Beaver camp

This post should have been made last Feb. , better late than never I guess.

My good freinds from northern Louisiana have this amazing place to play on. Unmolested, we can have all the fun four trappers really need to have. This year was suppose to have been more people, but that don't always happen, and it rained a bunch. The sloughs, backwaters, and creeks really camp up high. I set two traps the day before the rains came, the next morning they were 8 foot under water, no beaver of course.
We held off setting anymore traps until the rain stopped. The next problem would be how to judge the water levels , would they recede fast or slow?
It was a judgement call that I think many trappers encountered in history. Take a given water level, make a set and judge where the water will be the next day. You want to make sure you have enough water to drown a beaver, but also the trap bed has to be correct.
I made a poor judgement in setting one of mine too deep , I lost my beaver, the trap was moved and appears I caught a toenail. My trapping pard, Ron Butler judged the other way and had little drowning water, his beaver chewed out.
It was still a learning experience, and thats what we were after. The traps worked fine, we just judged our water levels wrong. I feel like the same concerns would have been encountered in history, and probably judged more correctly.
We did make a few land sets with the new leaf spring traps I made. There was much to learn again while using these. The long bar on these traps were noted as being a problem area, for coon especially. Right away, the wet ground was seen as the challenge. You couldn't bury the bar, for the wet dirt was holding the spring back. Being 24 inches long, it made an obvious "something is buried here" getting the curiosity of a coon real quick.
Knowing he would likely dig the trap up and toss it aside, i cut a channel just wide enough that the bar would set in it. Then covered it with loose leaves, adding a heavy broken limb over the bar lengthwise, making it real hard to divert the coon to it as he has more important things like bait to look for. The limb doesn't touch the spring, it just lays over the channel , giving the spring all the room it needs.
Something still went wrong , the next morning I found tracks around the set, but nothing would go to it. With all the messing around trying to figure out how to make a perfect set I probably left too much scent behind. Maybe next time I'll get it done right and get off the trap bed without leaving my prescence behind. Had it not rained so much, there would have been more days to work traps, with the limited amount of time, there was only one decent night of trapping.