Quote:
Originally Posted by Camdec
Keg,
I've got the pole about 5 ft off the ground. I use carabiners to quick clip a cable to the the trap around the tree/pole. Thanks for posting this set a while back. Tried it last year and had a marten. Will keep you posted.
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Five feet should be okay. I chose to go higher because my bait was hanging and we had wolves that could and would reach it from the ground and steal it.
I figure my poles were about seven feet up. It was as high as I could reach comfortably.
I thought a lot about using some sort of quick clip but couldn't find any that seemed suitable back when I was developing that set.
I figured that with a carabiner or other quick clip, once the set was made then removing a catch and resetting would be much faster and easier.
Plus it would make setting up in the fall faster and easier.
Of course that was before internet shopping and even before specialty stores for the most part.
My options were limited to what the local hardware and lumber yards handled and their selection was pretty limited compared to what you could find in the big cities. On top of that such things were hard to find even in the big cities.
About the only place one ever saw them was in the mountain ski towns, and then only the biggest ones.
Horse riding paraphernalia suppliers, tack shops had some but again they were bog and expensive.
So I never pursued the idea beyond researching what was available.
This was actually not my go to set. That was a bird box type set I had developed. Again because there was nothing similar on the market back then. Today there are as good or better options.
The reason I started working on this pole set was because setting up the boxes and removing them in the spring was time consuming and required multiple trips due to the volume needed to transport large numbers of them.
The old timers used a snare pole setup along these lines for Fisher and Marten and I simply adapted it for conibears and refined it a bit.
The idea was, come spring I could collect my traps and be done for the season. Come fall I could re-bait, reset the traps and be set for the season.
With the boxes or with cubbies, each year I had to find an appropriate tree, attach a box to that tree, or build a cubbie, bait it and hang or set a trap.
That all took quiet a lot of time.
I had tried leaving my boxes out year round but that proved to not be the best idea. The bears would tear them up, squirrels would gnaw on them sometimes to the point that in one season the box was not longer usable.
I've had half the box missing when I returned in the fall, and what the bears would do was even worse.
Most years I had to replace nearly 3/4 of my boxes, if I left them out. The pole sets did not seem to attract that sort of attention.
As I'm sure you know, boxes of any sort take up a lot of space in a sleigh.
I actually stumbled upon one of my old sets this fall that I had made back in the mid 1980s. The pole was too week from rot to use but everything else was as I had left it. And that was in a high bear traffic area and close to several Squirrel middens.
Plus I liked the potential for double catches and the backup trap in case one missed or misfired.
Keg's go to marten/Fischer set
Linear Mode
