Business: Trapper

Every year at the end of November muskrats set out to do something about their annual housing shortage. In the summer they burrow into the banks of streams or ponds but during the northern winter the underwater entrances freeze up and the muskrats must build houses. A muskrat house is a haphazard domelike heap of reeds and marsh grass. Muskrats are vegetarians, so if necessary in the dead of winter they can eat their houses. Mostly each family lives alone, which makes muskrat census-taking easy. Walter Abner Gibbs, who is the biggest muskrat breeder in the eastern U. S., used to wade round his 700 acres of Maryland marshland in hip boots, counting muskrat houses to see how large his next year’s catch would be. But last week impatient Walter Gibbs decided to take this year’s muskrat census by airplane, an innovation. He counted 4,000 muskrat huts, estimated they had 20,000 tenants.

When Walter Gibbs bought his land in 1913 he thought he was just going to use it for shooting ducks. But people told him he could easily pay his taxes in muskrat pelts. Mr. Gibbs was pleased to find he could. He invented two traps: one which got the muskrats not only by the leg (which they often gnaw off to escape) but also by the body; another which netted them, captured them alive. Before long he was inventing and manufacturing traps to catch everything from English sparrows to bears. By 1919 he had a large factory in Trainer, Pa., made as many as 2,000,000 traps a year, grossed annually as much as $400,000. But the fur business in all its branches was hit hard by Depression. Last year he sold out to his only big competitor, Animal Trap Co. of Lititz, Pa., which began as an enterprise of the celebrated Oneida Community.

Two to three million brown muskrats are caught annually by fur companies like Orange Cameron Land Co. in the Louisiana bayous, the great U. S. muskrat country. Their pelts retail at from 50¢ to $1.25., But prime muskrat is black muskrat, whose native habitat is around the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays and whose pelts bring $2. With the money he got for his trap factory Mr. Gibbs promptly bought 3,000 acres of muskrat marsh on Currituck Sound, N. C., began transferring his black muskrats south. More than half the 2,400 muskrats he caught alive in Maryland last year he shipped off to breed in North Carolina. Since then he has been busy dredging canals and ditches so his muskrats can swim deep in winter and grub for roots underneath the ice, using the mud to build up the banks so there will be plenty of slick slopes for them to slide down in their leisure hours. Next week Mr. Gibbs will fly down to North Carolina to see how his muskrats are doing. Though he does not plan to do any trapping there till 1939, in five years he expects to be catching 25,000 a season.

Since Mr. Gibbs went into the muskrat business he has caught about 75,000 animals, which would mean more than 1,000 muskrat coats if he had sold them all for fur. Actually he sells many alive to other breeders, some as far away as Czechoslovakia. A pair of black muskrats used to bring him $50, twice as much as he gets now. Almost all the skinned muskrats are sold to markets in Baltimore and Philadelphia. Sometimes the meat is retailed as “marsh rabbit,” sometimes as terrapin.