We older outdoor sportsmen are frequently reminded of the importance of passing on our love and knowledge of the outdoors to the younger generations. I usually fail miserably in that department. I’m the kind of guy who is quite happy by myself and I don’t need a lot of conversation, so it just seems easier to head out the door to set or check traps, to hunt turkeys or deer or to just knock around in the woods entirely by myself or with my wife Joyce.

Last spring, I wrote a column about a young McPherson lad, Jared Austin, who is on the Pheasants Forever National Youth Leadership Council. When we first talked, Jared expressed an interest in learning more about trapping and I promised to meet him at the Kansas Fur Harvesters convention (which was in McPherson a month ago) and help him get some equipment, then to help him learn coyote trapping this fall. Well, wouldn’t you know, after five years of applying I got a Kansas antelope tag this year and the season when I’d be hunting fell on the exact weekend of the Fur Harvesters Convention. The president of the KS Fur Harvesters does a lot with trapping education and was glad to meet Jared, and helped him get what he needed to trap this year. Now the ball was squarely in my court again to help him get started.

I got a call from Jared last week telling me the McPherson Golf Course was having beaver problems, and asked if I’d be interested in trying to catch the perpetrator(s). Another trapper caught and removed several from the golf course last spring, but suddenly new chewing was showing up, so evidently at least one beaver had not gotten the eviction notice.

I put together traps and equipment and met Jared at the golf course shop where we hopped a golf cart and followed the superintendant around to look at the beaver’s handiwork. A manmade creek runs the length of the course and new trees were being chewed and cut down along its bank. The creek is fairly deep making it very difficult to find beaver’s dens or travel ways. We were using large beaver-sized body grip traps that the critters swim or walk through, so we set one in the water at the base of a slide being used by the beaver to crawl in and out of the water just below a 4 inch diameter tree it had recently cut completely down and stripped of its bark. We went to the other side of the creek and set one in a spot narrowed down by a big brush pile, hoping we could entice the bugger to swim through the trap to get to a stick dipped in beaver lure.

I wasn’t feeling too confident with either of those two locations, but the options seemed few. As we walked the banks I spotted a slight indentation along the bank that gave me an idea. Male beavers are very territorial and occasionally scrape together piles of mud which they mark with a musky smelling secretion from glands near the base of their tail called castor glands. This secretion known as “castor” marks their chosen territory much like a whitetail buck uses a scrape on the ground. These castor mounds can be replicated and scented with beaver lure to entice male beavers to stop and investigate, and the indentation along the bank was a good spot to try that. With a shovel I dug a short channel, piling the mud into a pile on the bank at the upper end of the channel. I placed a trap in the water at the entrance to the channel, dabbed a stick with lure and stuck it into the pile of mud. The idea is get the beaver to swim through the trap as he investigates the strange new odor in his territory. I had more confidence in this setup than I did in the other two.

Since Jared lives in McPherson just minutes away from the golf course, he offered to check the traps each morning, saving me the drive. Bright and early Friday morning my phone chimed, informing me of a new text; it was Jared telling me that one Mr. Beaver had fallen for the new “imaginary” intruder into his domain and was caught in the trap at our castor mound. I met him there and removed the beaver, which appeared to have been a loner since we caught no other the rest of the week.

Several years ago I caught a huge beaver in an old castor mound I found along the river. I remade it with additional mud and juiced it up with some scent and snagged the big male beaver the first night. In fact, one of my best stories ever described the hilarious antics of Joyce and I getting the monstrous beast dragged up the bank out of the river and across 200 yards of alfalfa field to the truck. And since that was my first beaver ever, it seems only fitting Jared should help catch his first the same way. Continue to Explore Kansas Outdoors.

Steve Gilliland, Inman, can be contacted by email at [email protected].