Ábrahám Levente: Biomonitoring a Dráva folyó magyarországi szakasza mentén 2000-2004 - Natura Somogyiensis 7. (Kaposvár, 2005)
Heltai, Miklós, Szemethy, László, Szabó, László - Szőcs, Emese: Small and medium sized predators monitoring along River Dráva - Kis- és közepesméretű ragadozó emlősök monitoringja a Dráva mentén
162 NATURA SOMOGYIENSIS trapping places since the year 2001. We payed attention all the time to the traps to be located equally on the territory if possible. So it was an opportunity for us to form the trap places not by necessity, just because we passed 50 meters, but we could choose those places where the successful trapping has the highest possibility. We also gave up the uniform, planned in advance outplacements of the bait. We used the next materials as varied as possible fitting in the given traps and areas according to the disappeared lures outplaced as dragging: liver, fish, chicken-neck, raw and boiled egg, dry dog food, dog salami, table-tennis ball, flavoured bread, pieces of chicken meat, Valeriana officinalis, apple, grape. Changes in the applied traps In the first two years we kept trying new kinds of traps, which were not in the protocol. According to these tests we decided to use a total of 24 traps too, which are bigger than those we applied earlier. This alteration had three reasons. The most important wasthat already after the initial researches it was found out, that one of the most valuable predators of the territory is the wild cat. This medium sized predator species can be trapped more successfully with bigger sized traps. The second reason was that during our observations it seemed to be that first of all the pine marten went sooner into the trap, that was larger than the one before. The third reason was in turn that probably the effectiveness could be grown with making the trap-park more various. Therefore the trap-park stood about 76 small sized 1 stone marten 1 traps, 12 medium sized „stone marten" traps and 12 large sized traps from 2001. The medium sized 1 stone marten 1 trap is all the same in it' s material, shape and work as the small sized trap, the only difference is in the size. It's door size is 25x25 cm whilst the length is 100 cm. The 150 cm long, 35 cm wide and 45 cm tall large sized trap belongs to the slippingdoored traps. The doors run in the rails prepared on the two sides of the trap. The lifted doors are held by the rectangular holding element, which is fixed up to the door keeping axle and turns round on it. The longer arm of the holding element shores up the door, the thin wire-bowden sets out from it's shorter part toward the locking mechanism. The locking mechanism is a dual lever, that can hold the doors together or separately too. So the trap can be used both ways as a mechanism with one or two doors. The tread-pedal can be inlayed into the counter-holder situated at the bottom of the locking mechanism, or we can hang the lure up directly here. By pushing the tread pedal or pulling the lure the locking mechanism is releasing, the bowden get loosen, the door keeper turns out round the axle under the door that falls down. The material of the trap's case part is spot-welded wire netting, which has a 2.5x5 cm mesh. The stiff frame round the doors is formed by flat-irons that are fixed with screws end-to-end. There is a door covered with sheetiron in the middle of the trap above the tread-pedal, which can be opened after unfastening a screw to make the feeding easier. A small penthouse can be put onto the locking mechanism to protect the lock from the falling twigs or from birds ready for sitting on it. Whilst the sensitiveness of the locking mechanism, namely the scale of the strength needed for the letting off can be regulated practically everything can be captured with the trap, that is willing to go in it and can't get through the mesh. Of course because of it's size it is suitable first of all for capturing major sized predator species like the red fox, the badger or the wild cat.
