Looking for ideas to build a cover to place at entrance burrows for a nuisance groundhog but don’t want my 5 month old dog stepping on the traps. Burrows are around shed and off driveway. Thinking like a box that I weight down and have over top of my 550’s. Looking for ideas or even better real world experience.

Box the hole with cages.

Yep, I'd use a cage in that situation.

Also possible to use chicken wire to form a tunnel over the trap.

check my thread setting for wood chuck , The Beav gave some good advice a 150 or 160 in the hole with a basic cage that covers the hole so that no dogs or cats can get to the trap.


he called it a one way trap , only what comes out of the hole gets snapped.

A 550 is overkill for a ground hog. A 1 1/2 is plenty of trap. 11's work well also.

problem with footholds with groundhogs is that you gotta make sure you stake it so that the animal cant make it back to its hole. If it does, youll have to dig it back out.

Grounghogs are really easy to force into a cage. Block it off completely and youll have it within 48hours if not the first 6

Setting up a few early mornings/evenings with a (.22, short or subsonic in town) would probably do the trick.

Trapped many many many groundhogs. Just set on the ground, no cover. Exposed trap. If dog gets caught he prolly won’t again.

I trap lots of public ground for wood chucks and 150 BGs don't get the job done. If the den size is too small for a 160 I just use my spade to enlarge it. And a foot hold in my situation is not acceptable. I want that cuck dead and out of sight.

Cage trap is what I've always used. If you want to bait it, anything green like lettuce, broccoli, etc, will work too.
Set the cage trap against the hole.

Short story long, I'm going after a bunch of groundhogs that have been doing damage in a barn I use for storage of hay and hay equipment. I put small square bales on top of pallets to keep them off the ground so they don't rot. Groundhogs then moved in to excavate a huge tunnel network under the pallets and in doing so pushed all the dirt up into the pallet so hay bales now in contact with soil below.......and are going moldy anyway. Pulled about 40 bad bales out a couple months back. So those guys gotta go.

We cleaned out the barn, got all the tunnels filled in, level, put pallets down, then proceeded to stack in 250 bales. A month later and pigs are back. In this corner of an 80 x 50 pole barn, under a section 8 x 20, I found at least 6 tunnel openings. Two outside, the rest inside. Coming and going from 3 sides and game camera showed which were active. Set 6 body grips at openings, and quickly caught 2.......with maybe 2 Einstein Mensa level pigs left. They have quit using the openings. They may be sill coming and going, just not sure where. On other end of the barn is another tunnel system. Two openings outside, one inside. At least those are the one's I can find. Filled in the outside openings...........and those opened back up, so are in use. Except when I then set traps, they stop using them. They are still around, as they show up on game cameras. One is a jumbo big'n.........the other this year's juvi.

In place of a cage trap (mine are drop gates with no nose cone, so can't use those to block openings. Instead I have a body grip box........which allows butting against back wall and covered opening.......kinda like using a cage, except with body grip. No joy. They refuse to go thru it.





I cover the bottom ply with dirt or hay, still no joy. And that was with an active hole they dug open and I watched them use. These boys are smart.

So for now, have replaced that box with a 1.5 coil spring............and a 160 set in hole dug in opening. Those been active 2 days now.





The board on top and other blocking is to limit access from outside. Anything coming out of tunnel is going to have to get past that 160.

But I still see them in the barn, where I have 3 baited cages set. They sniff em, but don't go in. My hoped for miracle bait was going to be some Dobbins Backbreaker.........and yes one did spend a lot of time sniffing........from outside. Never cared enough to in in the cage to get a good whiff point blank.

These boys are smarter than they look.

PS: Not sure if my pet avoidance plan is any good, but on the coil spring I set pan tension to 3 pounds. If the big groundhog I'm after steps on the pan, it should fire. I cage caught the two feral barn cats that were hanging around about a week ago. They didn't like the ordeal and as near as game cameras can tell, have not been back since, but should not set off that trap if they do.

Make a nose cone out of hardware cloth or even wood. Place over an active hole so they can not get out without going through the trap. A double door cage works good but I have caught them this way in a single door cage. But to be successful, you have to block all of the other holes in that tunnel system and force them to exit through the cage.