Okay, a number of commenters suggested that I rig the live trap with only one side open, and although it clearly isn’t supposed to work that way it turned out it’s possible with just a little non-destructive rod-flexing.
So I set it up so, with a piece of bread tied with string to the closed end and then slathered thick with peanut butter. Hell, LB wanted into the trap.
And nothing happened. Yesterday the little bastard got into the powershed while all that stuff was going on in the morning. All afternoon he ignored the trap. On the theory that maybe he was still in there, I moved the trap into the powershed overnight. That didn’t work.
This morning I moved it to the pallet under the junk, where the squirrels have been living. And a little after 7:30 there was an unholy racket…
People, this is one mightily pissed-off squirrel. I’m going to take him elsewhere before “releasing” him, just so his angry ghost doesn’t haunt the place.
But for the record let it be said that you really can do this. Lock down one side of the trap and put the bait all the way to the closed side, and the victim has no choice but to completely enter the cage. Then he will inevitably trip the trigger and we’re done here.
Release it? Won’t it just scamper right back? How many trips will this guy make back and forth to get more peanut butter, I wonder? I’d be happy to send you a box of .22lr…. but if you’d rather feed perfectly good peanut butter to squirrels, oh well. 🙂 Each to his/her own, of course.
Or, maybe I misread that about releasing it… Never mind.
congratulations, Joel. May you trap many more. You know I’m out here cheering you on.
Many decades ago my father got pissed at the squirrels who were destroying his attempt at growing strawberries, and got a similar trap. After trapping several and releasing them in a wooded area about 2-3 miles away he wondered if any were returning, so with a capture rate of one per day he used yellow spray paint to paint their tails while in the trap. IIRC, the paint can lasted about 2 weeks. Peanut butter was the attractant, as I recall.
None so identified ever returned, but about a month after the tagging experiment ended the author of a community news column in the paper fielded a reader query about a local breed of squirrels with bright yellow tails….
The tally for that summer was over 100 squirrels. Didn’t get rid of them all, but the herd was thinned quite noticeably.
Nosmo, the squirrels around here aren’t as common or as used to being around people as the ones I knew in Michigan, and they’re as arboreal as rabbits: I’ve never seen one even climb a juniper bush. But once they get into your stuff they’re worse than rats. I’m still cleaning up the mess this one made of my powershed, including finding a completely empty five-pound bag of popcorn. And the funny-insulting part is that it kept the bag hidden until it had emptied it, and then pitched it out in the middle of the floor. “Yo! Human! Fetch me another. And make me a sammitch while you’re up.”