Coon Hunters a Dying Breed?

I put out DP traps Monday. Had a huge male last night with a beautiful coat. I thought that sucker would of been worth some cash back when I trapped as a kid in the 80s. Now I do it just to save my chickens and some turkey eggs.

Esshup did you get the tool to set them with. I had 6 others that I bought several years ago and no tool. First time I used the tool to set one I cussed myself for not buying it sooner.

I have a big spool of electric fence wire I use and always fasten to trees. I just trap along a little creek and by my chicken house.

If you’ve never been there I’d say it’s worth the drive. Charlie and the guys know their stuff and will help however they can. Plus their just great people. Every deer on the walls of my house came from them too. I need to stop in there myself and get some dp traps for along my creek.

I trapped several raccoons in my back yard using a Havahart Live Animal Trap. I used sardines as bait. It works like a charm. They can't resist a sardine. I cut a 1.5" diameter PVC pipe to fit inside the trap sideways. I used plastic zip ties to hold the pipe in place at the top of the cage right above the trip plate in the trap. The coons have to stand on the trip plate and rise up to try to reach the sardines which I placed inside the pipe. There is just a little space at each end of the pipe between the side of the wire cage.

One of the raccoons I trapped was a mother with 3 young raccoon babies. I didn't know she had babies until after I relocated her. After that, I was getting ready to go someplace in my truck when I heard a noise coming from the area under a big Elm tree in my side yard. I looked around and found a baby raccoon that didn't even have it's eye's opened. It fell out of the tree. There was a big limb that was horizontal to the ground and was rotten on the end. The rotten part had fallen down a while back. I burned it. But there was still about 10 ft of limb left up in the tree. The end of that limb was hollowed out by the raccoon and she made her den inside that tree limb. She had been raiding my bird feeder at night. I have a motion-activated floodlight at the back door and the bird feeders were right near that light on my back deck. She was walking along the top of the deck rails and then eating the birdseed where I had built a platform for the bird feeder at the corner of my deck rails. I had a 2' by 2' by 1/2" piece of plywood screwed down on the deck rails at the corner junction of the deck rails. The deck rails are just some 2 by 4's laid flat and connected together.

So I was able to zip tie the cage onto the top of the deck rails using two long plastic zip ties. When the raccoon entered the cage and the trap door shut the one male raccoon I caught caused the zip ties to break and cage with the raccoon inside fell off the deck into the barberry bushes that planted around the outside edge of my wood deck. The male raccoon was mean as all get out. I sprayed him with the garden hose to clean up all the raccoon poop that he pooped into the cage and on my deck. Raccoon poop has a lot of parasites in it. Worms and other parasites reside in the raccoon's poop. So I wanted to spray off the deck real good and clean up that poop. After I hit him with the spray hose a few times he stopped growling at me and calmed down. I was then able to carry the cage to my truck. I put the cage with him inside into the bed of my truck and secured the cage against the tailgate and the bed rails with some rubber straps. That way the cage rode well in the back of my truck without sliding around. I took the animal to a safe place where he could roam the woods without getting into trouble. That birdseed is not cheap and he was eating all my birdseed in one night.

Ditto, relocate to cause problems for someone else?

Case in point. A neighbor that has a house roughly 1/2 mile as the crow flies from my house (properties almost touch) loves coons so much that he has the "Critter Control" people release them at his place. They are so tame at his place that he can hand feed them and has them crawl up into his lap as he's sitting in a chair on his porch.

My next door neighbor has tremendous problems with coons trying to get his chickens, we trapped 18 or 19 last year that were trying to get into his coop. I have a deer feeder out now at a property with a trail cam on it and the dang coons are eating more corn than the deer - 3 coons at one time in the trail cam pictures.

I've had coons get into the out building and eat/wreck a bunch of fish food - I can't sell a bag of food that they ripped open.....

And the final nail in the coffin for me happened last night.

I made a pot of soup, and it was too hot to eat. So I put it out on the porch to cool off for a few minutes. When I opened the door to get it a large 'coon ran away, and the soup was about half gone. This happened in less than 10 minutes.

As soon as I get the disposable stakes I'm setting out a dzn. DP coon traps.

I ended up with 5 male coons and 1 grinner this week. Had one where marshmellows were gone and trap was not set off. No tracks around trap. Mouse is all i could think of

Around here the big antler disease used to be main reason you couldn’t run hounds, “ you running the deer off “. Lol. Biggest buck I’ve ever taken was morning after treeing several coon there night prior

I'm a night owl so coon hunting is right up my alley. I've only went about dozen times or so but the most fun I've ever had in the outdoors was coon hunting. Being out late on a calm cool night and waiting to hear the dogs cut loose is so much fun. If you've never done it I highly recommend doing it the first opportunity you get. The guys that I know that do it could care less about the fur prices but it is a nice bonus when prices are up though. It takes a lot of money to keep a couple coon dogs around all year.