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The Larsen trap is mainly a trap for magpies, although it also has been known to catch crows, jays and other corvids.

It is one of the few traps where it is legal to use a live bird to catch others – not as ‘bait’ in the usual sense but by using the natural instinct of these birds to guard their territory.  Dominant birds, or new birds entering an area, will approach the call bird and in the course of the encounter will be caught.

The health and welfare of the call bird is very important – both morally and legally.  It must be provided with water, food and shelter.

The trap must also be inspected at least daily.

Larsen Traps in Action

Here’s some Larsen traps in action.

A call bird and catch. Notice the two cage cups for food and water.

A fake nest is often effective in catching a first call bird. This can work all year round but is most effective in Spring and early Summer.

This one is using the ‘pop bottle drinker’ described in the book.

Hints on a Side Opener

Personally I have found the most difficult aspect of making a side entry trap is getting the springs right.

Commercial Larsen Trap springs are designed to close a top opener by pushing the door outwards where as with a Side Opening trap they need to push the doors inwards.

Unfortunately this means that the legs of the springs don’t quite orientate as well as you would like and don’t line up neatly against the trap ‘leg’.

Close up of the 'hinges'

To get around this I have fitted the spring to the side of the door using staples as normal— although you’ll notice it’s the other way round.  You will see that in order to give the spring arm some degree of purchase I have place the short leg on top of the frame, secured it with a wire staple.

Other Variations

This is an example of a different design of door and trigger mechanism illustrated in the diagram below.

The door opens outwards to set the trap and is propped open by a small block placed between the cage side and the return edge of the door. This block is connected to the end of a long perch by means of cord or wire. The other end of this perch is pivoted off the opposite of the cage. The weight of a bird landing on the perch is enough to pull the block out of place and release the door.

One advantage of this design is that by closing inwards the door helps to capture any bird that may be escaping.  It’s also probable that the cage would not need to be as deep as a conventional Larsen trap as it does not require the bird to go a ‘door depth’ into the cage.
On the downside the door would need to be firmly sprung both to prevent the door being pushed open as even a partial opening could lead to the captured bird injuring itself.  The spring must also be strong enough to hold the door firm when set otherwise a gust of wind could wobble the door, release the block and spring the trap.  Some sort of ‘stop’ behind he door may prevent this.

Reader Suggestion

We recently had an email from Vaughan in Norfolk with a excellent suggestion for the Larsen Trap design.

“You might find it useful if you fix a triangular piece of wood say 4″x4″ x 1.5 on each of the bottom corners to keep it off the ground and stop it rotting over time. It also strengthens it a bit and stops the bird poo from accumulating on the mesh.”

An alternative would be to use rails,  screwed along the ends or straight across the bottom.  These  would also strengthen the trap as well as make them easier to stack upside down when not in use.  Remember to make the floor using fine mesh, something like 5mm squares, so that the birds can walk on it comfortably and cannot be attacked from underneath.

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This trap is ideal for catching feral pigeons which can quickly accumulate in large numbers and create a health hazard. The design makes use of ‘bob wires’ which allow the birds to push past in one direction but which will not swing back the other way.

A door made with with commercial bobwires (they have a hollow plastic ‘T’ bar which is slid onto a mounting wire or bar).

The picture shows a door clamped to a length of timber to show how it would look, in a real trap it would be screwed to the bottom rail of the cage.

The book Trap Making Step by Step gives details for creating a bob wire entrance using commercial bob wires (available in the shop) and the sizes of cage to mount it in.
As with all the traps featured in the book there are rules governing their legal use.

You may occasionally capture a ringed bird amongst the feral birds. Sometimes this is a racing bird that has joined a feral flock but just as likely it’s a bird on route which has stopped for rest and food.  Either way any ringed bird should be separated from the others and released as quickly as possible.

If a particular bird is recaptured over several days, make a note of the ring number and contact Royal Pigeon Racing Association.  Racing Pigeons have a high financial and emotional value to their trainers so every effort should be made to return them unharmed.

Pigeon Traps in Action

These are pictures of bob wire pigeon traps in action.

These traps were not built from my plans but were the inspiration for it.

Pigeon entering a busy trap.

More bob wires in action

An Experimental Trap

This was a trap I built as a bit of an experiment. The bobwire doors work on the same principle but.....

this trap can be dismantled and put away for storage.

In this picture you can see how the doors work, with the pigeon pushing through the bobwires to reach the grain....

before finally being captured.

‘Prop and String Pull’ Pigeon Trap

Peter B, from Redditch used this cage to try and catch pigeons using the ‘prop and string pull’ method. After buying a few bobwires he was able to convert it into a much more successful trap.

Alternative Doors

I can’t take credit for this one. It was sent to me by ‘Talpa’ of South Wales who found that some of the large ferals had managed to push the bobwires out of shape and escape. Talpa has gone for the Ground Funnel approach, an example of the passive door principle described in Trap Making Step by Step.

March 2011

More recently I have been engaged to make large pigeon traps on a commercial basis for one of the big national Pest Control firms.   After a few trials we settled on a 4ft by 4ft design with 2 bobwire doors and 2 funnel doors.   This dual approach gave the technicians the opportunity to chop and change according to what worked best at any given site.

Another innovation was the ‘lift up’ roof panel that made life a bit easier for the technician when inside the trap.    See also the ‘Plan Updates’ section for improvements to the bobwire doors.

New design pigeon trap with top lowered, bobwires open for prebaiting phase.

Same trap with top in raised position to enable easier access and servicing.

