Trappers are front-line wildlife info gatherers

WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
SUN MAR.10,2002
PAGE : A4
by Bill Redekop


INTERLAKE TRAPLINE -- Drats! Foiled again! Trapper John chops through the ice just north of Winnipeg and pulls up a beaver trap, staked next to a five-star beaver lodge, only to find it empty.

It's a wonder he could miss at that range. The trap --baited with a delicious deciduous log -- is virtually in the beaver's mailbox. It looks like net fishing in an aquarium.Obviously, it's not that easy. Trapper John can't understand why the beaver keeps avoiding the trap. It's baited with freshly peeled poplar branch, the equivalent of a steak dinner to a beaver.

Trapper John traps for nuisance beaver that are flooding roads and properties north of Winnipeg. The province and municipal governments pay up to $35 a head bounty on nuisance beavers. Trapper John did not want his name used for fear of harassment or attack from animal protection extremists.

"You don't realize how many radicals are out there," he said.

He is defensive about what he does. He feels like the hooded executioner of yore, doing society's dirty work so urbanites can hold fanciful ideas about nature. We trod the one-kilometre distance into an Interlake marsh near the Shoal Lakes. We follow a ditch that beaver regularly dam up, flooding land for eight kilometres in all directions. Trapper John wears a flotation jacket in case he breaks through the ice, and drags a plastic sled holding a steel bar, a chainsaw to cut through the ice, a plastic bucket, burlap sacks to carry the beaver pelts, and traps. Trapper John becomes excited. A dead arctic shrew is lying in the snow. It looks like a tiny mouse with a pointy nose, but it's a rare find and valuable to science. A coyote must have killed it and spit it out because of the tart taste.

Tax receipts

Trapper John can get $15 tax receipts by selling the shrew for research. He's sold hundreds of carcasses to science over the years. Researchers examine the carrion for diseases like hantavirus, lyme disease, even a strain of mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy).

But even more exciting is a tiny black speck in the snow next to the shrew. It's a dead flea from the shrew. Trapper John picks it up with tweezers and deposits it into a plastic sandwich bag. That's another $15. He will sell the flea to the University of Manitoba, for study by entomologists.

Trapper John is a modern trapper with a partial degree in entomology, and he sells fleas and ticks regularly for research. He was the first to find black-legged deer ticks with lyme disease in Manitoba, and his discovery led to it becoming a reportable disease here. He also collected roadkilled deer over a four-year period so the skulls could be examined for a form of mad cow disease.

Ian McKay, Manitoba Conservation manager responsible for fur and problem wildlife, said trappers are the province's front-line information gatherers on wildlife, reporting everything from diseases to population trends.

"We had a trapper up north near Thompson in the mid-'80s who noticed his snare blackened, and that led to the discovery of a leak in a tailings pond where tailings were getting into the waterways. That would have gone on for years if he hadn't been working that stream," McKay said.

The province could use more of those trappers. Two decades ago there were more than 17,000 trappers in Manitoba, compared to 5,500 today. That's resulted in larger populations of animals like beaver, fox and coyotes, and some problems for people who live in the country.

Beaver pelt prices have recently climbed up to about $30 per beaver pelt and could climb higher at an upcoming fur auction in Toronto. That could encourage trapping again.

But trapping isn't all a person has to do. The trappers also have to skin the beaver, and that can take up to four or five hours, said McKay.
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