The Northwest Territories government is hoping record prices for fox fur pelts will encourage northern trappers to target the critters and keep a check on the burgeoning population.The price doubled at a recent auction in North Bay, Ont., with cross fox pelts going for $100, more than triple the average price. White fox pelts went for $200 — up from $40 in previous years.

Francois Rossouw, with the territory’s Industry Department, said that kind of price for fox is unheard of.

“We really hope the prices will get people targeting foxes,” Rossouw said. “Every community in the North has their own resident fox it seems. Instead of having problem wildlife, we would prefer to have them harvest the foxes humanely and pelt them up properly and put them into the market.”

Fur has garnered above-average prices this year compared to years past, Rossouw said. Wild fox is particularly in demand from Chinese buyers.

You can click here to read the full article.

“We started by releasing 25 otters at the Muscatuck National Wildlife Refuge (near Seymour) early in 1995,” said Scott Johnson, a Nongame Mammalogist with the Indiana Department of Natural Resources. “A total of 303 were released at a variety of watershed areas around Indiana over a five-year period.”

The otters used in the Indiana reintroduction were wild and caught in Louisiana by cooperative trappers. Since the reintroduction began, river otters now are found in more than 70 counties, including Lake and Porter.

“This has been a tremendous success,” Johnson said. “We kind of expected it though. Other states had already completed reintroduction programs, and we followed their strategies. We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel with otters.

In recent years, populations of river otters have been expanding throughout the United States.  I’ve covered several articles about otter population comebacks, with the most recent stories coming from Texas, Missouri and West Virginia.  The pattern is similar across all of these states.  Otter numbers were historically depleted during periods of heavy hunting, trapping and expanding development.  Otter populations are likely more susceptible to overharvest and habitat alterations than other furbearing species.  There are other potential reasons for this decline that I’ve heard from other trappers, but most of the biologists seem to believe that unregulated harvest played a large role.

As Indiana DNR’s Scott Johnson noted:

“Unregulated trapping and hunting was the main reason otters disappeared,” Johnson said. “Back then there was no Department of Natural Resources. There were no limits, regulations or laws. It was a trapping and hunting free-for-all. This combined with a loss of habitat to farmland and subdivisions led to the otter’s demise in Indiana. They succumbed to the pressure.

With the advent of regulated trapping in its current form and more targeted wildlife management, otter numbers started to come back.  Many states that completely lost otters in most areas started programs to re-introduce the species.  This new wildlife management strategy has proven extremely successful.  I suspect we’ll continue to see stories that relay the successful recover of otter populations in other states.  Hopefully we’ll see future controlled trapping seasons in places where otter populations have recovered and can be responsibly harvested.

Click here for more otter recovery stories from Trapping Today.

While furbearers can be a valuable natural resource, they can also cause serious ecological problems when their population levels are uncontrolled.  For example, we simply have to look at places like Massachusetts and Washington state, where laws prohibiting trapping have resulted in overpopulation and animal damage problems from multiple furbearers.

Ecological problems also arise when furbearers are introduced into areas outside of their native range.  The newly introduced species and the natural environment it is placed in are often not compatible and a major ecosystem imbalance can often arise.

In a recent case of ecosystem imbalance with a furbearer population, trappers in Ireland have been commissioned to trap and kill thousands of American mink that are causing havoc with bird and fish populations.

Mink are not native to Ireland, but have been inadvertently introduced via escapes from fur farms in the country.  Since their establishment in the wild, mink have taken on a predatory role in a place where populations of fish and bird species are not used to such predation.  So to help minimize the negative impacts mink are causing to the country’s environment, this huge trapping effort is underway.

More than 33,000 mink which originally escaped from fur farms have colonised much of Ireland, a new report shows.

Three full-time trappers have now been engaged by the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) to catch the mink in riverside traps and to kill them before they can wipe out rare birds.

Luckily, trapping can help play a role in restoring ecosystem balance in places like these.

Read the full story here.

Bobcat photo from Sean Kerwin via NH Fish and Game website

A four year trapping and tagging study by the University of New Hampshire and NH Fish and Game is beginning to document a significant comeback in bobcat numbers in the state.

As of late last month, UNH faculty and students, trappers and Fish & Game personnel involved in the effort had tagged 12 bobcats, collared them and taken small bits of tissue for DNA testing.

Litvaitis said trappers involved with the project are local to the Keene area and willing to help. Much of the trapping took place once snow was on the ground, Litvaitis said, noting many bobcats find food more scarce in the winter, lose substantial weight and are more willing to take bait. Only full-grown males, who can take down deer by themselves, make it through winter without struggles, and bobcats are showing up in back yards looking for bird feeders and the like much more frequently than 20 years ago. Litvaitis said he’s had close to 170 observation reports sent to him the last two years, more or less statewide.

The New Hampshire Fish and Game Department is interested in learning more about the bobcat population, presumably to help guide their wildlife management decisions.

As the project is a cooperative effort with Fish & Game, Litvaitis said the agency has an interest in how many bobcats the state has compared to surrounding states. The agency hopes that will give it a better sense of how 20 years with protected status affected the animals’ distribution and abundance.

The return of a healthy bobcat population in New Hampshire is great news.  With this new knowledge of bobcat population status and today’s sound wildlife management practices and regulation, perhaps bobcats could again be legally harvested by sportsmen in the Granite State.

See the story here.

Click here for more info on the bobcat study and some great pictures.

Once a very rare sight, river otters are starting to appear more and more frequently in areas of Texas.

