Arrowing experience to fill lockdown hours

While some took up breadmaking and learning new languages during the COVID-19 lockdown, Soldier Palmer turned to archery

- Soldier Palmer

Lockdown is lifting at last and it’s fun to look back on the many projects I undertook while confined to barracks.

While people across the country used the spring and summer of forced confinement to learn new languages and catch up on their reading, I learned how to make my own traps.

Forget knitting or watercolor painting; I discovered that it takes a 2p coin to counterbalance the weight of a mouse and that a stoat can eat through a wooden plank if he is angry enough.

I must confess that most of my home-made trapping experiments wound up in failure, but there was plenty of fun to be had along the way. With the exception of a rat or two, everything was released without injury or insult, and I came away from my studies with a far more rounded view of the trapping process.

In defence of my poor success rate, if you make your own trap then fail to catch anything, it can be hard to diagnose the problem. Is your trap design to blame or are you simply not using it properly? It often takes a little practice to use shop-bought traps successfully and contraptions bought off the shelf can require a fair amount of fine-tuning.

I console myself with the optimistic thought that I actually made some great traps, but simply failed to set them correctly. Perhaps that’s flattering myself, but if nothing else, even my most miserable failures left me with a pile of kindling for the woodburning stove.