Birds thieving from my cage traps....

[gollum 1]

Hi folks,

Been cage trapping for a while

 

 

 

and although things were going well, suddenly the bait has started disappearing from the cages without them triggering.

 

Perplexing at first as I knew that the same cages had caught rabbits perfectly ok the previous week so i checked the triggers and no problems there. Decided to visit the site at different times of day and see if I could spot the culprit. No luck so far, but the huge numbers of pigeons and quite a few pheasant lead me to believe its birds pecking it out through the mesh. I've been using apple which had instant results with the rabbits after changing to it from carrot, but changed back to carrot again to see if it would solve the bird problem. It hasnt! The bait is also being removed between 6am and 2.30pm in some cases.

 

Has anyone else had this problem and is there a simple solution? Maybe tying the carrot/apple to the cage?

I thought about putting a finer mesh around the trigger end of the cage but its a lot of fuss and these traps are on loan so probably not an option.

 

I'll make up my own soon but thinking maybe to use sheet ply instead of mesh and makeing them double enders to double the chances Has anyone used these types and got an opinion?

 

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

HH all.

 

G.

[00taz11 39]

shoot the buggers with an airgun