I found this piece of the December News Letter to be particularly interesting.
This year Idaho wolf trapping season started September 10th. I personally set most of the 60+ sets I have had out for the bulk of this season during that first week. I didn’t connect for 47 days and finally on 10/26 I took my first wolf of the season. In those 47 days, I had numerous elk hunters accidentally set off traps, caught a guy and his son on my trail camera purposefully searching for and springing traps, and even had other trappers disturb my sets because they wanted to set where I had traps already in the ground. Yes, it was very frustrating having the very people I am trying to help, hinder my efforts but to be successful, regardless what comes, I know I have to push through it. After 59 days, and missing 2 different wolves by less than 1” at the same location, I connected a second time on 11/7. Only this time, as the pack milled around the area they began correlating the smell of the waxed dirt I used to help keep my traps from freezing to the ground, to the traps themselves. They located and dug up two different traps that should have caught them, and now I have “educated” wolves that know how to find and disarm my traps. This type of interaction can really weigh heavily on a mans mind and dampen his confidence. After 73 days of checking traps every 2nd to 3rd day (sometimes late into the night so I could keep my F4WM meeting commitments in the mornings, and at other times during the dark wee hours of the morning so I could keep my F4WM chapter meeting commitments during the evening) I connected a 3rd time on 11/21. Only this time instead of staying to investigate for an hour or two, the remainder of the pack camped out on my set location from 9pm until 5am. During that time I captured them on my trail cameras repeatedly returning to the empty trap bed where the wolf had been caught, and stuffing their nose into the trap bed to soak in all the odors associated with the trap that the wolf was caught in. Then one at a time, they strategically located and dug up the rest of my remaining traps at that location. To add insult to injury, I have much of this activity on camera (coincidentally, those wolves have yet to return to that particular site) On the 105th day of season, after 45 trips up the mountain checking and rebuilding sets (transitioning during that time from my truck with summer tires, to my truck with winter tires & tire chains on all 4, to my 4 wheeler, and finally to my snowmobile), within the same pack territory, but at a different location about an hours drive away, I connected this last time on 12/23. This was a set where an elk hunter provided the location of a packs pee-post (territory marker). It took 52 days from the day I set it to when the pack passed through the first time–unfortunately no longer able to use waxed dirt on this pack, every trap I had at that location was frozen to the ground when they finally arrived, and the wolves stepped on 4 different traps that did not fire (a heartbreaking event after all that work and waiting). Ten days later on the 62nd day since I set that location, I caught a mature female as she marked that pee post location to tell intruders to stay off their turf.
