Three different muskrat traps turned up empty, however that didn’t faze Baker, who likes to deal with wins, not losses.

“It’s Christmas each morning,” Baker mentioned. “That’s how trappers take a look at that.”

Baker, who lives in St. Leonard, Md., is considered one of a dwindling breed. As soon as upon a time, trappers had been instrumental to European colonization of North America, as fur-trading outposts turned settlements and later cities. As just lately because the Seventies, Maryland counted roughly 5,000 trappers; in the present day there are perhaps 300 to 400 lively statewide who usually lure for fur, meals or pest management, state officers mentioned.

“It might be arduous to inform the story of the US with out speaking about trapping,” mentioned Joshua Tabora, a furbearer biologist with the state’s Division of Pure Sources.

However modifications in style and the lengthy, regular migration of People from farms and rural areas into cities and suburbs have made trapping a controversial anachronism. World fur costs have collapsed since 2013-14, pushed by components starting from overproduction of farm-raised animals to the battle in Ukraine to the pandemic, additional decreasing a bunch of outdoorsmen with a novel perception into the wild.

Trappers, who present knowledge to the DNR for analysis on animal populations and monitoring zoonotic and different illnesses, are usually keenly observant and educated about animal conduct and the indicators their quarry go away behind, Tabora mentioned.

“Trappers normally are a few of the most religious and most detail-oriented … outdoorsmen on the market,” he mentioned. “Once you discuss to a few of these guys who’ve been doing it for the reason that ’70s and the ’80s, they’re similar to dictionaries — they’re strolling repositories of ecological information.”

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Roosters crowed and the sky turned milky blue when Baker climbed right into a Ford 250 truck to run his trapline early on a uncooked January morning. He packed some plastic tubs and a bunch of tobacco stakes, which he makes use of to safe every lure by a sequence or wire earlier than driving the stakes into the bottom. He was keen to complete earlier than a rainstorm moved in and desirous to share what he’s realized over time from trapping.

When Baker, 57, rolls onto a farm, he reads the land with a psychological map of the routes a fox will journey over ridge and hole because it sifts the air for prey. He scours the banks of streams for locations the place otters have left scat filled with undigested fish scales. He walks farm ponds at midday with the solar excessive overhead, scanning the underside for the telltale method that muskrats swimming to their dens kick up the silt and algae.

“You see the yellow? Versus the inexperienced?” Baker requested, pointing to an virtually imperceptible path via the underwater weeds and algae as he walked beside a pond the place he had laid a number of traps. He waded off the financial institution gingerly, in order to not sink in too deep. Water lapped round his knees as he rooted about, hauling up what checked out first like a clump of weeds. It was muskrat, pancaked by the metallic bars of one other body-gripping lure.

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Baker is aware of how one can set leghold traps in order that they catch and drown a muskrat on the identical time. He faculties youthful trappers on how one can create and conceal elaborate units that may trick even essentially the most cautious coyote and on how one can kill a fox with two sharp blows from a membership. He saves the intestines of coyotes and foxes to assist the DNR monitor a parasite that additionally infects canines. He can whip out a blade and pores and skin a muskrat in 4 minutes flat with out nicking the pelt.

He sells the muskrat’s fur for $4. He sells the meat on the identical worth.

“It’s a delicacy,” Baker mentioned. “I’ve been promoting muskrat meat for most likely 45 years. So that you construct up a market via the years, and these days I’m like the one one which sells it round right here.”

Baker has been trapping for thus lengthy that almost all of his each day routines are dictated by the seasons and the animals he catches or kills. Come autumn and the primary chilly snap, he lays traps for muskrats, coyotes and foxes, typically pursuing them deep into winter. When spring returns, he’s after eels, then perch, then crabs. He tongs oysters from sandbars after they’re in season.

As summer season wheels into autumn, he’s again to trapping muskrats. In between there’s duck searching, which takes him to his blind on the Patuxent, and wild turkey season. When deer searching begins, he opens his butcher store within the barn behind his home, the place he additionally builds eel pots and different watery traps that he lists on the market.

For enjoyable, he carves duck decoys. He makes use of a comb to brush the paint into delicate swirls on his canvasbacks — a signature contact, he says — and melts his personal lead for the weights that enable decoys to journey upright within the water.

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He has spent a lifetime learning animals — how they journey, how they shelter, how they reproduce, what eats what. He spent 10 years touring the East Coast competing in waterfowl-calling competitions, a ability that turns out to be useful when he’s main searching events as knowledgeable information.

“Our first marriage ceremony anniversary, he took me on a ‘cruise’ up Looking Creek checking eel pots,” mentioned his spouse, Roberta “Bert” Baker. The couple met on an ambulance run in October 1985 — she was an EMT with St. Leonard, he a member of Prince Frederick’s rescue squad — and so they kind of hit it off whereas transporting a lifeless physique to a hospital.

Not lengthy after they started courting, Dan Baker mentioned, he realized they’d one thing particular. Whereas driving to the flicks in Annapolis in her Monte Carlo, they handed a lifeless raccoon. For a trapper, it was like discovering a $10 invoice on the aspect of the highway. However Baker, considering his date could be horrified on the concept of choosing up contemporary roadkill in her automotive, stored quiet. Then she spoke up as if she had learn his thoughts.

