The dirt sifter:
He would sift dirt over his traps with this sifter. Most people use peat moss, but the local tradition is to use the earth from a pissant mound. Pissant dirt has a natural antifreeze in it. Traps cannot be in allowed to freeze open. Otherwise, they won’t close on the fox’s foot when you need it to.
Trapper’s trowel:
This trowel allows the trapper to dig a narrow little hole to set the bait for the trap and to dig up the place where the trap will be placed. The goal is to make the set look like a red fox food cache, so it’s just a narrow little tunnel that contain a bit of bait (usually some kind of bird meat). The trap is set just at the entrance to the hole, and the dirt covering the hole is marked with red fox urine. Red foxes mark their caches, so when a red or gray fox comes along, it will try to raid what it thinks is a fox caches. And when they start digging, they get caught in the foothold.
Old foothold traps. He used coil spring traps in his fox sets:
They are still attached to the stakes that were used to drive them into the ground.
These traps haven’t been used since the 70’s. They are sort of antiques.
In many parts of the world, including the UK, they have been outlawed, and these traps are something of a curiosity.
Trapping was once a major part of my family’s life. My grandpa once made more money trapping foxes during a strike than he would have made under his old contract, so the foxes subsidized union activities.
I suppose people on the left would admire that.
Well, maybe not the left we have today….
A fine example of self-sufficiency. It was called feedin’ the family back then.
You mean the “left” that regulates how many dogs you can own and how big your Big Gulp can be? That “left”?