You don’t need bait to trap gophers. Researchers at UC Davis tested various attractants and found no benefit to using food baits or scent lures in gopher traps. Proper trap placement in an active tunnel is what determines whether you catch the gopher, not what you put on the trap. This runs counter to a lot of advice floating around online, but the science is clear: bait doesn’t improve your capture rate.
Why Bait Doesn’t Work on Gophers
Pocket gophers aren’t foraging above ground like squirrels or raccoons. They live almost entirely underground, traveling through a network of tunnels they’ve dug themselves. When a gopher encounters a trap in its tunnel, it’s not being lured toward food. It’s simply moving through its own burrow and running into the trap. The gopher has no choice but to pass through that section of tunnel, which is why placement matters far more than any attractant.
Several attractants have been formally tested, including food baits and scent-based lures. None of them influenced how often gophers visited traps or how quickly they were captured. The attractants didn’t even change which gophers were caught (male versus female). And if you’ve been told to wear gloves to mask your scent, you can skip that step too. Human scent on traps has no measurable impact on trapping success.
What Actually Catches Gophers
The single most important factor is setting your trap in the main runway rather than a lateral (side) tunnel. Gopher burrow systems have one main tunnel running 4 to 18 inches below the surface, roughly parallel to the ground. Branching off that main tunnel are shorter lateral tunnels that end at the surface, each one marked by a fan-shaped mound of dirt. Those mounds are what you see in your yard, but the lateral tunnels that created them aren’t the best place to trap.
You can have some success trapping in laterals, but you’ll consistently catch more gophers by finding and trapping the main runway. The main tunnel is the highway. Laterals are side streets the gopher may not revisit for days.
Finding the Main Runway
Start at a fresh mound (the soil will be darker and moister than older mounds). The plugged tunnel entrance is on the flatter side of the fan-shaped mound, not the center. Push a probe, a long screwdriver, or a metal rod into the ground about 8 to 12 inches from the plug side of the mound. When the probe suddenly drops an inch or two, you’ve hit a tunnel. The main runway typically runs between mounds, connecting them in a rough line, so probing between two nearby mounds gives you the best odds of hitting it rather than a lateral.
Setting the Trap
Once you locate the main tunnel, dig a small hole down to it. A post-hole digger works well. Clear all loose dirt out of the tunnel so the trap sits flush inside it. Place two traps facing opposite directions so you cover both approaches. Then cover the hole with a piece of plywood or a board and seal the edges with soil to block out light. Gophers will try to investigate and re-seal any breach in their tunnel system, which drives them straight into the trap.
Check your traps at least once a day. If you haven’t caught anything in two days, the tunnel may be inactive. Move your traps to a fresher mound area and try again.
Poison Baits Are a Different Category
It’s worth distinguishing between “bait” as a trap attractant and poison bait products sold to kill gophers. These are pesticide-laced grain or pellets designed to be placed directly in tunnels. They work on a completely different principle: the gopher eats them while foraging underground.
If you go this route, pet safety becomes a serious concern. Dogs in particular will dig up treated areas and can be poisoned by eating the bait or even a poisoned gopher. Buy only what you need for immediate use, because leftover product stored in a garage or shed is a risk to children and pets. Cover any holes where you’ve placed bait with sod and then something heavy like a brick or piece of wood to make it harder for a dog to dig through. Monitor your pets closely and keep them away from treated areas until the problem is resolved, then remove and properly dispose of any remaining bait.
For most homeowners, mechanical traps are simpler, cheaper, and don’t carry the secondary poisoning risk. And since those traps work perfectly well without any bait at all, the real investment is just learning to read gopher mounds and find the main tunnel.
Common Bait Recommendations You Can Ignore
You’ll find plenty of suggestions to bait gopher traps with peanut butter, carrots, lettuce, apples, or even anise oil as a scent attractant. These aren’t harmful to use, but controlled testing shows they simply don’t help. If you’ve been struggling to catch a gopher despite using bait, the bait isn’t the problem. Recheck your trap placement. The most common mistakes are setting traps in lateral tunnels instead of the main runway, leaving too much loose soil in the tunnel so the trap doesn’t sit properly, and letting light leak into the tunnel opening, which makes the gopher plug the hole from a distance rather than approach the trap.