How to Whack a Mole With a Mole Trap

Mole hills in my front yard

Two years ago we had a mole invasion in our front yard and last year they moved into our backyard. They weren’t too bad but I must admit they were a bit annoying. I tried a lot of different things to get rid of them with varied success, including:

• Running a garden hose in their tunnel
• Wriggley’s spearmint gum
• Mole bombs

The funniest thing to try, for me, was the mole bombs. It had a fuse, made a great cloud of smoke and it looked like it was doing something. Actually, they did seem to settle down for a month or so after that trick.

The easiest one was to try the gum. A few things I did find out along the way. You should break it into small pieces. You should not handle with your hands, scent scares them I guess. Again this seemed to slow down the activity but they might have been on vacation or raiding someone else lawn for awhile.

The third attempt was the good old garden hose. I think flooding their tunnel does work but you need to constantly running the tap and filling their holes. This worse than moving your lawn sprinkler around your yard.

Mole trap called Mole Buster

So now I’ve come to the next phase, mole traps. I talked to one of my neighbours and he said it is the way to go and it worked for him. He explained to me the trap, how it works and I went looking for them. Actually, I phoned around first and I recommend doing this. A lot of places do not have mole traps. I tried the garden stores and hardware stores and finally found one fairly large store that carriers them. If you are in the Vancouver area, check out Art Knapps Plantland on King George Highway.

Also, make sure you ask them were they can be found in the store when you phone in, this will save you some time at the store. Even when they told me which aisle they were in it took me a little while to find them. Here is a picture of what they look like, which will make it easier to find them.

The next phase is to setup the trap and see if these things work. I will be setting them up in the next few days and I will let you know my experience and how it goes.

Update  on the mole trap

The mole trap has an indicator if the trap has been activated. After waiting for a few weeks there was no indication that the trap had been sprung and I was curious. I decided to check it out just in case it had caught a mole. I dug away the dirt and checked both traps and both had been activated, but there was no mole.

I’m guessing the trap was sprung when I put them into the mole tunnel. The traps are fairly sensitive. So I reset the traps and put them back into the tunnels and was very careful when I covered them up. This time I also cleaned up the rest of the mole hills so I could see if there was any activity. If they are not using the tunnels there is no way I’m going to catch any thing.

I remembered the lady at the garden store mentioned that you need to make sure the tunnels are active before you insert the traps. The she said to tell is to flattened the tunnels and then you can tell if they are active when the ridges reappear. The problem with these tunnels is that they are really deep in the ground so there are not ridges. The best way I could tell is if they are active and mounding up the dirt.

So after waiting another week there is no activity, so I guess they have moved on. Maybe they recognized the traps and moved on. Probably to my back yard so I’m going to relocate them this weekend. I will update in a week or so if I have any success.