Hi Willowflat, thanks for more ideas and yes a break will be good and as you say more tinkering needed and I have lots of new things to try.
I find the Trapinator bite bar pretty easy to drill, I will attached pics using a broken trap waiting to be repaired. The bite bar has holes in already, I enlarge one with a 3.5mm drill bit, then insert an 8gx25mm (20mm better) s/s screw. Make sure they have the thread all the way to the top of the screw, technically a machine screw I think. Then attach bait. I find it doesn’t interfere if you want to use a soft bait like possum dough. Cheers
Have rodents eaten your dried apricots? I thought they’d be a hit, but they’ve been ignored.
I’m hoping to trap a cat in a Trapinator, so the screw should be great for attaching bait. I trap some large brown rats, so I might even trap one of them. Hell, I trapped one in a Timms 3 weeks ago!
If you use cinnamon, rodents might leave your bait alone completely. A coating on the PB might reduce the rate at which the mice eat it. It seems to slow down the rate of mold-growth when I use it, too.
I haven’t used apricots yet for the possums, I put screws in quite a few to fix meat in for cat trapping, a lot of possums caught get predated by cats so I thought it was a good idea. However I didn’t trap anything in them despite catching cats in other traps. Cheers
In my trapping with Doubtless Conservation Trust I made some hollow eggs which I could store the baits inside to protect them from mice. Mice were taking our baits within a couple of days, but the baits now last the full month. You can now get them from www.traptools.co.nz We call them LureGard and all our 700 odd traps have them now.
It definitely sounds frustrating, especially after having such consistent success for the first few years. If the traps are still set and the bait is disappearing from all 30, that usually points to something small and light enough not to trigger the mechanism. Large slugs can absolutely feed on sweet baits like Treacle Gold and even possum dough, especially in damp conditions, and they often won’t show up clearly on cameras at night. You could try lifting the bait off the trap floor by placing it in a small mesh bait holder or smear it higher inside the trap where only a possum can properly reach it. Some people also reduce moisture around the set or lightly salt the immediate base area (not inside the trap) to discourage slugs. It may still be rodents, even if they’re not showing on camera, but given what you found under the trap, the slugs are a very likely culprit.
