Quarles Turtle Trap

I recently bought a Quarles turtle trap.

I've been catching turtles with hooks and bank lines, but I was concerned about several things with this method.  The first negative is that a certain percentage of hooks would get robbed of the bait. I experimented with a lot of different baits, with using multiple hooks per line to get paw catches, etc. I was unable to find a fool proof method.

The second concern was broken lines. When I used twine as a leader the turtles seemed to more readily swallow the hooks and get caught, compared to when I used a stronger wire leader. However, I lost a number of turtles when they either chewed or clawed through the twine leader. Lost, hooked turtles are no good. A wire leader solved that problem, but I found that I had a lot more refusals to swallow when using a wire leader.

The third concern is that a turtle with a hook in it's throat goes downhill fast. I work a very demanding job, and often need to keep my turtles alive for three to five days before butchering them. Hooking meant I had to butcher them within a day or so.

The fourth concern is that I simply couldn't control what size turtle took the bait. I caught little ones along with big ones.

In short, I simply couldn't find a method of hooking them that satisfied me.

I decided to invest in a turtle trap because with a trap I could release small turtles, I could go to 24 or 48 hour checks if work intervened as the traps keep the turtles alive and unharmed, and I would either catch a turtle or not - no losing hooked turtles.Also, since the turtles are undamaged when caught, I can keep them as long as I want before I butcher them.

There are a number of different styles of turtle traps ranging from hoop nets to wire cages. Each type of trap has it's advantages and disadvantages. Hoop nets collapse flat and are easy to store and transport, but they take a little bit of work to deploy. Once they are pulled in, the turtles can get caught in the webbing and be a pain to get out of the net.

A cage trap is bulkier, doesn't collapse flat and is heavier, but it's a lot quicker to deploy and get turtles out of. Since I'm in very populated areas, I wanted a trap that I could pre load with bait, toss in the bed of the truck, drive up to the pond and simply toss and go; so I went with a cage trap.

The pic above shows my Quarles turtle trap in the bed of my truck. You can see the floats that keep the trap above water level so the turtles can breathe and don't drown. You can also see the bait box. This keeps your bait from being robbed.

The bait box is loaded with steak fat on the bottom, and craw fish shells left over from a recent craw fish boil a few days ago. As always, I experiment with baits. I've also got some scraps of beaver pelts soaking in a bucket of fish oil. A chunk of fish is the best bait, but I'm trying to find other baits that work just as well, if not better.

While it may seem that this trap is little more than a circular wire cage with a mesh throat, a bait box and a few floats, once I started examining it closely, and actually started fishing it, I realized just how much thought and experience has gone into this design. As with all things in life, there is much more to it than meets the eye.

The trap size, weight of materials and placement and size of the floats are precisely designed so that the trap floats with the throat end under water to make it easy for the turtles to enter; while the back end of the trap is up out of the water allowing the turtles a space to breathe so they don't drown and spoil.

To fish the trap simply load the bait box, tie a rope to it, toss the trap in the water and tie it off so your trap doesn't float away. To get the turtles out, simply untie the net in the back of the trap and dump them out. It doesn't get much faster or easier than that.

This trap sells for $85 new. It is well worth it. I bought mine from Newt Sterling at SnareOne. I also bought his excellent video Turtles By The Ton with Clint Locklear. The video has excellent video, pretty good audio, and is a goldmine of turtle information. The sections on cleaning turtles for the frying pan or pot is worth the cost of the video alone. I've cleaned a lot of snappers in my life, and I thought I knew what I was doing. Once I watched this video I realized just how much I didn't know. Trust me - you will not see this information on YouTube. He actually cleans a turtle for the soup pot in two and a half minutes on camera.

If you are the "make it rather than buy it" type, I'd suggest you buy a single trap and study it before trying to duplicate it from a picture. Once you see how it floats and how it's made, your chances of making your own that work as well will go way up.

In a future post, I'll demonstrate how to theft proof the trap and use it in stealth mode.

Seven Year Old Pancakes

Seven years ago, in 2005, the stock market was booming. The real estate market was booming. The economy was strong and gas was cheap. Things were going good. I was busy storing food for the hard times that I knew were ahead.

