# Mole Trapping?



## dewy6068 (Jan 5, 2010)

Anyone have any tips/tricks to trapping miles in your yard? I've been trying to catch them all spring and have been failing miserably!

I live out in the woods and their trails just come in a few feet from the woods into the lawn so I'm thinking they just don't travel that same trail very often. Anyone have a similar experience with moles that they figured out how to kill them?


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## thelastlemming (Sep 11, 2009)

It mostly comes down to grub control. If you go to the Homesteading and Home improvement forum there's a 50 page topic on how to deal with moles.


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## Patrickr (May 2, 2016)

thelastlemming said:


> It mostly comes down to grub control. If you go to the Homesteading and Home improvement forum there's a 50 page topic on how to deal with moles.


I've trapped just under 10K of them for pay. It was the specialty niche I used to get into the urban wildlife business. Grub control is not the cure all. Moles eat all sorts of ground insects. Worms are a huge one. Being located in the woods you will probably have an ongoing issue that just requires routine maintenance. What you ideally want is a run going from point A to point B. Think root system to root system. They are going from one feeding area to another. When the weather is cooler or it is super hot and dry out you will ofter find the moles moving out of the drier more exposed areas back under the cover of leaves or heavy plantings around the house where the ground stays moist. I could get into more important details that you might need to know but am recovering from surgery right now and tired. I'll check back later.


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## wally-eye (Oct 27, 2004)

dewy6068 said:


> Anyone have any tips/tricks to trapping miles in your yard? I've been trying to catch them all spring and have been failing miserably!
> 
> I live out in the woods and their trails just come in a few feet from the woods into the lawn so I'm thinking they just don't travel that same trail very often. Anyone have a similar experience with moles that they figured out how to kill them?




When you try everything else the EZ set mole trap is a guarantee

Like posted go to the homesteading section of MS and read the thread.........

EZ set traps for the WIN............you can get them at Tractor Supply stores or stores of that nature..........best $20 you'll ever spend.......


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## jigornot (Dec 29, 2010)

Had a learning curve on how to catch them. You need to find a "run" and set a trap on it. The places in the pushed up dirt where they are tunneling longer distances that go in straighter lines are used like main travel "highways" where as dirt pushed up all over the place are areas where they were finding food. "Feeding" mounds are not good to set on because most of the time they don't dig there again. I can't remember what the brand of my traps are but they are 2 big jaws that you shove in the ground and then open up to set. Filing the the trip arm free of burs and making a hair trigger on it really helped my catch rate. Setting required sort of packing the trail down under the trip and getting it set so the trip barely rested on the packed dirt. I had those buggers in my yard so bad I thought about placing a lawn roller on the front of my mower to save my blades.


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## Martin Looker (Jul 16, 2015)

Make sure your trap is clean before you set it. if it smells like dead mole they will not get caught.


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## Patrickr (May 2, 2016)

Martin Looker said:


> Make sure your trap is clean before you set it. if it smells like dead mole they will not get caught.


Dewy6068, if there is some way in which you can contact me directly I will be glad to give you the honest facts about highly effective mole trapping. If you do a google search of Wildlife Control Technology you might be able to find my article on mole trapping titled, "Mole Trapping; Tunnels of Gold". Or something like that. Helped many an urban ADC trapper get into the commercial mole trapping business. Or do a search for the Cincinnati Mole Man.


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## JBooth (Sep 21, 2009)

as mentioned above they do have good noses on them. I read somewhere that they try to avoid dogs (as most small animals do) so I started letting my dogs dig any tunnels I would find creeping into my yard. They never continued the tunnel once a dog had rooted around in it for a while.


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## NEW HUDSON WALT (Jan 11, 2009)

Kill them with an ICE SPUD ! After about 10 years of grub control and traps, I stopped 
wasting the money. I go out at dusk and step down the runways....I go out at dawn
and walk around slow looking at the runways I stepped down , as soon as I see
ground movement I spear them with the spud. One month I killed 14 moles ,and
it's been two years and I have not had any since. Should have done this years ago.


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## Patrickr (May 2, 2016)

Jbooth, those were just exploratory tunnels into your yard from the woods. Made once, never to be used again. Your dog had nothing to do with it. When I trapped moles commercially I trapped in hundreds of lawns with dogs running around on them. Moles are not afraid of dogs or scent on the traps.

New Hudson Walt, if an individual has the time and patience doing as you did can prove successful as you proved. But as a former commercial trapper, I have to ask; What changed in the habitat that prevented moles from migrating in to fill the void you created in what was apparently good mole habitat? What was the size of your lawn and what type of habitat surrounded your lawn? Grub toxins should not be applied unless you have signs of grub depredation. Grub toxins are for controlling grubs not moles. If you have a healthy lawn you will have lots of earth worms and if the habitat is right you will have moles sooner or later hunting those worms. There are lots of little things a trapper needs to know and do to be real good at mole trapping. It's not the trap you use but how you use it. Trapping moles is no different that trapping mice, *****, rats, or coyotes. It all boils down to knowing the animal better than it knows itself and how it utilizes its habitat.

