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After the trapping season: Connecticut’s annual fur sale
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Beavers are targeted by Connecticut trappers both
for their furs and for nuisance animal control. National
Park Service photo by Jim Peaco.
Shortly after the March 15 close of trapping season, Connecticut’s fur trappers gather for one day to sell their furs. It’s the culmination of the trappers’ year. The sale is organized by the Connecticut Trappers Association (CTA), which has about two hundred members—a solid majority of the licensed fur trappers in the state. This year, as in many years past, the sale is held at the Fin Fur & Feather Club in Chaplin, Connecticut, a few miles northeast of Willimantic.
I’ve been invited to attend the sale by Herb Sobansky, Jr., the CTA’s secretary-treasurer. When I began looking into the issues surrounding S.B. 994, the proposed Connecticut legislative ban on leghold and Conibear traps, I got in touch with Herb to gather background information about trapping in the state. He told me that I’d be welcomed if I came to the fur sale to meet the trappers.
The sale takes place on a Saturday. It starts at 8:00 a.m., but Herb suggested that I visit later in the morning, when the sale is well underway. My traveling companion on this day is my seven-year-old daughter, Juliana. I thought carefully about whether to ask her along, a little concerned about her reaction to a roomful of raw furs. But she has already seen more of nature’s sharp edges than some adults do in a lifetime, and she’s curious and smart, so I told her about the fur sale, and she said that she wanted to go.
The Fin Fur & Feather Club is just a country road or two off Route 6. It’s a big place, with shooting ranges, expansive rearing pens for game birds, and a long, rambling clubhouse at its heart. Shots ring out from the shooting ranges as we walk into the club’s little restaurant to get directions to the fur sale.
The sale is taking place in a large room, appropriately rustic, all dark wood inside. There’s a woodstove, unfired on this mild March day, by the door. The scent of the furs is heavy in the air. It’s hard to describe, something like an old, well-oiled baseball glove and a dog that needs a bath, mingled with a powerful, slightly sweet muskiness.
There are long tables running most of the length of the room. The table tops are sectioned off with cardboard dividers, and each section holds a trapper’s harvest. Some of the fur lots are small—perhaps a few muskrats, a mink, a raccoon. Other lots contain dozens of pelts: muskrats and minks, beavers, raccoons and opossums, foxes and coyotes, a few river otters, and fishers—there are more fisher pelts here than I’d expected to see. The number and kind of pelts in each lot are written on the cardboard dividers with a felt-tip marker. A Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) wildlife officer is slowly working from one lot to another, tagging furs. Connecticut trappers kill about 6,500 furbearers a year, and a fair number of those animals are here.
Juliana and I wander around the room, looking at the furs, exchanging polite greetings with trappers, and asking a few questions. With the tables and furs and more than forty men in the room, it’s a little crowded, but it isn’t noisy. Many of these trappers are old friends, and there’s catching up to do, but the conversations are quiet and low-key. It’s a workday, after all, and these men are workmen. The furs in the room represent thousands of man-hours spent on winter traplines, and it’s time to convert that hard, cold work into some hard, cold cash. The money is small, but it will buy some gas and groceries, maybe something for the grandkids, and a couple of new traps to replace the ones lost through the ice last season.
The pelts of small animals, like muskrats and minks, are “cased,” stripped from the carcass like a pullover sweater, and dried and stretched with the inside out. They’re cylinders of stiff, oily skin with the fur inside and often with a tail hanging from one end. The pelts from most of the larger animals—the foxes and fishers and coyotes—are right side out. Some of the coyote pelts are impressively large, and I’m reminded that coyotes in New England are bigger than their Western ancestors, a trait that some biologists believe is the result of interbreeding with wolves as the species spread eastward through Canada during the nineteenth century. The beaver pelts are prepared differently than the others, stretched out open and flat so that they’re almost perfectly round, like big drumheads.
Three fur buyers have come to the sale. They briefly inspect each lot, and then make a sealed, confidential bid for it. An officer in the CTA will later unseal the bids, and will present each trapper with the highest bid for his lot. The trapper may accept the bid or not. If he declines to sell, he may turn his furs over to North American Fur Auctions (NAFA) for later sale on consignment, or he may take his furs and go home. Most of these pelts will be shipped overseas—there’s not much of a market for furs in the United States anymore, and the highest demand is in Russia and China. This year, the market is depressed by the recession, and there’s a general understanding that there won’t be as much money offered as in some years past.
I ask one of the trappers where I can find Herb, and I’m politely directed to a gentleman who is dealing with some paperwork at a table at one end of the room. As an officer in the CTA and a successful trapper himself, Herb is beyond busy today, but he drops what’s he’s doing to show us around and introduce us to some of the other trappers. We’re guests, warmly received. Herb is younger than most of the men in the room, a family man with a wife and five kids. Like so many of the trappers here, he learned his craft as a youngster, helping out on his father’s trapline.
The conversation in the room is mostly shop talk, muted and matter-of-fact. It's informed by a keen awareness of what’s going on in Connecticut's forests. I doubt there’s a man here who would identify himself as an environmentalist—from a trapper’s perspective, environmentalists aren’t easily distinguished from the animal-rights people who vilify trappers and are trying to shut them down—but environmental stewardship is deeply ingrained in this trapping community. We hear about variability in the muskrat population, of the increase in red foxes and the thinning of the grays, of ways to help the DEP track the expanding range of invasive Phragmites reeds in freshwater wetlands. These men are apex predators in a fractured ecosystem shorn of Indians and wolves. Whether they consciously think of themselves that way or not, they take the responsibility seriously. Trapping isn’t usually pretty, but here in Connecticut, it’s real wildlife management—deliberate, direct, and selective.
*****
On the drive home after leaving the fur sale, we see an opossum dead on the road. It’s one of the roughly one million vertebrate animals randomly killed by American motorists every day.
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