Basket Trap for Crayfish

Description

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The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

morning I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance Outfitters in the Pathfinder school what I thought I'd do today is we had a primitive trapping concept class out here over the weekend this past weekend and my buddy Tony Daniel one of my instructors out here at the school taught the folks how to make a small basket trap for crayfish and the great thing about a lot of traps is that they can be sized up or down depending on the type of prey that you intend to catch and learning how to make a small trap like a crayfish trap lends itself very well to being able to make other types of bigger and larger basket traps for things to include fish and turtles and things of that nature so we're gonna make a small crew fish trap today and it will get you the idea of how you make this basket weave type trap and it will also allow you to make bigger traps for bigger prey if that's what you choose to do once you understand the concept so what we did was we just went out and pulled this honeysuckle vine right out of the trees and I have a big ton of it here you can just yank this stuff out of the trees here in Eastern woodlands that grows rampid then I will not grab some green briar thorns here that were fresh shoots that we're about the same size and I'm gonna use those and cut them down to make mistakes or my uprights and I'm gonna use this honeysuckle for my Weaver so we'll talk about setting that up and I'll move the camera in and we'll go through it okay so we need some kind of a mold for how big we're gonna make this trap one can eyeball this but I'm gonna use my cup for my cup and bottle set and I'm just gonna set it on the ground here then I'm going to cut myself a few steaks and if you've got something that's thorny like this green briar you can knock those thorns off of it fairly easily just by knocking them sideways or you can run that thing on some kind of a piece of wood that you've got a nut cut out in that will knock all those thorns off of it go ahead and cut those two lengths and we're going to take that thing I want kind of a springy end on this thing so I'm going to cut it off here and use about this much of it for my steak which is a piece about a little over 12 inches long probably 14 15 inches long and I'm just going

run it right here in this notch on the stump to knock all the thorns off of it and that should take care of most of them right there and then I'm going to stick it into the ground a couple three inches so it doesn't move around on me just like that and I'm going to alternate them and I'm going to want an odd number of these stakes so that could be seven stakes it could be nine stakes it can be whatever you want it to be depending on how big you're gonna make your trap I'm gonna start off with seven because I'm making a fairly small trap but the important thing with this is that we start off with an odd number and we're just going to you kind of alternate them to keep them even I'm going to go both sides and then here and here first

don't be real concerned with these things being exactly the same size in diameter as long as they're the same length and they're close you'll be fine okay now once you've kind of went around I balled this and make sure your stakes are fairly even you can pull that mold out of there make sure that your stakes aren't going to move around too much on you in the ground make sure they're buried in there pretty good and then you're going to start separating this honeysuckle to find your good weavers and you want these long thin pieces like this are gonna be the best for you and you'll be able to get some really nice long ones out of that and all you're going to do with this is you're going to begin weaving these you're going to tuck one side in and then start weaving in and out every other one just like this and you don't want this Weaver to be too long when you first start this process because then you got a lot of messing around you got to pull it in but keep all of this nice and tight as you go pull everything down and if you've got a good piece of material it shouldn't be a problem

wrapping around these sticks if your bark starts to come off of it don't worry about that that's not important you can't take the bark off if you want to in that same fashion by scraping it off and that's what you want to do and it's not a big deal just kind of hold your place as you go and continue that every other rap as you go up your stakes just like this now as you're starting to work toward the top of this thing in the cones it's taking shape it's gonna get more fiddly with these rods because they're going to start to get crisscross with each other and you just kind of have to be patient with it and fish him out of there and when you get to the end of a weaver just grab another one in backtrack yourself a couple a couple weaves I'll show you here in a second backtrack yourself a couple of weaves in there and just start running it don't get too particular about it I got a little tail left right here I got enough room to tuck out one more time right here and then what I'm going to do is just grab another Weaver out of my pile over here and I'm just going to kind of chase that backwards three or four just like that and just tuck it straight down in between one of my stakes here just like this

tighten it up good and go with it just like I never stopped at that point and the longer these Weaver's are the more of a pain they are to kind of try to move them around things because you're trying to pull an awful lot of awful lot of this weaving material through one at a time so just kind of wrap it around as you can just flip it over the top instead of trying to pull it all through every single time you can see now I'm getting crossed up right here and I need to get behind this stake and that's where things kind of get a little bit tedious for you now as you get further and further the top of this cone that's going to get more and more pronounced that Criss crossing of your stakes don't worry about that just keep on keep on rocking it and just be patient with it now when I get up in here work I'm tired of weaving it it's already so tight there's nothing gonna get out of it I'll just go in here with my last Weaver I kind of wrap it around a few times just keep everything good and tight

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and just kind of half-hitch that thing off with a couple of half hitches just like that good and tight till she breaks and then at that point we can come in here and we can kind of trim some of this back end off that we really don't need now just like this we can pull them out of the ground be careful with this because you've been pushing that whole thing and compressing into the ground the whole time you've been building this trap cut those ends off just like that tuck that beginning end you can tuck it down inside one of these and tuck that beginning right down inside one of those stake holes just like that if you got a sharp stick or a bodkin to help you shove that down in there lock it in go ahead and do that trim everything just a little bit long now you've got a crayfish trap that's okay all you really need to do at that point is just stick about four sharp sticks in there they don't have to be razor sharp just pointed he'll get in there but crayfish tend to back out of things a lot of times and he's not going to be able to get out of it we've caught in traps like this made of bamboo and things like died down at Florida and our Everglades advanced classes we've caught lots and lots of crayfish that may take you 15 or 20 minutes to make this thing maybe even 30 but it'll catch you a lot of crayfish and if you make 10 of them then you got lots and lots of crayfish the good thing about understanding how to build something like this though is number one it's basically the same as waddling Dobb type material that you'd use on the wall structure of a hut so you've taught yourself how to do that wall on table type weave

then all you have to do is pack it over with

mud and clay let it dry out you've also taught yourself a little bit about basket making you've taught yourself how to make a trap and now you can size this up or down depending on what you're trying to catch and if you made this exact same cone and stopped it before it was closed off before it came all the way down to a point and cut the runners off of it and tied it off and then made a bigger basket that that cone fit inside of you now have a fish or a turtle trap

that's very usable as well so this small trap and that's why I like teaching micro trapping in my primitive trapping concept classes because these small traps teach you how to make bigger things it all builds on itself in a crawl walk run mentality folks I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance Outfitters in the Pathfinder school I appreciate you doing for this video today I thank you for everything you do for a school for a family for business from of our sponsor instructors affiliates and friends and I'll be back to another video as soon as I can thanks guys