My Trapping Season

So far my trapping season has a fair one but not a great one. I have been trying to trap coyote , raccoon, and fox. During the season I have had only twelve traps out because of the football practices and games. I have to take my traps out soon, if it gets too late the traps freeze or you cannot get to them because there is too much snow on the ground.

The average price per hide is pretty good this year. Raccoon and coyotes are in good demand especially. Raccoon in the $20’s for heavies (which is a large raccoon)– coyotes up to $50 to $60 for the pale "white". Red fox, beaver, fisher, bobcats and badger will be about the same price as last year which is about $20-$40 . Muskrats are cheaper with a $3 to $ 5 average. Mink up to $20.00. Deer antler–brown, up to $10.00 per pound. Most of your deer do not have one pound antlers unless you shot a mosnter buck but if you have shot several in the past years the antlers can add up if you have quite a few of them.

What I have trapped so far this season are six feral cats, two possum, five skunk, seven raccoon, two fox, and one coyote. The only thing that we kept and skinned were the seven raccoon the two fox. We would have liked to skin the coyote, but it had mange. Mange is a skin disease of mammals caused by a tissue-burrowing arthropod, the mange mite. So after we caught the coyote we shot it, took it with a log and threw it into the plowed field and poured some gas on it and burned it. We did this to help the environment so no other animals will get it. Besides the one coyote every thing else that we caught did not have mange so we skinned them and we approximately made about $200 this year and we still have some raccoons from last year that we had caught. We did not skin the five skunk or the two possum because they were not worth skinning... plus we don't want to smell like skunk for weeks.