I couldn't afford a nice grain mill, so I had to store pre milled products rather than wheat, corn, spelt and kamut. I started doing dry pack storage where I stored flour, grits, cornmeal and beans in glass canning jars. I used a friends food saver with a jar attachment to pull a vacuum on the jars.

Over the years as I invested in a grain mill and other things, I moved away from store bought preps stored in jars and I used most of what I had originally stored. While rotating stock and preparing for an upcoming move, I ran across a couple of jars of Bobs Red Mill Corn Pancake mix.

You can see this was packed almost seven years ago:

So, is it any good? The jar still had a vacuum. The pancakes cooked up fine, and passed the taste test of my eight year old pancake expert!

I accomplished two things by putting food preps back seven years ago while everything was going great and times were easy.

1) I had food insurance on hand in case of a natural disaster, job loss or other problems.
2) The food I'm eating today is saving me money. The stuff I bought seven years ago cost a LOT less than the same things cost today. Food and energy inflation is through the roof.

What other forms of insurance provide you with that sort of protection and return on your investment? None that I know of.

The question you need to consider is this: What will the next seven years bring, and how much will food cost then? Do you really think that America in 2019 is going to be a land of plenty? A land of good, cheap, nutritious food?

There is still time to get started.

Turtle Sauce Piquant

You've put a hook in the water and caught a snapper - now what? How do you turn that snapper into dinner?

If you turn to "popular wisdom" on the internet (aka internet wives tales); you'll "learn" that you can either make soup out of a turtle or you can fry it. As usual with internet wild game "knowledge", this isn't exactly the whole story. There are a couple of ways to turn a snapper into first class, nourishing, delectable food. In my opinion, first among those is the Cajun concept of 'Sauce Piquant'.

Basically Sauce Piquant is a thick stew type dish that is tomato based and strengthened by a roux. It can be mild, hot, spicy, light, dark and anything in between. Done with a modicum of effort, it is always delicious. It provides a rich backbone of flavor while allowing meats that can be tough to simmer and soften as they marry with the spices. 

Making Sauce Piquant is a prepper skill. Learn it. It will serve you well in good times and bad. 

So what does it take to pull this off? The first thing you need is a cast iron pot. Seriously. Cast iron allows you to brown the meat in a non stick pot, it allows you to apply the even heat that is so critical to making a roux, and it allows you to simmer a dish for hours on end. Combined with a supply of wood, a cast iron pot or dutch oven is an indispensable survival resource. There's a reason our ancestors carried a cast iron pot with them into the wilderness. The cast iron pot makes 'one pot meals' a reality. 

The next thing you need is to understand what a roux is and how to make one. Trust me, it's a lot easier than it sounds. It's basically equal parts oil and flour that are mixed together and cooked to make a thickening agent for soups and stews, There are a lot of guides on YouTube on making roux. Roux is the backbone of Cajun cooking. You can use any oil to make your roux, and each type of oil results in a different flavor. In the recipe that follows I used canned ghee from my preps. The ghee I used in this recipe was almost 10 years old. It worked just fine. Think about that. Given that I grind my own flour from wheat that I store, you can see that stored preps can be used as the backbone to support delicious, healthy meals filled out by trapping. You can check out the recipe at  LA Crawfish.

Step 1 - Catch a Snapper

Step 2 - Cut off the head and all four feet. A turtle will have reflexive motions in it's legs for hours after it's dead and if you leave the feet on those sharp claws will scratch you!

Step 3- Skin completely around the bottom shell and cut the "hinge" on both sides that holds the bottom to the top.

As you butcher the turtle you want to make sure that you remove all the yellow fat. Turtle fat doesn't taste good and is very strong. Get all the the fat off!

Step 4 - Skin all the hide off the legs and neck. Once all the hide is off, it's time to cut the neck and the four legs out of the shell. This takes practice to get all the meat as the shoulder structure of a turtle is different from most animals. I find that once I have the shoulders and legs mostly cut away that I can take a pair of tin snips and reach down into the shell and snip the shoulders out. 

Once I have the neck and shoulders out I'm done. You can gut the turtle completely and us a pair of snips to cut the back straps out, but unless you have a large turtle I find this is the point of diminishing returns. Every man must decide for himself how far to go when processing an animal. 