DALLAS — River otters are popping up in Texas waterways where they haven’t been seen in decades, giving wildlife officials hope that the rarely seen critter is on the comeback.

The animals were believed to have been restricted to the Piney Woods of east Texas because of habitat loss and trapping. But people have been spotting them outside Austin and as far away as Wichita Falls, northwest of Fort Worth near the Oklahoma line.

“This tells us that this species has made a huge recovery in the state,” said Gary Calkins, a biologist with Texas Parks & Wildlife Department’s Jasper office who has been studying the semiaquatic mammals for three years.

Click here to read the full story from AP Texas News.

Did you know that fishers were once a very rare furbearer in the state of Minnesota?  Here’s a clip from an old Minnesota newspaper back in 1969:

40 years ago (1969)

The long arm of chance reached into the life of Pine River trapper Walter Norman recently. He made trapper’s dream of catching what appeared to be a 15-pound black weasel, but it was a rare fisher, not often seen in Minnesota.

Here’s some info on the fisher population from the Minnesota DNR:

Fishers were nearly extinct in Minnesota by the early 1900s. But the population has grown steadily since then. Since the late 1970s, the population has remained at more than 10,000, enough to support a regulated trapping harvest of about 2,000 each year.

In a state almost completely covered with trees, forest harvest practices in Maine can seriously influence populations of many of the furbearers that call the Maine woods home.

Two such furbearers, the American marten and Canada lynx, depend on certain forest types for their survival.  Lynx need 20-40 year-old successional forest that holds plenty of snowshoe hares (their main prey base), while marten need forest with heavy canopy cover and some thick trees to protect them from predators.

In 1989, the Maine Forest Practices Act, a landmark piece of legislation that was pushed by many environmentalists and conservationists, began the process of fragmenting the state’s northern forest.  In simple terms, the act basically limited the size of clear-cuts.  This eliminated the large, barren openings in the forest that many environmentalists and members of the public simply didn’t like looking at.

The new restrictions on the size of clear-cuts didn’t reduce the number of trees that were being harvested from the forest, however.  It simply began transforming the landscape from one of a few, very large clear-cuts, to a patchwork pattern of numerous small clear-cuts dotting the landscape.

This new landscape that continues to take form in the northern forest is far from ideal for our valuable furbearers like marten and lynx.  The large patches of forest that once existed are now plastered with small openings that support less food for lynx and make marten more vulnerable to predators.  Further, the once-prevalent large clear-cuts that re-grew into large stands of quality habitat are becoming increasingly rare.   And in the long run, this could mean fewer lynx, marten, and other forest dwellers that have similar habitat needs.

As it’s beginning to appear that the highly touted Forest Practices Act may not have been such a great idea after all, and many are working to see if overturned.  The Nature Conservancy, among others, is exploring ways to ensure future habitat conditions promote healthy populations of valuable furbearers in northern Maine.

Read the Nature Conservancy story here.

See a recent lynx/clearcut story from the Boston Globe here.

For the first time in recent history, the state of Missouri has lifted harvest level restrictions on the river otter, marking a high point in one of the most successful conservation stories in the United States.

Just a few decades ago, Missouri’s otter population was considered almost nonexistent, with only an estimated few dozen otters left in isolated locations.  The plight of the otter in the state was probably due to a combination of over-trapping and shooting.  You see, otters were once a very valuable furbearer, and they eat lots of fish, which doesn’t sit well with many anglers and commercial fishing interests.

While unregulated trapping surely played a part in the otter decline, it was trappers who helped restore a species that now numbers over 15,000 individuals.  Otters were captured from neighboring Louisiana, using the same conventional methods that recreational trappers use to catch the critters for their fur.  They were then transferred to Missouri and released in suitable habitats.

Beginning in the early 1980′s, Missouri transplanted 845 otters into 43 different streams.  With strict regulations in place to limit harvest, otter populations began to grow exponentially.

The years of otter transplants and limited harvest paid off, and a healthy population of otters exists throughout the state.  The success of the otter project may have been too great, however and the species, according to the experts, may be exceeding healthy (and socially acceptable) levels.

Like with many animals, an overpopulation of otters can mean increased spreading of disease, starvation, and a depletion of the food base.  Many Missourians are concerned that otters are having an impact on fish populations in small ponds and large rivers alike.  The Missouri Department of Conservation receives numerous ‘problem otter’ calls, and has documented fishery declines in high-density otter areas.

Fortunately, the Department has the ability to manage otter populations at a healthy and publicly acceptable level by allowing limited otter harvest during trapping seasons.

The first otter trapping season opened in 1996, and has expanded over the years to encourage increased otter harvest.  Still, harvest levels haven’t been high enough to meet management objectives.  Otter fur prices are much lower than they were historically, and trappers are few and far between compared to days of yesteryear.  So there haven’t been enough trappers out in the woods to harvest otters in high enough numbers to keep their populations in check.

Which brings us to today, where Missouri has decided to lift the harvest level restriction on otters, allowing each trapper to take an unlimited number of otters.  The DOC will continue to monitor harvest levels and make future regulation changes if otter populations decline or grow to unhealthy levels.

The Missouri model is similar to how many U.S. states are managing their furbearer populations.  It’s this level of sophisticated wildlife management what will ensure both healthy furbearer populations and regulated trapping continue for generations to come.

To learn more about the Missouri otter story, click here.

Click here to read the article.

It doesn’t get into otter trapping, but does give some good background biological information on the otter.