In one location there was a danger of catching domestic animals, so I made the nooses only just big enough for a possum to get its paw into. I have only tried this a time or two, but I was very encouraged with the results. Here are pics of a possum and a wild cat both taken with spring-up traps. The cat was huge!! The possum looks like it is having its arm stretched, but actually there was only enough spring to just pull the snare shut, so the possum could curl up comfortably on the ground. However, when I got there with my camera it ran to the extreme limit of the cord which of course had the effect of lifting the paw up.
To give you some idea of the size of the cat, the knife in the picture is a cut-down Cold Steel Bushman with an overall length of approximately 225mm. Actually, in thinking about this particular cat, I think it may have been caught by the 'neck' rather than the 'paw' spring up. I'm fairly sure I caught another cat by the paw because I recall being impressed that the cat had been curious enough about the possum lure to stick its foot into the hole.
Below is a diagram for a foot spring-up for bigger animals. I've never caught any game with this design, although I once caught a farm dog with one while trying to trap some mysterious pigs on the property. Anticipating this possibility, I had ensured that there was only just enough spring to lightly close the noose, so there was very little chance of causing injury. The farmer was with the dog at the time. I did get one of the pigs eventually, but it was in a simple snare. That is another story though.
Below is an interesting spring-up trap evidently used by our early Maori people to catch rats. This cunning design does not have a conventional sliding noose. The 'noose' is a simple stirrup of plant material that lifts the animal up against the top hoops of the structure. This would clamp the rat in place where it would lack the manouverability (and probably the will) to chew at the noose cord. This is also a good design to use in conjunction with fibres that don't take a knot well, or which may be too rough to easily slide through a noose eye. I have found that dried strips of flax break relatively easily if knotted. The noose hoop can be fixed to the spring stick with relatively strong 'wrapping'-type knots, but a conventional noose eye-knot could be relatively weak. The drawing is based on an illustration in the book "Forest Lore of the Maori" by Elsdon Best. I am yet to try using one of these traps, but I thought it worthy of a mention in this blog.
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