There are several different kinds of meat on a turtle. The neck meat is as white as lobster while the shoulders are as red as beef. Here's a picture of where the neck meets the shoulder. Notice how you have white meat joining to red meat. 

Here's what the shoulder looks like. Notice the triangular structure.

After you finish butchering, you'll end up with something that looks like this. Keep in mind that the going rate for turtle meat these days is in the neighborhood of $20 a pound! This is $50 worth of meat that I got for the cost of a treble hook and ten feet of line. 

Now get your cast iron pot, brown your turtle meat, cook your roux, add your veggies and saute them, add the stock, tomatoes and spices and reduce the heat and simmer for a few hours. 

When it's done, server over rice and be sure to share! This is an absolutely delicious dish! A hook, a line, some bait and a single pot combined with ingredients you can store and grow will feed you and your family like a king  - even in difficult times.

If you want detailed instructions on cleaning a snapper, the best YouTube video on the subject is a four part series by Got Blood Outdoors. Part 1 can be found here. Jeff's Uncle Kash was a big help to me. If you have no idea where to start to clean a turtle, I'd start by watching that series. 

Enjoy!

Bank Lines For Snappers

Now that the weather is warm and the turtles are out, I'll be catching them in my beaver sets when I'm doing removal jobs. I decided that this year, rather than them being nuisances that negatively impact my beaver work, that I was going to actively target them when doing a beaver job.

This would do two things - it would put even more free meat on my table and by deliberately removing the turtles, it would help keep my beaver traps clear so I can do the job I'm hired to do. Just another way to take what most people consider a negative and turn it into a positive. Being able to turn a negative into a positive is a mindset you will need the tougher times get - and they are going to get tough.

I started to invest in some hoop nets or wire cage traps, but a few days ago Alabama slammed the door on commercial turtle harvesting because the Chinese were buying everything that had a shell and four legs, and out of staters were coming in and decimating the populations. We are still allowed to keep two a day for personal consumption. Because of this I turned to bank lines instead of traps. Besides, traps are bulky and hard to transport on foot - and a lot of my nuisance beaver work requires foot access.

Fortunately any place that's good beaver habitat is also good turtle habitat, so I have access to a lot of good turtle spots. The first problem I had to solve was the bait issue. Most people use chicken livers and tie it to the hook with elastic thread of some sort to keep the bait on the hook. Since I'm hiking in on foot - the less I have to carry the better, and trying to carry a plastic tub of chicken livers didn't work well. I also had trouble with the bait getting robbed as well.

I spent some time trying catfish 'punch baits'. They stunk like you wouldn't believe, but it would dissolve off the hook after a while.

Then I had what I consider a rare flash f genius for me (yep, I don't get that many of them :)  ).

In the past, it had been very common for beavers that I caught in 330's or drowner sets to be half eaten by snappers when I got to my sets the next day. Snappers - like everything else, likes beaver meat. I wasn't about to use beaver meat for bait, as I eat that myself, but the fur was a different matter. I took a damaged beaver pelt and cut 2" x 2" squares of beaver hide that had the fat and meat still on it. I embedded a 4/0 treble hook in the fur making a fur ball out of it. The beaver hide is so tough it is impossible to pull off the hook. No robbing this bait!

The next thing I realized is that I can take a pre baited hook, wrap the line around it and make the whole thing into a ready to use ball and carry it in a shirt pocket with no fear of getting hooked or getting it tangled up. The beaver hide makes for a nice soft ball.

But, would it catch turtles?

I put out two lines and the next morning I had two turtles.

 I was sold. This bait is free, easy to handle, doesn't stink and works like a charm. It's hands down the best turtle bait I've found. While I haven't tested it, I'd be willing to bet that any road kill fur would work. I'd also bet that if you saved the pelt from a deer killed in deer season that would work as well.

I'm going to keep experimenting, but if you're in the mood to catch a few snappers, remember you don't have to buy bait at the store. You can catch your own  - or pick it up off the side of the road.

Beaver Jerky

Who doesn't like jerky? Everyone I know likes jerky. You can find people that think venison tastes "gamey", and you can have wild game that is tough because it was cooked improperly, but it's really tough to screw up jerky.

You can take the toughest cuts of meat, season it and dry it and suddenly it becomes a snack that people will happily mooch until it's gone.

