Hi, I'm Mike Watt.
I'm Dan Storm and we're working on the Deer Project in southwest Wisconsin.
Um, we're here to talk today, um, about Clover Traps.
Um, it's a tool that we use for catching Whitetail deer.
Um, it's a big part of our project that we're doing currently and we want to
let people know a little bit about them.
So, um, this trap is designed in such a way that deer will walk
in, they'll come into the bait.
And there's a trigger line, which we'll show in a moment here, but basically
there's a trigger that comes across.
And when they bump that trigger this door right here, slides down and shuts,
and the deer is captured at that point.
They're a little bit more portable than the other methods.
So what we'll do is we'll have a bunch of these out in sort of a trap line.
Along a road or a trail on, on a property and we're able to put these
apart, you know, several hundred yards apart, and then we'll just, we'll just
drive, drive our route, drive the trap line and check them one at a time.
First of all, they're stake to the ground so that they're fairly stable.
The deer can't bounce around and knock, knock the trap over.
Knock the trap over definitely.
They have what are called...we call them breakaway bars on the side.
So with the trigger assembly, the way this is designed is if the deer does
kick up around, up around these bars instead of being solid and something
that the deer can get hurt on, they actually break loose and fall to the
side so there's no risk to the animal.
And this is where the, what the trigger is actually attached to.
Right.
And so, um, this, so these are collapsible traps.
And so if we have an antlered buck, we don't want to be, uh, we don't
want to be kind of restrain...
trying to restrain that buck so we're going to cut these cords and we'll
gently let the, the trap collapse so that'll kind of restrain the buck
in that way, then we can drug it.
Exactly.
So...
Another safety feature here.
Yeah.
We have what we call a spider wire.
It's a made up name basically, but these are...
what we've done is we've, we've put a piece of rope in here and wired the
netting in such a way that the deer bouncing around cannot hit these poles.
Okay.
This is what we're talking about.
We're talking about the spider wire and we take the netting on the side
of the trap and, and the netting on the back and we join it together.
And then we loop this rope through it.
That ties these ends together and so...
then we would do the same thing on the top.
And the purpose of that is if you know, when the deer bounces around when it's
first caught, it's going to hit that.
It's not going to hit the metal pipe.
So it's a safety feature for the deer.
And what's, what's going to happen is...
so the deer gets caught, they trip the trigger, this'll slide down, it makes
a noise and they'll just get startled.
So they jump.
And so the point of this again, is when they do that, they're
going to hit net, not, not metal.
A thing that's been happening down here as we've had, uh,
squirrels and rabbits come in.
They like corn, just like deer like corn.
And so they'll come in and instead of nicely walking out the front
of the trap, they're always going to chew their way out.
So every time...
this is a little bit of a safety hazard.
So every time, um, our crew comes and checks the nets,
they're gonna repair these.
Repair all these holes everytime.
Um, first thing we do, you know, we've got the bait in here, but we've
got to run a trigger wire across that'll actually operate the device.
And the way it works is a nice tight string here.
And we've got a wire that hooks to this [unintelligible]
that operates the, um, net.
And the way we want to do this, we want to set it in such a way that
it's tight enough that when they hit it, it'll pull the trigger, but not
too tight that it will just trigger in the wind or something like that.
So the next step is to take and, face this way so you guys can see, but
this is a pretty simple mechanism.
You just take the main rope.
So what we do is we take this rope that goes straight to the door.
Um, we put that underneath the cotter pin.
And then Dan is holding the door for me there.
He's going to put the weight of the door down on this cotter pin.
So now the weights pulling up and over the trap to the door,
and now it's holding steady.
And the last step we do is we try to get this trigger nice and light.
The tension should be nice, nice and tight across here.
I can do a little bit of adjustment to try to tighten that up.
And that's, that's how we want it and now its triggered and ready to go.
Okay.
So you've got the trap triggered and so whats going to happen now is the
deer's going to come through the trap.
They're going to go after the bait, the baits just, just sitting
behind the triggers so they're going to nudge the trigger with...
the trigger rope with their nose or their leg and the deer's caught.
That's it.