Corona Wildlife Diary: Day Seventy.

Day Seventy 

I've been focussing a lot on the birds that I've seen in the garden of late. Yesterday, while I was sat in the sun, I started thinking about what mammals I have seen in this small suburban garden. I've already talked about the fox (here) and the recent discovery of the hedgehog (here). And there was that rogue Roe Deer that one time (here). We have mice, voles, rats, squirrels and bats too. I guess the most mammal-y thing that has ever happened was way back in 2013 when I looked out of the kitchen window and saw this...

9 June 2013: The famous 'Fox and Badger in the garden at the same time' incident. I still bring it up every week.

But we have another regular mammal visitor that I always forget about - even though it's right under my feet. The problem is it's hard to bond with the Mole. Like 99.9% of us – I’ve never seen a live one. In dry summers I have often stumbled across dead Moles who have perished because of the lack of food in the hard, baked soil. I am always in awe when I find one. Such amazing creatures.

(A dead Mole I found during a hot summer).

They’re almost a supernatural entity – the bigfoot of the back garden. They’re invisibility means my mental image of the mole has been painted by ‘The Wind in the Willows’ and cartoon characters like Morocco Mole from Secret Squirrel (here) instead of real-life encounters. I’m always surprised when I see an actual photo of a mole and it’s not wearing glasses.

Moles aren’t blind. Admittedly they’ll be struggling by the second line of an eye test, but there isn’t much call for perfect eyesight when you spend all your life in total darkness. Instead their pink nose is covered with 5000 sensory organs which register touch and vibration allowing the Mole to ‘see’ with its snout; a super-sense that makes them efficient hunters. Their tunnel network spreads out like an underground web. When a wiggling worm drops into it, the Mole’s senses tingle sending them scrambling through their pitch-black passageways. Worms are captured, cleaned, beheaded and stored, still wriggling, in a larder for future consumption. 

 

Their front paws are like a pair of giant pink snow-shovels and come equipped with an extra thumb; a characteristic they share with the giant panda. These wide shovel-hands can move an incredible 540 times their own weight of soil in a day. That’s like me moving 55.46 tonnes of mud (and before you go scrambling for your calculators, yes, I could do with cutting back on my trips to the lockdown bakery delivery van).

As you know, there's nothing that winds me up more than a neatly mown lawn. I think I called it a complete waste of planet a few weeks back (here). If your lawn is full of nectar rich flowers for butterflies and bees with, maybe, a patch of long grass for grasshoppers and hedgehogs then Mother Nature will thank you. But if you’re one of those strange people who demands that their lawn is a perfectly manicured carpet, poisoned with chemicals, shamelessly shaved each summer Sunday and useless for wildlife then Mother Nature will not be happy. She’ll send in her best hit man.

The molehills that erupt on our lawns are spoil heaps created by the construction work below. OK - they’re unsightly but gardeners should be welcoming Moles. If you’re blessed with molehills, grab a trowel. When potted, molehill soil makes an excellent growing medium for seeds and seedlings. Once the tunnels are completed the molehills will stop appearing and, in the long run, mole burrowing gives untold benefits to soil aeration and quality. Never mind these benefits - for me it’s a pleasure knowing that such an amazing animal is living, unseen, a few inches below my feet. Still, some strange people will complain but I guess some there will always be some folk who will make a mountain out of a, well, y’know.

Here's a Mole song for you - but I warn you - don't click (here) or else you'll be humming it all day.