[note: I always like to mention when discussing moles that they are meat eaters and not plant eaters. Moles in garden and farms are good allies. Moles in lawns can be tolerated because they are not consuming your lawn they are smothering it with soil. Cleaning up soil from large hills can minimize damage to a tolerable level.]

Moles are a little more of a challenge than gophers. Moles have more of an ability to learn as they are in the shrew family unlike the gopher in the rodent family. Moles are known to become trap shy and avoid steel objects in the ground. Moles do have regular patterns and use some of their runs or burrows on a daily basis. Some burrows are used once or rarely. Your first task is to identify which runs are used most often. Also, there are two distinct kinds of mole burrows, the suraface or feeding runs which are just below the surface and look like this

Or you may see the mounds created when a mole is digging a deeper permanent burrow and they look like this;

Surface Burrow Trapping

1. Follow burrows and find where they seem to join together or where they follow along a curb, driveway, side of a building or garden border. If not along a border step down a few sections of the raised run and check the next day to see if they are raised again indicating that the mole has used the burrow again. If you find this, then you have a good trapping site. Open the burrow in each direction and place two Cinch traps, one in each direction like this

You may have to wait a day or two until the mole comes back through the burrow. If a trap is sprung reset and wait. If the mole tunnels around the trap then you need to try a different set in a deeper burrow.

Deep Burrow Trapping

You can always tell when you have deep mole burrows by the series of mounds that represent the soil that moles bring to the surface while excavating the deep burrows. These piles are almost always at the end of a lateral tunnel off the main tunnel. and look like this

You can trap in these tunnels easily without a lot of work by using the Hori Hori tool to open the tunnels.

(one of the best all around gardening tools as well)

So here is step 1. Plunge the Hori Hori or other sharp tool between mounds until you sink into a burrow. They are usually 4-8 inches under the soil. When you find the burrow use the tool to open a gradual opening into the burrow.

The tool will fall through the tunnel.

Set in cinch trap and then repeat the setup in opposite direction.

Check back the next day and see if you were successful. If the tunnels are too deep for the method to work easily either try another spot or get out the shovel and excavate and then set in traps in hole. In my business doing as little damage to the landscape is the key.

Trapping Along an Edge

It has been my experience that trapping along an edge like a driveway, wall, rock border or anything that moles follow along is the most successful trapping site. They are also the easiest to set up especially because the Cinch trap has the extended jaws enabling them to have a long reach under objects. Here are some examples of these kind of sites

In this case, simply open the burrow finding the direction and insert the trap