Best Gopher Traps of 2026

Stainless steel, a five-and-a-half-inch body and three to a pack: this one is built for pocket gophers and not much else. The size is the point. At two and a half inches across it seats inside runs that a full-size jaw trap has to be forced into, and stainless comes out of wet soil looking the way it went in — which is more than the plain steel traps here can say.

Three traps is the right number for a garden with a couple of live runs, and there's nothing to bait or refresh between checks, so a week of neglect costs you nothing. The one thing to plan for is losing one: a five-inch stainless body disappears into dark soil, so mark every set with a flag or a stake. For a raised bed or a suburban lot with tight pocket gopher laterals, this is the set that fits the shape of the problem.

Six spring-steel jaw traps make the DK-1 the volume buy of this group, and the cheapest way here to put several traps in the ground at once. One per active run, a spare behind the seat of the truck, no agonising over whether to leave a set in for another week.

Mechanically they're traditional: two long jaws, a hook, and a spring you wind by hand. Set in a properly opened run they are brutally effective, and the trigger plate can be set fine enough to fire on a light nudge. We treat them as a tool for someone who has done this before. The spring is the strongest here and the jaws close with real force, so set the trap on the ground, both hands clear of the jaw path, and never with your face over it.

Two practical notes. Plain steel in damp soil rusts, which a wipe of oil at the end of the season slows rather than stops. And buy six rather than two, because the whole value here is having a trap in every run you know about at the same time.

We can arm the SuperCat with two fingers, which isn't true of any other trap here. A light lever takes it to full tension with barely any force, an indicator shows whether it's live or spent, and the trigger is enclosed inside the body rather than left out in the soil and daylight. Setting one means cutting a clean hole, sliding the body in flush with the run, and closing the opening so no light gets in.

It fires from both directions, which matters more than it sounds. Runs bend and fork, and you can't always tell which way a gopher will come; a trap that works from either end is one you stop resetting every morning. Nearly nine inches long, the body wants a straight stretch of run with room to lie flat.

Plastic has one obvious advantage underground: it doesn't rust, and it doesn't mind being hosed off between sets. It also won't take the prying of a rocky bed the way steel does, and that's the calculation. In soft, clean soil it's the set we hand to a first-timer — the arming lever is that forgiving.

A steel rod, a plastic wedge and a trap that goes into the ground the way a plug goes into a socket — the GopherHawk is the most established no-dig design here, and we like it for exactly what it spares you. Probe six to ten inches off a fresh mound, feel the rod drop as it breaks into the run, widen the hole just enough for the body, and the trap slides in from above. Your turf keeps its shape, and you can see from across the yard whether it has fired.

It's fast when it's clean. The spring is heavy, the trigger sits exposed to soil, and those two facts explain most of what goes wrong: grit in the trigger stops it releasing, and setting it in hard, dry ground takes real force. The fix is simple and worth doing before every set — unwind the spring past the yellow mark and rinse the trigger under running water.

What it won't do is last like a steel jaw trap. The frame is thin enough that a gopher working around the body rather than through it can bend it out of shape, and a bent frame seats badly the next time. Against that, a thumb-width hole in a bed you'd rather not tear up is a strong argument, and one live run under a prized shrub is exactly the case where this one earns its place.

The Blackhole is the least expensive trap in this group, and it looks it: a black plastic tube with a spring-loaded arm inside, light enough to carry three in one hand. One trap per purchase, which is worth saying plainly — one unit covers one run, and gophers rarely work alone.

It works like a short section of tunnel. You open the run, lay the tube in line with it, and the gopher walks in to the arm. Because the body sits inside the run, the trigger is shielded from soil and daylight, and plastic shrugs off wet ground that would have a steel trap rusting by spring. It also carries the broadest label here — gophers, moles, voles, rats, mice — which tells you it's sized for the middle of that range rather than tuned to one animal.

Where it earns attention is a small yard and a first attempt. The low price makes buying two an easy call, and reloading after a catch is quick once you've done it once. The failure to watch for is a trap that never goes off: plastic mechanisms can stiffen in cold, wet soil, so work the arm by hand before each set and check it again after a hard rain.