The Record That Starts Before the Animal Is in the Trap
A Hancock trap sunk into the bank entrance of a suspected lodge run at 18:45 on a Tuesday evening in October is the beginning of a data record, not the end of one. The time the trap was set, the exact location within a site that may have six other trap positions, the observer who set it, and the trap number — all of this needs to be in a durable record before you leave the site, because you will be back at first light to check it and you will not remember which bank opening you used for Trap 4 versus Trap 6 when you are standing in the dark in waders on a wet October morning with a headlamp and cold hands.
The Trapping Log template captures the operational record of each trapping session — setting or checking, trap results, time spent, and who was there. Combined with the Post-relocation Log, it creates a complete documentation chain from first trap set through final release and long-term monitoring.
What Setting and Checking Produce as Separate Records
The Activity field — Setting Traps, Checking Traps — creates two distinct record types from the same template. A setting session documents the trap configuration: location text, coordinates, trap numbers deployed. A checking session documents the result: empty or captured. The calculated Total Time field, running (#{stop}-#{start}) / 60, records trap inspection time in minutes — which is a labor accounting field for grant reporting as much as it is a field log entry.
Running time matters in beaver conflict relocation programs because trapping effort — hours deployed, trap nights achieved — is part of the effectiveness reporting that determines permit renewals and program continuation. Total trapping time across a season can be extracted from the log records and summarized without manually tallying field notebooks.
The two Observer fields capture crew composition per session. Beaver handling — live-trap extraction, health assessment, holding, and transport — requires at minimum two people on most protocols. Having Observer 1 and Observer 2 in the record matters when an animal that was healthy at capture shows problems in the holding period: you can identify who handled it and reconstruct the sequence of decisions made at the trap site.
Trap Numbers and the Spatial Record
Trap Numbers as a free-text field handles the reality that a single trapping site may have multiple Hancock or cage traps running simultaneously, each numbered and positioned at different features — lodge entrance, runway, feeding area, scent mound. A record that says "Traps 2, 4, 7 — all checked, 4 and 7 empty, Trap 2 — beaver trapped" gives you not just the result but the spatial inference: Trap 2 was at whatever location you described when you set it, which tells you which part of the site the animal was using most actively.
The Coordinates GPS field logs the trapping location precisely. When a site has been trapped across multiple seasons, the GPS coordinates in the record let you layer trap placement against capture success over time, which is the kind of spatial analysis that tells you whether your trap placement strategy is converging on where the animals actually move or whether you have been setting traps in positions that look logical but consistently turn up empty.
Trap Results — Beaver trapped or Empty — is the raw data field that makes effort-versus-success analysis possible. Across a full season, the ratio of successful captures to empty checks, broken down by location and by observer team, tells you which sites are productive and which are consuming trapping hours without results. That information directly shapes the next season's resource allocation.