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This post will contain any updates or improvements to the plans in Trap Making Step by Step.

Feral Pigeon Trap

Some readers have reported instances of captured pigeons squeezing their way back out through bobwire doors.  This seems to be particularly the case with slim younger birds or feral racing pigeons that are familiar with loft structures.

Over the last couple of years we have had a lot of success eliminating this in our own traps by making two simple changes to the basic design:

1. The first change is to cut the bobwires down to 7″ or 9″ in length.  This is fairly easy to do with a pair of heavy duty wire cutters or a hacksaw.  The metal is soft and cuts easily.  These shorter bobwires remove some of the flexibility, but be sure to adjust the height of the frame to cater for the new length.
2. The second improvement is to cut slots in the foot rail to correspond with the bottom of the bobwires.  This means that when they are pushed outwards, the bobwires are effectively pinned at the bottom and not just at the top, but are still free to swing inwards.

Larsen Trap

We recently had an email from Vaughan in Norfolk with a excellent suggestion for the Larsen Trap design.

“You might find it useful if you fix a triangular piece of wood say 4″x4″ x 1.5 on each of the bottom corners to keep it off the ground and stop it rotting over time. It also strengthens it a bit and stops the bird poo from accumulating on the mesh.”

An alternative would be to use rails,  screwed along the ends or straight across the bottom.  These  would also strengthen the trap as well as make them easier to stack upside down when not in use.  Remember to make the floor using fine mesh, something like 5mm squares, so that the birds can walk on it comfortably and cannot be attacked from underneath.

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This is a lovely example of a traditional Finch Cage Trap, used widely through the 19th Century to catch Finches and other small birds suitable as caged pets.

Made from a wooden frame with wires inserted into the cross pieces to form the cage bars.

A trap just like this one is pictured in ‘With Nature and a Camera’ by Richard Kearton,published 1897.  I had assumed that many of these were home made but the one in the Kearton photograph appears to be identical so perhaps they were made commercially.

Kearton writes this about the trap he photographed.

“Bullfinches were caught by many cottagers in Kent and Sussex during the winter months with the kind of trap shown.  A call bird is placed in the lower compartment of the cage, and the upper one is baited with privet berries, which can easily be reached by the unwary victim through the open doorway shown in the picture.  The trap is hung up in a tree, and a soon as the bird enters to partake of the good things provided by the benevolent peasant, its weight releases a small door above its head, which instantly closes, and eventually the little prisoner finds its way, along with five or six others, to a bird dealer’s shop in the nearest town.”

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I came across this article on ebay and although I couldn’t make out much from the image at the time, I bought it anyway.     It is a brief reference to ‘Kings Lightning Trap‘ a huge scale bird trap that seems to have been effectively pegged down to the ground.

Has anyone else ever heard of this trap before ?

I have followed up the New Zealand angle and  managed to find this advert in an archive of New Zealand newspapers, but other than that, nothing at all.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume XXXIX, Issue 9621, 30 May 1919, Page 3

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We were recently engaged to make a series of large pigeon traps for one of the big national pest control firms.  After a few trials we settled on a 4ft by 4ft design with 2 bobwire doors and 2 funnel doors.  This dual approach gave the technicians the opportunity to chop and change according to what worked best at any given site.

The traps breakdown completely into 4 wall panels and a roof panel so that they can be carried up maintenance staircases and will fit through a conventional roof access door.  They are also designed to be completely assembled without any tools.  Another innovation was the ‘lift up’ roof panel that made life a bit easier for the technician when inside the trap.

New design pigeon trap with top lowered/

Same trap with top in raised position to enable easier access and servicing.

The results can be quite impressive.

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This is one of my collection of trapping photos, showing the use of Clap Nets in the USA in 1944.  Although Mist nets are more commonly used by bird banders, this type is also an establish part of the toolkit.

The text on the photographs explains how they were used:

“Many types of traps hate been devised for the purpose of capturing birds to be banded. This one is known as a clap-net. The mesh is supported by bamboo rods which rise from sockets in the operator‘s belt. A flock of small birds has been discovered in the nearby trees. The net is held in position while two or three persons surround the area and try to drive the birds toward the net. When the birds fly against the net it closes around them and they become entangled.”

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This is a Cage Trap for small birds, using the same mechanism as the Finch Trap but without the call bird chamber beneath.  It was purchased a few years ago as part of our ongoing research and development, but has now been sold.

It’s very difficult to give an accurate age for this trap but I would estimate 50 to 70 years old.  The sides of the trap are made from wires threaded through the frame, which is a time consuming and fiddly technique largely abandoned once wire mesh became easy to buy.  The base of the trap is made from a thin composite board which did make us think it might have been repaired, but after a little research I was surprised to discover that plywood was invented as early as the 1850s and in widespread use during the 1940s.  This then fits in with the estimated age.

There is some beetle damage but the trap has been treated with a recommended insecticide.  We cannot guarantee that it is now fully clear.

The weight and the angle of the door are not enough on there own to keep the trap set.  There needs to be enough pressure between the door and the falling perch for friction to hold the two parts stable.  In some of the photos below we have used a modern replacement spring for the door and this enables the trap to work perfectly.   On one side of the trap there are a few loops of wire around the top rail and this may have been part of a simple spring mechanism.

SOLD

Out of Stock

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A pair of Larsen Trap springs for the wooden frame design given in the book – enough to make both doors on a single trap.

Please call or email us for a price if your requirements are not shown above

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Please call or email us for a price if your requirements are not shown above