Wolf Trapping Lessons From Three Western Canadian Legends
I learned about wolves from three Western Canadian trapping legends who made their living off the land with full-time trapping and predator control. One has passed on; two are still with us. I'm not naming them because I never asked.
Humans and wolves have a love-hate relationship. They've been the enemy for thousands of years, and we've also bred them down to lap dogs. Wolves are always on the move, patrolling huge home ranges and guarding them from other packs. They know the animals in their range; that's their food. When another pack moves in, things can turn deadly. Sometimes an alpha gets pushed out and becomes a lone wolf, trailing two or three days behind the pack and picking up scraps.
Wolves also get blamed for livestock kills without a thorough investigation. One of these guys made a point I'd never thought about: if a pack moves through a ranch and isn't killing cattle, you may be better off leaving it, because it keeps a cattle-killing pack out of that country.
Three setups from three legends
The lifelong predator control man: no bait, just wolf lure in a film canister hung in a tree, sometimes with a feather for a visual. Then he snared the area heavily. The pack smells another pack in its range and comes charging in. He added a couple of foothold sets on the outskirts, because if the alpha isn't caught, it often sneaks back and circles.
The guide and lifelong trapper: a bait station, snared hard. Not 20 snares: a minimum of 50, sometimes 150. I use his setup and add footholds on the outskirts.
The trapper from the books: two bait stations one to two kilometres apart with no snares at them. Once wolves were moving between the two, he set blind snares on the trails in between. He believed wolves never connected the bait stations with losing pack members.
The predator control man had other lessons too. He believed mindset matters when you set for wolves. He also said scent control matters most with wild wolves that don't know you; a ranch wolf already knows the rancher's scent. And he'd seen wolves spend long stretches at beaver dams, which he thinks is where they teach pups to hunt.
Stories from our line
We've found kill sites where four hooves were all that was left.
Wolves ate a lynx out of one of our cubbies, everything but the head in the 330. We set a foothold at the back of the torn-up cubby and caught a wolf the next day.
One night we snowmobiled into the cabin in the dark, and wolves killed a young caribou within 400 yards of us while we slept.
We were taking six to eight wolves a year out of our area, and we've seen moose numbers come up.
Winter is wolf party time. After the thaw they seem to scatter, then regroup in late fall.
All three of these men greatly respected wolves, and so do I. Always check the current BC trapping regulations for your area before you set.
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