“Nicely,” he recollects her saying, “I obtained some newspaper within the again. You need to return and get the coon?”

“I’m, like, ‘Positive,’” Baker mentioned. “I knew I used to be going to marry her then.”

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In order that they did almost 36 years in the past, and raised two youngsters in a home on the farm Baker’s father as soon as owned. Along with many aspect gigs, Dan Baker works for Calvert County as a security officer. He’s additionally a lifetime member of the St. Leonard Volunteer Hearth Division, the place he served as chief for a time and used his expertise as a licensed diver to assist arrange its dive staff.

Roberta oversees the St. Leonard hearth division as its president. She spent the primary 10 years of her life in Cleveland earlier than transferring to Southern Maryland along with her household, however embraced nation residing, if not the searching and trapping that’s on the heart of her husband’s world.

“I don’t know anyone sane who desires to stand up at 4 o’clock within the morning and get your searching gear on and exit on this bitter chilly and duck hunt. That’s simply loopy to me,” she mentioned.

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Baker picked up a lot of his pursuits from his father and namesake — Dan is Daniel Baker III — who lived in Lusby, working as an electrician by day and a Maryland state trooper by night time. In 1976 Baker’s father purchased a 36-acre farm, and Baker realized to lure after raccoons began raiding the rooster coop. He turned ok at it that neighbors requested him for assist.

“It obtained to the purpose the place someone had a groundhog of their backyard so that they’d name me,” Baker recalled. “After which someone would say, ‘I obtained a snake in the home. Are you able to come down?’ And it simply obtained larger and larger.”

When he was 13 years outdated, Baker joined the Maryland Fur Trappers Inc. He even gained a trapping competitors, a lot to the annoyance of the grownup trappers he beat. These had been the times when a primary pink fox pelt would fetch a mean of $46 — about $185 in in the present day’s {dollars} — and old-timers guarded their turf as carefully as their commerce secrets and techniques. In a superb yr, Baker caught as many as 200 pink foxes and grey foxes — not dangerous pocket cash, even when not precisely sufficient to make a residing.

These days, although, fox pelts go for round $3, Baker mentioned. The U.S. fur commerce — which peaked within the Seventies and Nineteen Eighties — has plummeted due to the animal rights motion and advances in material know-how that led to a change from pure furs.

However Baker, like different trappers, discovered that trapping “nuisance animals” might nonetheless earn money. The Maryland State Freeway Administration pays him to lure beavers, whose dams can flood and wreak havoc with nation roads, and peculiar people pay him to take away pesky dwelling invaders.

“We’re those getting the squirrels out of the attics, the raccoons knocking over rubbish cans, foxes stepping into yard chickens,” Baker mentioned. “All people has chickens now of their yard.”

After returning dwelling that day in January from operating the lure line — about 25 traps in all — Baker lugged the plastic tubs together with his catch into his butcher store. Deer carcasses hung from the low ceiling, the air heavy with the tang of dried blood. For 3 hours of labor, he counted 5 muskrats and one mink.

His instrument of selection for skinning muskrats is a blade he usual from a small metallic file. He whet the perimeters on a metal, ruffled the muskrat’s moist fur together with his fingers and flipped the carcass on its again. Then one other few deft cuts, till he might seize sufficient unfastened pores and skin and, as if turning a sock inside out, yanked the cover off. He rolled the meat in plastic wrap to promote, with the tooth exhibiting, in order that patrons could be certain it’s not possum or another critter.

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One in all his common clients is Howard Brooks, who lives in Lusby and took 300 muskrat meats off Baker final yr. Brooks mentioned he stored just a few dozen for himself and distributed the remainder, at value, to other people who prize the muskrat’s darkish, savory flesh.

“You’ll be able to bake ’em, grill ’em,” Brooks mentioned. “I can fry them and make gravy with some onions. They don’t style like rooster, I can let you know that.”

There are regional cook-offs for muskrat, which is usually styled “marsh rabbit” for the squeamish, which Baker will not be. He cooks a number of sport, together with groundhog slathered in bacon and pulled from the bone like pork. He’s eaten crow, actually. His spouse and searching associates say he’ll eat something, not as a praise.

“Muskrat? Completely not in my home,” Roberta Baker mentioned. “Rabbit would make me gag, too. However he eats all of that stuff.”

Dan Baker doesn’t rip round backwoods trails in four-wheel-drive autos or elevate Chesapeake Bay retrievers like he used to. He’s much less inclined to remain out all night time searching coyotes or different varmints. He passes on what he’s realized about searching and trapping to his 7-year-old grandson and anybody else who asks, together with a 30-something neighbor, who couldn’t catch a fox it doesn’t matter what he tried.

Baker took the novice trapper out this winter and confirmed him the painstaking methodology of laying a lure that resembles the buried caches of meals that foxes go away behind after killing their prey. The setup requires choosing the right location, digging out the bottom and dealing with instruments in order to not go away traces of human odor or exercise, including scent-masking lures akin to fox urine and scat.

The method labored so effectively, Baker mentioned, that the trapper went on Fb just a few days later to boast about his success, saying he was catching foxes each night time with tips he had realized from “an old-timer.” Baker shook his head on the thought.

“I’m one of many old-timers now,” he mentioned. “Fifty-seven is old-timer now.”