THE MOLES
By SIR STEPHEN TALLENTS
THE moles, two winters ago, were playing havoc with our meadows. It was time, I thought, to master their invasion. A little research convinced me that they did more harm than good. Their best advocates, supported by the bills-of-fare of a hundred Welsh moles, claimed only that their sharp teeth devoured harmful larvae such as leather-jackets. Their staple diet was earthworms ; and it was suggested that too large a mole population might dis- courage the good work done by worms. I could find no English worm census ; but the discovery of an observant American that an acre of good Texas soil contained zi million earthworms, with 70,000 miles of ventilating and irrigation channels constructed by them, seemed to show that worms could be spared without detriment to the land. The main indictment against the moles was that their burrowings disturbed the roots of crops and that their hillocks pro- vided attractive seed-beds for alien weeds. They might even damage the knives of cutters, and they were ripe for development as homes for ants. This last charge determined my verdict. The blade of my scythe, as I had patiently mowed the hay on a tennis court that summer, had kept slicing into ant heaps ; and I had had to stop after every such encounter to whet my blade afresh. The moles, I determined, must go.
In the holidays of my boyhood I had learned, with the help of a gamekeeper, to trap and to skin moles ; and I had thus accumulated as many pelts as made a muff for my sister. I decided to refresh my forgotten skill. I -took counsel with a retired mole-catcher in our village. Moles, I learned from him, patrol their tunnels every four hours. Loose stones must be carefully removed from the burrow before the trap is set, and then it must be so covered as to let no twinkle of daylight enter. (I fancy myself that it is the draught and not the daylight that moles dislike ; they are said to hate the cold.) Moles were fierce and cannibal. If two moles met in a tunnel, they fought to the death. (I remembered a strange incident of two moles being caught head-on in a trap.) My counsellor had once on our own ground caught fifteen moles in a single run leading to the water. Once he had trapped a giant mole, twice the Size of its fellows. He had seen white moles in his time and had captured • grey one which, with his giant, he had presented to the County Museum. I was later to learn that moles of many colours are to be found—red, white and orange, biscuit and grey, olive and piebald. In that hidden underground life strange colours are no handicap. 1 consulted, too, another neighbour—a famous taxidermist in his day and the first Englishman to skin an okapi. He demonstrated for me on the corpse of a four-ounce mole the arts which he had practised on lions and tigers. Thus equipped, I set myself in spare moments to trap and skin our invaders. I went about the fields with a pointed stick, a trowel and half-a-dozen traps—finding the runs with the stick, opening them up with the trowel, setting my traps and covering them care- fully. And, as I went, I reflected on these strangers who shared the ground beneath my feet but of whose manner of living I knew nothing. Here, it seemed, was a parable of the two Englands. I became curious about my mysterious neighbours, and sought sign- posts for their study from the admirable Oxford Bureau of Animal Population. Aristotle had evidently skinned moles. He noticed the passages which lead out to their now functionless eyes. He observed, too. that moles were plentiful in Orchomenos but not to be found m near-by Lebadia. A mole transported to Lebadia from Orchomenos would refuse to burrow there. But after Aristotle's day darkness seemed to descend on the subject till Henri Le Court, ousted by the French Revolution from his life in palaces, withdrew to the country and devoted himself to the study of moles with such effect that he once caught boo of them in five months. He was seemingly the first to remark, what an English naturalist was later to confirm, that gentlemen moles make straight runs with logical side-roads, whereas lady moles burrow without a plan in many directions. He distinguished from their workaday runs—and, like a good French- man christened " traces d'amour "—the long shallow tracks which moles make in search of their brides or, as some think, merely in search of new pastures. All these several types of run, as well as the fortresses which moles build for their homes and shooting boxes, I found in our own fields.
The English mole, I discovered—talpa europaea—is a cousin of the hedgehog and the shrew. All the way from England to the Pacific coast of Siberia he is to be found burrowing for his living— but not in Ireland. (There is an old tradition that no mole can live where Irish earth has been scattered.) In Africa he gives place to the golden mole ; in America to five other breeds. But their pelts, the Department of Agriculture wistfully notes, are neglected— to the advantage of the English molecatcher, for American furriers have bought millions of our skins. American moles, like their European rivals, are among the hungriest and most industrious of animals. One Townsend mole is recorded to have made in 77 days 302 mounds in a quarter-acre field.
This search for knowledge led me far. I came on some admirable first-hand observations by Mr. Lionel Adams, enshrined in the Pro- ceedings of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. I enjoyed an incredible tale of the mole's sanitary forethought, which an old molecatcher persuaded the Rev. James Grierson, of Cockpen, to believe. I was guided to a couple of abstruse papers in the pro- ceedings of the Zoological Society, bringing out startling features in a married life which yields a single litter, generally of three or four young, in the early summer of each year. I was reminded of the mole's place in history as " the little gentlemen in the velvet jacket." I followed him inio English poetry—to Spenser and Shake- speare and George Herbert.- Even in gastronomy he has his niche. Mr. Adams found unweaned moles, when boiled, "excellent, much like rabbit, the flesh being white and very tender." But Dr. Buck- land, the Oxford scholar who claimed to have eaten his way through the animal creation, remarked that the mole was the nastiest of all animals to eat—save only, he added on reflection, the bluebottle. Yet I am left with the conviction that there is much for a field naturalist still to discover about moles, especially about the extent to which they share their runs at different seasons.
When I had skinned some too moles and air-dried their pelts, I had my skins dressed. Some were given over to home products, such as a pair of minute gloves for a 'granddaughter. The rest I entrusted to a lady furrier to make a gift for the elder daughter of the house. My furrier wanted to get them dyed. Not a moleskin nowadays; she assured me, could be bought undyed in the City of London. I refused my consent. The trade was welcome to dye its rabbit skins and call them coney. Let them not reduce to a dull flat grey—or to the " black " in which the author of " The Wind in the Willows " clothes his Mr. Mole—the soft- gleaming fur of my moles. I was glad that I had resisted when the fruits of her skilful piecing and sewing reached me. She was pleased with them herself and urged me to persevere with a " fingertip " coat to match. That would need, she said, 30o skins. I could probably find, I told her, the 1,800 or so spare minutes which the skinning of that number would require but not the time needed to trap so many. Perhaps, I imagined, some landed stranger, meeting my daughter in her new furs, would offer her moles, trapped between October. and April, by the dozen—moles that he would otherwise throw away. But that is in the future. Enough for the moment to imagine this girl of ours, doffing her nurse's headdress and strings to take the March winds in her gay new moleskin cap and stole, with the winter light in singular beauty flickering -and playing and dancing upon them.
[We regret that owing to illness Mr. Vernon Bartlett has had to postpone his article announced• for this week.]
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