to bank to the trap with “gates” above the trap. A beaver won’t swim straight, it will swim over a clear place, where a trap exactly is. This “fence” will work either in the case when a beaver will go out in a different place but will go down by the crawling-out where the trap is placed. The “fence” will guide a beaver in a “right” direction.

If a beaver lodge or semi-lodge is within reach you can place a trap there. A beaver restores not only dams but also its houses. But if a lodge or a semi-lodge can be easily noticed, then a burrow is hard to reveal. To build a lodge or a semi-lodge a beaver needs to carry branches and ground and that means that it will trample a crawling-out anyway.

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