Outdoor Ironies on the Osage River

After the lessons of hunting, an outdoorsmen pursues trapping to further round out his knowledge of the intricate workings of Mother Nature. The One-Eyed Hillbilly with a late January coyote.

This past week on the Osage River in Webster County while boiling traps for one last bobcat and coyote trap line before season’s end, as I stared into the fire I was mesmerized into a trance while pondering some absolute truths in Mother Nature. As I watched the fire and contemplated, I found myself once again disturbed at how obvious truths in nature have been twisted into philosophical quagmires and great ironies for our modern society. Trapping, for one, seems to be a human interaction within Mother Nature that can stir the emotions of many a diverse group. For me personally, after hunting, trapping was the next level in the hierarchy of outdoor interaction that taught a mountain man the intricate movements and workings of Mother Nature. If you can recognize and read sign of all the different scats, tracks, and wildlife activities, you can better understand the bigger picture of how game animals and furbearers travel through and use the landscape. And, subsequently, you can become a better and more efficient participant in the circle of life. Isn’t it ironic that as outdoorsmen we drift toward the pursuit of trapping as being more intimately involved in the Great Outdoors yet some mistakenly view the pursuit as inhumane? It is simply the difference between making decisions and acting on those decisions based solely on emotion versus making those same decisions armed with the real facts along with a basic understanding of the real Mother Nature.

Above - Smoke and steam is hard on the ol' eyes...especially when you only have one! Greg pulling traps from the boil barrell.

Below left - Jack Fortney playing 'hot potato' with a trap fresh from the barrel.

Below right - Using a wire brush to clean the traps before boiling.

As with understanding the basic realities of the real Mother Nature, an understanding of the basics is the foundation of any successful trap line. Proper functioning mechanisms and scent control are key when preparing traps. Prior to putting the traps in the boiling pot proper adjustment to pan tension and fine tuning of the firing mechanism is crucial. Cleaning all the dirt and crud from your traps with a wire brush is also important. After cleaning and adjusting each trap, the traps should be bound together and dropped in a large pot of boiling water with an adequate amount of trap dye – this process eliminates scent and stains your traps.

Above - Is it cheating to wax inside a warm shop? The One-Eyed Hillbilly and Ellis Floyd waxing traps ‘in the dry.’

Right - Letting the string drip dry before hanging them up - Ellis Floyd pulling traps from the wax pot.

After boiling your traps and hanging them to dry it is important to wax them. Traps are waxed as a means of lubrication so that they operate as efficiently as possible. The wax also provides a barrier between the metal and any corrosive agents, such as salt, used as antifreeze in the trap bed. Great caution should be taken when waxing traps due to wax being flammable – if your wax boils you should reduce heat! After submerging you traps in wax a few at a time it is important to allow the traps to reach the same temperature as the wax to maximize surface area coverage. Once the traps have heated up to the same temperature as the wax (this generally takes a few minutes) you should remove the traps and let the excess wax drip back into the wax pot. Then hang your traps to dry. These are the basics of boiling and waxing traps.

Getting back to the basics - the basics of Nature will tell you that, by any stretch of the imagination, Mother Nature is not humane. She has no tolerance for judgments based solely on emotion - that is a purely human condition. Nature could be accurately described as the most savagely beautiful show on earth. If you have ever been lucky enough to witness an eagle high in a treetop using his beak and talons to rip the skin from a struggling salmon, you understand. If you have seen a coyote disemboweling a week-old white-tail fawn while it is still alive, you know what I mean. If you have ever watched a bobcat pounce on a young turkey, with the great squawking and feather-flying ruckus that follows, it is quite a beautiful and savage natural spectacle, but humane it is not. Finally, if you’ve seen the last hours of agony of a raccoon with distemper or a white-tail deer with blue tongue disease, you quickly come to realize that any harvest of wildlife by human hands is greatly desirable to that which awaits the animal otherwise. Survival of the fittest, and only the fittest, is very real. In the wild there is no such thing as quietly, much less comfortably, passing in the night.

Outdoor Irony for sure – is it me or are we hypocritical in our dealings with our own species as compared to our laws pertaining to wildlife?

At the end of the night as I sat there staring into the fire I humorously considered the 2 ironies of which I had pondered. The first – that Nature somehow understands ‘Humane’, much like a gazelle thrusting an olive branch to a charging lion and asking him to be nice. Then, I recalled my trip to Kodiak, Alaska last fall. I saw a sign that read: Don’t Feed the Bears. It went on to explain how feeding bears creates adverse conditioning for them and ultimately makes them stop looking for food in their natural environment and start looking for food from man, whether it be in the trash or in the dog’s bowl. Hmm, isn’t that ironic. The government says (correctly) that we shouldn’t feed the wildlife because it makes the wildlife depend on sustenance from human society. Is there a lesson here we should be learning ourselves? I’m just asking. So says the One-Eyed Hillbilly.

Greg Stephens is a 35-year veteran & life-time student of the great outdoors. His column appears weekly in print & online publications. You can email him at gregstephens@one-eyedhillbilly.com. For more columns go to www.one-eyedhillbilly.blogspot.com.