It can get expensive buying meat at the store to make jerky from, and hunting season can limit the availability of venison. Here lately I've been making jerky from many of the beavers I catch. The fact that I get paid to catch them makes the proposition even sweeter.

Getting paid to put meat on your table is the best way I've found to beat Bernanke.

The first step is to catch or kill a few beavers. Anybody needing instructions on how to do this can simply read my blog. Trapping beavers is not hard - it's just hard work. Turning them into food is not hard either - it's just more hard work. Notice the trend? Any man that is willing to work can eat - and profit.

Last weekend my trapping buddy and I caught two beavers and a possum.

We'll get to the grinner in another post, so let's focus on the beaver. You'll need to skin the beaver (also described on my blog), so that it looks something like this:

Remember to extract and dry the castor glands - they're selling for about $40 a pound now - thanks to inflation. :)

Next you'll need to bone the meat out and cut it into chunks that will feed into your grinder. Remember - electricity saves a hell of a lot of work. Get an electric grinder.

Once you've ground the meat, mix in your spices and seasonings. You can find any number of recipes by searching for "hamburger jerky". I'm still tweaking my recipe so I'm not going to share yet. This most recent batch was too salty for my taste, but I'm working on it.

After mixing the ground meat with the spices, you'll end up with something like this. Notice the complete absence of fat, gristle and notice how deep, rich and red the meat is. You simply do not get meat like this at the store. It's grass fed, organic and steroid free goodness. If you are a carnivore like me, the picture below will actually make your mouth water.

The next step is to roll the meat out using a rolling pin between two sheets of waxed paper. Spray the paper with non stick cooking spray and save yourself a lot of cussing. You want it to be about 1/4" thick. You can also buy a jerky shooter from Cabelas if you want to spend money on something else to wash.

Next, flip the meat onto a dehydrator tray. I use an Excalibur - don't go cheap. Quality makes you cry once, going cheap makes you cuss often. Take a pizza wheel and score marks into the meat. Once it drys this will make it easy to brek the meat into strips.

Dry the meat in your dehydrator for a few hours at 165 degrees until it gets as dry as you like it. Take it out and snap it into strips.

This is what the two beavers in the first picture turned into:

I know a guy in Central Florida who snares wild hogs and sells the meat. He's feeding himself and getting paid to do it.

People who live up north are still getting fair money for fur - they can sell the fur (unlike us Southerners) and eat the meat.

There are a lot of folks down South here who have developed ghetto connections and have a thriving market for coon meat.

Texas and western bobcats are selling for $250 - and bobcat meat is delectable.

What about turtles? My trapping buddy caught this snapper this afternoon when we stopped to check a beaver trap. Take a wild guess what's going to happen to him? (The snapper - not the trapping buddy :) )

Misses and Lessons Learned

Everyone likes to see pictures of successful catches, good shots and stringers full of fish. However, it's our losses and misses that we learn from. In that spirit I thought I'd share a series of pictures where I missed an animal, where I screwed up badly, or where I simply got outsmarted by an animal. I'll then share the lesson learned from the incident. Perhaps others can learn from my mistakes.

The first lesson today is what Clint Locklear calls the "Tiny Trap Club". That's the term he coined to describe the act of using a trap that is too small for the job at hand. The bigger the trap, the better. Sure you can use smaller traps and have good results, but over the long haul, larger traps will catch more meat. Period.

Below is a picture of a Duke #4, which is about the size of a Bridger #3. Plenty of beaver have been caught in these traps, but they are not dedicated beaver traps. In the case below, my trap placement was a little off. That's a toenail in the jaws. I got a toe catch on the beaver because I used a trap that was too small for the job and my trap placement was a little off. As a result of the poor catch, he was able to pull out leaving his toenail behind.

Lesson #1: Don't go cheap. Use the right tool for the job. A bigger trap is a better trap.

The next lesson learned is related to lesson #1, but it relates to snares. Never underestimate the size, strength and power of an animal you may catch in a snare - and use a cable that can handle it. Then swivel it more than you think it needs to be swiveled. 

I've long been a fan of 1/16" aircraft cable for snaring. It's small and very hard for the animals to see. It's also marginal for powerful animals like coyote and beaver. A good buddy of mine, Swampfox, has often admonished me for using it. I am gradually, stubbornly beginning to realize that he is right. I'm going to make the switch from 1/16" cable to 5/64" cable for beaver and coyote. 99% of the time the 1/16" cable holds a hard fighting animal, but every once in a while I lose an animal that I would have held using a larger cable. 

