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Posts Tagged ‘mole’

The Mole and the Block Paving or, Why I haven’t Been Out Much Lately

Posted in Diary Post, tagged on June 13, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I admit it.  I haven’t been out much lately.  In fact, the nearest I’ve come to taking a stroll in the deep dark wood is reading The Gruffalo with Scarlett each evening.

I’ve been busy at work, with big projects in exotic places like London, Paris and …Watford, with too much work at home in the evenings.   I’ve been busy at home with various chores that have kept me going from dawn to dusk at the weekends, ranging from fixing the lawnmower (I am now an expert on servicing the Briggs & Stratton petrol engine, if anyone needs advice) to re-laying the block paving on our drive in the pouring rain yesterday.  It’s been busy busy busy, but at least it’s keeping me out of mischief.

And what about the mole?  Where is the mole in all of this?  Well, I came home from work this evening to find a dead mole in the middle of my newly-laid block paving.  How it got there I don’t know.  I can only assume that it got flushed out by the torrential rain yesterday and the cat caught it.  Maybe she left it there as a tribute to my paving skills.  She does that sort of thing (remember the rat in the dining room?)

I can’t remember ever seeing a live mole.  I’ve certainly seen molehills in my vegetable garden.  As the latest in a long line of  ‘dead animals I have found’ pictures, here’s the mole.

Mole

Do dead animals count as a tick on my mammal list?  Not even if they’re on my own drive?

Back soon, hopefully…

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Mystery Tunnel Update

Posted in Fieldnotes, tagged on October 17, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Last week I confessed that I was puzzled by some tunnels that had appeared in one of the the fields near my house.  They were about 15 feet long, fairly straight and looked like some animal had burrowed along close to the surface leaving a small ridge of soil.

Mark Garrett kindly replied with the following information

“Moles will dig both shallow and deep tunnels and the classic molehills are the result of “deep” excavations. The soil from the shallow tunnel is just pushed upwards (or to the side) There is a good chance that your mystery tunnels could well be a mole making a shallow tunnel, perhaps returning to the field from the safety of the hedgerow now that the tractor has gone away.”

This matches my own limited research.  The Readers Digest Wild Britian – Animals (a small book but very useful and readable) says of moles “Occasionally tunnels are so near the surface that the soil is forced up in a long ridge – once thought (wrongly) to be ‘love runs’ made by male moles seeking a mate“.

I think we can safely say that the mystery is cleared up – the tunnels were mole ‘love runs’.  I think the odd thing is that I’ve never seen them before, despite years of wandering around the countryside.  Perhaps it was a coincidence of the right moles and the right soil conditions.

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