Brian Coghill has been around wild animals since he was 5 years old living in Massachusetts. For years, he says he even served as a surrogate mother to dozens of critters.
“My father and I used to take raccoons out of chimneys for people,” Coghill explained. “I’d raise the pups and release them in the fall. I had baby raccoons [at the house] until I was 18.”
That love of nature and wildlife eventually led to a friendship with a local firefighter who introduced him to trapping, and when he was 12 or so, he began trapping himself.
Today, the 51-year-old Coghill is still a part-time trapper and serves as the President of the Maine Trappers Association. He’s also on the board of directors of the National Trappers Association.
Coghill won’t discourage anyone from taking up the activity, but he says it’s important to have an accurate view of what they’re signing up for.
“If you think we’re doing it for the money, you’re crazy,” Coghill said. “I would say back in the 70s and 80s, people could afford to buy a brand new pickup truck [with their trapping earnings]. I think today, if a guy wanted to go out, he’d have to bust his tail to make a thousand dollars.”
And still, the Parsonsfield man is out there, year after year, enduring some of the state’s worst weather during a season that lasts from late October until late March or April.
Rain? Sleet? Snow? Biting winds? Blizzards?
No matter.
Coghill will be out there, hoping to catch a few mink, raccoons or beavers. So will a few thousand other trappers. In 2013, the latest year for which the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife could provide data, a total of 3,141 trappers were licensed by the state.
“You’ve just got to really enjoy it,” he said. “Once you get bitten by the bug, you’re hooked. You’re burnt out by the middle of the season, but by the time the middle of summer comes around, you can’t wait [for trapping to start again].”
Get rich quick?
Walter Jakubas, a wildlife biologist for the DIF&W, is filling in as the state’s furbearer biologist, a post he once held, after the former biologist who held the post left the department. Jakubas said trappers would love to make some cash, but the relative price of the pelts they procure doesn’t seem to drive many out of the game.
“I don’t really see a trend [of trappers buying or refusing to buy licenses based on the price of pelts in a given year],” Jakubas said, while conceding that increases in pelt prices over time can make the activity more attractive. One reason for an increase since 2009 may be the relative value of a muskrat pelt ranges from $4 to $12. (The price has dropped again this year, and will likely be closer to $4 than $12).
Muskrats, he explained, are fairly easy to catch and one of few animals the state doesn’t tag nor monitor after they’re trapped.
Overall, however, Jakubas said roughly the same number of trappers have been licensed — give or take a couple hundred — since 2002. And often, he said, the weather plays a big role: During years when heavy snow and ice make it difficult for trappers to target beavers or muskrat, license sales often suffer.
Jakubas said making a profit is a motive for trapping, but not the reason the activity is popular with its practitioners.
“They have a really high level of curiosity about different aspects of animal behavior and they like being out in the woods studying those factors,” Jakubas said. “Trapping is kind of a unique avocation, because it involves both the sport of trying to figure out where animals are and catching them, and the commercial aspect that they’re getting some kind of monetary return for the animals that they trap.”
Still, Jakubas said he doesn’t know of any trappers who are getting rich pursuing that avocation.
“People can get the misconception that people are only doing it for the money,” Jakubas said. “But there is a core group that just loves trapping and they’re going to go out there no matter what the price is.”
So, what’s the price?
Coghill said animal rights groups may claim they help decrease demand for fur products through their lobbying efforts. But the veteran trapper doesn’t believe that’s true.
Conflicts around the world, however, can have a big impact on fur pelt selling.
Products made out of trapper-provided fur are often bought in Russia, Korea and China, and much of the manufacture of fur products takes place far from the U.S., he said. Coghill believes tension in the world, along with trade sanctions against other nations, can play just as big a role.
“Russia is a big buyer of fur. China is a manufacturer,” Coghill said. “If their economies are in a hole, nobody will be buying products and they won’t be manufacturing.”
Pelts from animals trapped in Maine are often purchased by local fur buyers, who then ship them to the North American Fur Auction in Toronto. At that point, a Maine fur can end up across the globe.
Jakubas said the price of some pelts continues to rise as other pelts are less valuable. Pine marten, for instance, peaked at around $62 per pelt during the 2013-14 trapping season. The average had been much lower at about $30.
Prices for a fisher pelt have dropped from $157 to about $117, he said. Beaver pelt prices have fluctuated widely, from an average of $18 five or six years ago to a high of $30 last year. Now, the price has dropped again.
But bobcat prices have surged.
“Not a whole lot of guys are trapping bobcat,” Jakubas said. “Historically, bobcat [sold] for $50, $60. Now we’re looking at $110 to $135.”
DIF&W on trapping
Jakubas said that he and other biologists monitor the take of most animals (muskrat and a few others are excluded). Additionally, the state only allows an individual trapper to take 25 pine marten and 10 fisher per season.
The biologist said trapping can help the department achieve its population goals for certain species.
“One of our usual talking points is to stress that trapping is a highly regulated activity,” Jakubas said.
Among those regulations: Trappers must obtain written permission before trapping on someone else’s land. While that practice is encouraged for hunters, it is not required.
“We also try to regulate the harvest by using the available data that we have,” Jakubas said. “For animals like beaver [there is another factor at play]. What is the public willing to put up with? The ‘social carrying capacity’ is often much different than the biological carrying capacity.”
Jakubas explained that beavers, a popular target of trappers, are an essential or “keystone” species. Beavers make dams, which create wetlands, which in turn provide homes for a variety of species.
“For the same reason, their big impact on the habitat isn’t looked at upon as fondly by large landowners who want to maintain their roads, or by small landowners whose backyards get flooded by a beaver dam, or whose favorite tree in the yard gets cut down by a beaver that’s looking for some food,” he said.
In response to public complaints, and an increased demand for beaver control, Jakubas said the DIF&W has lengthened the trapping season on beavers.
“We have many more areas that are open in the springtime for beaver trapping than we did, say, 15 years ago,” Jakubas said.
And that, you’d think, benefits the trappers.
It does … kind of.
Coghill, who spent part of Thursday trapping beavers, explained that “trapping a beaver” and “making money by trapping a beaver” can be two different things.
“I went out and set seven traps on a flowage. I was probably there three hours,” Coghill explained. “Today, I was back there for an hour and caught two beavers. But by the time I skin ‘em, flesh ‘em, strech ‘em, I’ve probably got five and a half hours into two beavers that will bring me $35. If I’m lucky.”
Still, he’s not discouraged. This is, after all, the life he moved to Maine for back in 1987, after trapping in Massachusetts was largely shut down.
“Some of the things that you see out in the woods and on the ice [are incredible],” Coghill said. “People always ask, ‘Why do you do that?’ I don’t know. I just love doing it.”