The picture below is of a 1'16" aircraft cable snare that was twisted by a beaver until it broke.  Notice how close to the swivel the break occurred. How he pulled this off I still don't understand, but he managed to get the cable wrapped around a log so tightly he short circuited the inline swivel and broke the cable.  I was stunned when I found it. I've never seen a cable twisted off that close to a swivel. 

A bigger cable and more swiveling would have held that beaver. Lesson #2: Use a reliable cable and add extra swivels when snaring. Refer to rule #1 - don't go cheap. Going cheap will bite you in the butt at the worst possible time. 

The next lesson is simple - just because to decide to use sticks to guide the animal into your trap means nothing. They will work your set if, when and how they choose. 

Below are a couple of pictures of 330's guarding castor mound/trench sets lured with castor. You can see how I tried to guide the beaver into the trap by cutting a trench in the bank, sticking a lure stick in the back and placing the trap in front of the trench. It makes perfect sense and looks great - but it doesn't always work. 

Beaver will often approach a castor set at an angle. The angle they approach can depend upon the current in the creek or river, or the wind direction if on a pond or small lake. They will follow their nose and the flow of the water before they follow your idea that they should approach the set at a 90 degree angle because that's how you want them to. 

In the pics below you can see how they ignored my guiding and broached the bank to the side of my trap, setting it off in the process. They worked my set their way, and I had nothing but a sprung trap and an educated beaver for my trouble. 

Lesson #3: Set your trap according to how the animal will act - don't try to force the animal to act how you want. 

While these lessons may seem obvious, they all are learned of cold hard experience. I hope you can find something of use from my mistakes. 

BBQ Coon

As a follow up to my recent post on Dog Proof Traps, lets take a closer look at what it takes to pull a coon out of the woods and put him on your plate - in a form that's actually good enough to eat. With coon, that can be a trick.

I've found that a younger sow is a better candidate for a BBQ than a tougher, older boar coon. I recently caught this one:

You can see that the new Dog Proof traps are very easy on the animal - there being no paw damage whatsoever.

The next step is to simply skin and gut the animal. On this coon, it was small and there was very little meat on the front legs so I simply removed them. You want to make sure that you remove as much fat as possible when skinning the coon. The less fat and oil that remains on the meat - the better.

You'll hear a lot about making sure you remove the "kernels" or "scent glands" from a coon. You need to make sure you remove all the fat, and then you need to look in between the muscle groups in the hind legs and remove the fatty deposits that live there.

The picture below shows the cavity here these are located. I have already removed the fat, but you can still see a small line of it in the center of the oic between the muscle groups.

The next step is to quarter the carcass so it will fit in the pot better:

Now it's time to cook. The first thing I do is parboil the quarters for about 30 minutes, skimming the impurities that rise to the surface periodically. The idea behind parboiling is two fold - remove any remaining fat and grease, and tenderize the meat.

The older and tougher the coon, the longer this process will take.

Next get your ingredients ready - butter and BBQ sauce:

Now for the final act. Place the quarters in aluminum foil, add a few pats of butter and drizzle some sauce over the meat. Wrap it up and bake it at 350 degrees for 2-3 hours, depending upon the size off the coon.

Once it's done, pull it out of the oven and it will look like this:

At this point it's ready to eat as is, but I prefer to finish it for a few minutes over a grill and baste it with some more sauce to give it a smoky, 'fire grilled' finish.

So - bottom line - How is coon? It seems like everyone on the internet just reposts the same old information that they read somewhere else - it's either wonderful or it stinks. From my experience, its neither. Coon has a unique flavor that honestly, is not my favorite.  On the other hand, the dish above is perfectly good food and a heck of a lot better for you than a Big Mac or chicken fingers - and it's free.

While I wouldn't serve coon to somebody I'm trying to impress, I certainly wouldn't turn it down either. With things going the way they are in this country, you need to remember that there is a LOT of free food walking around the average suburban neighborhood absolutely free for the taking. It makes sense to know how to catch and cook this food in case you need to. Don't wait until it's too late - learn by doing now.