Every animal out there will tell the observant trapper/hunter when, where, and how you can kill it. You just have to listen to what it is telling you.


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## 9 (Jan 17, 2000)

Patrickr said:


> Every animal out there will tell the observant trapper/hunter when, where, and how you can kill it. You just have to listen to what it is telling you.


 There it is for all the inexperienced trappers following this thread! VERY, VERY, sage advice indeed!


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## NEW HUDSON WALT (Jan 11, 2009)

Patrickr said:


> Jbooth, those were just exploratory tunnels into your yard from the woods. Made once, never to be used again. Your dog had nothing to do with it. When I trapped moles commercially I trapped in hundreds of lawns with dogs running around on them. Moles are not afraid of dogs or scent on the traps.
> 
> New Hudson Walt, if an individual has the time and patience doing as you did can prove successful as you proved. But as a former commercial trapper, I have to ask; What changed in the habitat that prevented moles from migrating in to fill the void you created in what was apparently good mole habitat? What was the size of your lawn and what type of habitat surrounded your lawn? Grub toxins should not be applied unless you have signs of grub depredation. Grub toxins are for controlling grubs not moles. If you have a healthy lawn you will have lots of earth worms and if the habitat is right you will have moles sooner or later hunting those worms. There are lots of little things a trapper needs to know and do to be real good at mole trapping. It's not the trap you use but how you use it. Trapping moles is no different that trapping mice, *****, rats, or coyotes. It all boils down to knowing the animal better than it knows itself and how it utilizes its habitat.
> 
> Every animal out there will tell the observant trapper/hunter when, where, and how you can kill it. You just have to listen to what it is telling you.


I agree with you 100 %...I quit working two years ago.....I get up by 5a.m. I cannot
sleep any later.....so to tell you the truth, it gave me something to do for the first hour
or two in the morning....I live on 10 acres with about 1 acre of lawn. My wife thinks
I am crazy.


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## 9 (Jan 17, 2000)

NEW HUDSON WALT said:


> Kill them with an ICE SPUD ! After about 10 years of grub control and traps, I stopped
> wasting the money. I go out at dusk and step down the runways....I go out at dawn
> and walk around slow looking at the runways I stepped down , as soon as I see
> ground movement I spear them with the spud. One month I killed 14 moles ,and
> it's been two years and I have not had any since. Should have done this years ago.


LMAO! Reminds me of when my brother and I were kids. We'd pack down the tunnels, set a lawn chair over the tunnel, and sit and wait with a sucker spear. LOL Spearing moles was better then hoeing beans! LOL


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## Patrickr (May 2, 2016)

Seldom said:


> LMAO! Reminds me of when my brother and I were kids. We'd pack down the tunnels, set a lawn chair over the tunnel, and sit and wait with a sucker spear. LOL Spearing moles was better then hoeing beans! LOL


Anything is better than hoeing the beans lol. Where I grew up we had a lot of clay in our lawn. Very few moles as we were surrounded by cow pastures. So I grew up flushing 13 stripped Columbian Ground Squirrels out of their dens and shooting/trapping woodchucks. I'd rather shovel manure than hoe the garden.


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## 9 (Jan 17, 2000)

Patrickr said:


> Anything is better than hoeing the beans lol. Where I grew up we had a lot of clay in our lawn. Very few moles as we were surrounded by cow pastures. So I grew up flushing 13 stripped Columbian Ground Squirrels out of their dens and shooting/trapping woodchucks. I'd rather shovel manure than hoe the garden.


When I said "hoeing beans" I was talking about hoeing 20-40 acre fields either alone or with my kid brother. I'd set quart jars of water wrapped in newspaper at each end of a field for "sweat recovery". LOL

I don't know about that shoveling manure busienss. Every spring when I was a kid I'd fork chicken manure for a neighbor. He was using the old manger so all there was for ventilation a dang small window(what I was throwing it out into the spreadwer and the man-door. A 9hr job at $.50/hr to do a year's worth of chicken s--t throwing! Had to wear a bandana for the dust on top but wore rubber boots because of the "juice" on the bottom. Sweeeet!


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## Patrickr (May 2, 2016)

Seldom said:


> When I said "hoeing beans" I was talking about hoeing 20-40 acre fields either alone or with my kid brother. I'd set quart jars of water wrapped in newspaper at each end of a field for "sweat recovery". LOL
> 
> I don't know about that shoveling manure busienss. Every spring when I was a kid I'd fork chicken manure for a neighbor. He was using the old manger so all there was for ventilation a dang small window(what I was throwing it out into the spreadwer and the man-door. A 9hr job at $.50/hr to do a year's worth of chicken s--t throwing! Had to wear a bandana for the dust on top but wore rubber boots because of the "juice" on the bottom. Sweeeet!


Seldom you are a better man than me for hoeing bean fields and forking chicken manure. I'll stick to cow manure and throwing hay bales around. That $0.50 per hour was spot on as well. And kids think they have it tough now days. I used to pick strawberries and raspberries for a local grower in the late spring/early summer, and then pick peaches, pears, and apples when they came on in between everything else. No end to the work available if a kid wanted to work hard. Good times.


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