Still trapping after all these years

Published 3:22 am Saturday, March 27, 2010

About a week ago I was invited to the Steele County Historical Society’s Heritage Village by Lloyd Kaplan, a lifelong resident of that county. I did a story about Lloyd and his trapping ventures a couple of years ago. He called me and asked if I’d like to come up because he was giving a presentation about trapping and thought I’d be interested.

The first time that I met Lloyd Kaplan was the summer of 2008 at the Beaver Lake boathouse where the annual meeting of the Ellendale Historical Society was being held. He approached me and asked about a column that I had written the previous winter about the dwindling number of fur trappers in the area. He said that he was still an active trapper and would like to meet with me one day and talk about it. I said it sounded like a good idea and he said we should wait for the right time and he’d contact me. I visited him at his home in the fall of 2008 and was totally impressed his work shop where he does the skinning, fleshing and stretching of the hides.

He works in a small area attached to the back of his garage. The workspace was filled with a variety of hides on stretchers, traps and more stretchers. He heats the area with a small oil stove and it is clean and cozy, but you can definitely tell by the smell that it is a trapper’s workspace.

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Kaplan is an interesting speaker and has so many stories to tell that even he couldn’t squeeze very many of them in the allotted time we had for his presentation. He started trapping at about 8 years old when his father told him he’d pay him for trapping varmints and he got 10 cents for gophers, 25 cents for pocket gophers and 50 cents for gray gophers which were larger than a pocket gopher. This was big money for a young boy back then and he took to the trapping thing quite nicely. One year he decided to set some traps along a line fence. He would set them in the morning on the way to school and check them at night on the way home. The first day he caught a Civet cat and in the preceding days caught a total of 21 of those critters for which his dad paid him a dollar apiece. Lloyd saved his money and was able to buy a Sears Silverstone radio which, although in pretty rough shape, he had it there to display.

After he was a grown man he farmed full time so he didn’t trap again for quite a few years. When he met his future wife, Jackie, he found that her dad was an avid trapper in the late 40’s and 50’s. When his son Dean was old enough he got interested in trapping and his grandpa took him under his wing. Dean started with mink and muskrats and eventually included coon and fox. It was their son Dean who actually got Lloyd hooked on trapping again. He showed him how to do fox sets and the first time he set one he waited for two weeks before he had his first fox. He didn’t actually know how to skin it so he called a neighbor friend who came over and showed him how to go about it. He then learned how to flesh and stretch mink and muskrats and an occasional coon.

When Dean went off to college at Southwest State in Marshall, he took his trapping skills with him. During the week he would trap and freeze the animals then he’d bring them home with him when he could and skin and stretch them. His fur trapping helped pay for a large part of his college. In those days you got $45 for a mink $5-$6 for a muskrat and $30 for a coon.

Lloyd still has about 80 traps and 40 homemade wooden stretchers plus about a dozen and a half steel stretchers. Of the many tools he uses to stretch and flesh the hides most are homemade. Although he fleshes and stretches the mink, fox, coyote and rats he skins and freezes the coon and doesn’t do anything with them until it’s time to go to the buyer. Then he then thaws them out and checks the hides for quality.

Today’s market for furs is a lot less than it was a few years ago. He sells his hides to the Cumberland Company, which is located just north of Owatonna. This year he got $8 for mink, $3 for muskrats, $15 for fox, $7 for coon and from $6 to $10 for a coyote. He said that this year the fox, rats and mink were down a little but there were many more coon and fewer skunks (good thing). One thing he pointed out is that nobody wants opossum and even coyote and fox won’t touch the meat.

Lloyd had many stories to share like the time that he was trapping near a gravel pit and decided to set a trap by this old railroad tie. The first day he checked it there was a wild tomcat in it, the next a rabbit which he decided to use for bait and the third day he caught a mink. After he was sure the mink was dead he put it in the back of his old Mercury that he had removed the back seat from and was using to haul his traps and the critters he had caught. When he came back to the car after checking some more traps he opened the door and there was that mink sitting in the front seat looking at him. He got in, shut the door and tried to hit the little critter with a club. The mink was having no part of that and it scurried from the front to the back of the vehicle with Lloyd twisting and turning and swinging that club to no avail. He said that mink was wearing him out and then it got under the dash and lodged itself above the “cubbyhole.” This is when he decided to trap it again, this time in the vehicle so he set the trap and managed to get the mink to chase around the car again and eventually trap itself once again. He said that the mink definitely had worn him out. Over the years he has caught an occasional beaver and even a badger. He caught the beaver on the way to work and it weighed 66 pounds but with the water and trap it was probably close to 85 and almost wore him out just carrying it.

He said there is no animal that is more fun to watch than a mink and there was an occasion when he stopped to watch a mink as it was busy catching minnows in an opening in the ice on a creek. After it had retrieved two minnows from the spot it came up with a 14-inch sucker and the mink scurried to its den with the fish that was almost as bigger than it was. You knew that there was a family feast going on in the mink’s den that day.

Lloyd, who will be 74, said that one of the reasons why he still continues to trap is that he was a heart patient and there is no better exercise than that. He also said that walking through the water carrying a coon is no easy task. There are many reasons why he continues to trap and one of the main ones is that he feels that by trapping skunks, possum, coon, fox and coyote he is protecting the pheasant population, which is on the verge of a very strong comeback in the area. Lloyd said that whether he is trapping or not he takes great pleasure in being outdoors at sunrise, which to him, is just the greatest experience you could have. He also said that for that period of time when he is skinning and working with the different animal hides he feels like he can actually get closer to the wildlife. He says it’s because he smells of animals and doesn’t have the human smell that signals danger to them. He told of one instance when he caught a fox in a trap and a short distance away another fox stood looking at him and behind the fox a deer also stood looking as if to ask “aren’t you going to release him?”

His trapping today is usually confined to the small area surrounding his home and only occasionally will he travel to another section to trap. When he does it is usually because a neighbor is having problems with something. When his season is over he spends he spends a lot of time reading about trapping, taking walks and watching the area’s wildlife. This is something that most of us never take the time to or have the opportunity to experience. He also said that, sadly, trapping is becoming a dying art.

After driving around the area where Lloyd lives it’s amazing to see all the habitat that is there for our wildlife. The number of fur bearing animals that can come from just a small area is hard to imagine. The next time you drive past a slough or habitat area just think about the number of animals that may actually be living there. There’s a whole other world going on that most us don’t or aren’t lucky enough to witness like Lloyd is.

Until next time, the smell of spring is in the air so take a little time to enjoy our great Minnesota outdoors.

Remember to keep our troops in your thoughts and prayers throughout the year.