Select the beat from the drop-down menu. The name of the first trap in the beat list will appear by default. If your phone has a built-in orientation sensor, the red arrow will point due north, and the black arrow will then show the direction of the trap from where you stand.
The touch buttons at the bottom of the Field Recording page allow you to add, inspect, activate or deactivate, and remove traps. The Deactivate and Remove buttons are available only when you have just inspected a trap. If you have gone back to a trap purely to deactivate or remove it, you will need to record this as an extra inspection. This is to ensure that you can’t forget to record a capture (or no capture).
If you are within the inspection distance of a previously added trap, the Inspect button will be green. Select Inspect. A new page of drop-down menus allows you to record the status of the trap as found. If you now decide to deactivate or remove the trap, you will need to close the Inspect screen and select the Deactivate or Remove button.
If the trap is empty at inspection, there are strong reasons for recording ‘Still set, no capture’ (the default) or ‘Sprung, no capture’. One is simply to record the fact that you did check the trap and that at the time of your check there was nothing in it. This safeguards you against an accusation of neglect if an animal is caught later in the day, and it adds to your record of responsible use, which might be useful as evidence one day. The second reason is that future analyses of trapping data by you or the GWCT may want to explore the consequences of inspection time or inspection frequency, or the propensity of different snares or traps to spend time out of use through misfires.
Once you have recorded the status of the current trap, Trapper will automatically select the next trap in the beat and show you its distance and direction from where you are. You can override this by using the forward and back arrows alongside the compass display, to jump to another trap in the beat.
If you add a new trap when in the field, it will be inserted into the currently selected beat between the last trap inspected and the next one in sequence.
Suspending trap operation
Click on the Deactivate button. This leaves the trap name and location, but Trapper will no longer expect daily visits, nor will you be able to record trap checks until the trap is activated again. If you use the Remove button, the trap location can no longer be reused. If you set a trap there again at some future date, it must be entered as a new trap.