When the first snow comes and walking gets difficult in the forest, but it is still to less for skis, I use the time to prepare for the trapping season. This year I need to build trap boxes as the laws for pine marten trapping recently changed and traditional traps built out of nature materials are questionable now. Because I always take a lot of care to hold the laws strictly I will only use trap boxes now.
The change of law was made because of some incidents with irons in the south of Finland. Bears got injured by irons there. This can’t happen here as the bears are hibernating reliable, while in the south the hibernation is not reliable any more due to climate destruction. But as the hunting law is the same everywhere in Finland it has also an influence here.
I build the trap boxes out of old garbage wood which I collected a few years ago from the garbage dump.
Overall it saves me a lot of time to have prepared trap boxes. But the big advantage of in-nature built traps was that I can do all my trapping by skiing, like I do it with willow grouse and red fox. But now as the trap boxes are bulky and heavy it is not practically any more to place them by skiing and I will use the snowmobile to spread them out in bigger amounts. This saves me a lot of time during trapping season as I do not need to build the traps in nature and I can cover larger areas with the snowmobile.
This method goes against my principal to do the trapping with as few environmental impact as possible. On the same time I need to trap more animals to compensate for the extra costs of the snowmobile.
And the saddest thing is that a more traditional and ecological way is blocked again.
