[Saskabush]

This spring was my first go at muskrats and i learned a ton from this and other sites. For what it's worth here's a few observations i had.

Most of my trapping was done in ditches. I tried an assortment of traps this spring to try to get an idea of what works well. My three funnel colony traps destroyed rats on a few select culverts and accounted for close to 1/2 of my catch this week. Floats worked well and i caught on over 50% of them, but are so conspicuous, the pucker factor was always a little higher when i set one of them out. Among my most productive sets were submerged 110's staked in runs, banks, small culverts or the little feeder holes they kept open on the icey mornings. The 110's hit 75% of the time, but are time consuming to set, move/check and i was limited by how many i have. Towards the end i tried a few of Nube's #1's on a stake. Had lots of stolen carrots and only hit on 2 of ten but i think it was more to do with how i set them. I really like that set for ditches, low profile and damn hard to see unless you know where to look.

Here's a few pics from my spring. The colony traps sure upped the #'s in a hurry. I had one culvert that produced 21 rats in just over 24 hrs.