There are one or two places in every swamp or pond where nearly every mink will visit. It may be a hole in a bank or an old muskrat house. You can tell it by the signs or by tracks in the snow. There is the place, then you are sure of your mink.
I make small iron stakes to fasten my traps where I can get nothing for a drag. I make them myself. Take a rod 1/4 inch thick, cut in lengths 8 inches long, turn one end when hot over the ring of trap chain, sharpen the other end. I only lost one mink last winter by gnawing his foot off. A fish is good bait for mink, also fish oil and fresh rabbits or birds. When buying traps, buy the best, they are the cheapest in the long run.
Some trappers buy the cheap traps and lose enough fur the first season to pay for good traps.
I find that it pays to stretch and care for furs well. I have bought furs that were not worth one third price. Mink were stretched 6 inches wide at tail tapering to a point at nose, being 8 inches long, when they should have been 16 or 20 inches and 3 to 4 wide. Again I have got them that they were stretched so tight you could see through them.
CAMPING OUT.
Some trappers claim the mink is very sly and hard to trap, others that he is very easy to trap, and that they could catch an unlimited number if the mink were only plentiful in their locality. I always like to read anything I can find on this subject, says an Illinois trapper. Sometimes I find methods that I have used with good success, methods that I think would be good, and methods that I think would never work in any locality. Not like the muskrat, the habits of the mink are almost the same in all localities, but changing some in different seasons of the year. In Central Illinois along with the change of seasons, we have wet and dry seasons, and good methods of trapping in the dry season will not work at all in the wet.
When I first started trapping mink I met with very good success, not due to any good method, but as far back as I can remember I have always been a lover of nature, and I was not a stranger to the habits of the mink. And I will say right here to all young trappers, and also to some older ones--learn the habits of the animal you wish to trap, and if you are half a trapper, success will be yours. I have learned many things that I never knew before I trapped for him, but I would not trade what I knew before for what I have learned since. I am going to try to make plain to you, brother trappers, some of the methods we use here in Illinois, and I believe these same methods will work in all localities.
This section of the country is cut up with small ditches and small creeks, ideal places for mink and muskrat. In the dry season all the tile ditches and small creeks have very little water in them, and no better places can the mink find than a dry tile or an old muskrat den. Here they will live until the water drives them out in the spring.