Of Moles and Men.

My neighbour Patrick looks after the walnut trees. He has an orchard of 400 splendid trees which he tends, preventing anything much growing underneath them as these trees do not like competition. He looks after our few trees too and last year complained that we had too many moles and the mole-hills were breaking the cutters on his mowing machine. Would we please get rid of them? It was time for a crisis of concience, of choosing between the needs of the local wildlife that live with us and the tradition of the maintenance of the partrimoine in the traditional manner.

One evening, after a few months of appropriately agonised reflection, I put an old metal wastepaper basket in the ground below a recently used mole tunnel in the hope that the creature would fall into the wastepaper basket and I could move the creature elsewhere. Early the next morning I crept out, lifted the lid on the hole I had dug and found the wastepaper basket had been backfilled by the mole, such that it was now two thirds full of earth and any mole could easily scrambled out. The small creature responsible had moved many times its own mass of earth. Had there been a dramatic rescue of mole A from the trap by doughty digger mole B, or was it just the natural response of a mole to a chasm appearing beneath a runway, fill it in? Clearly I had been outwitted.

My next idea was to go into town to see what the local agricultural co-operative offered. Here I encountered a whole new world of magic realism. Every form of cruelty that human kind is capable of has been devoted to the destruction of this delightful creature - the mole. There were breakback traps to be inserted in the creatures burrows; there were sound systems to make life intolerable by blasting certain unpleasant frequencies through their living space; there were mechanisms for blowing them up using explosives and of course there were poisons and baits. There was even a video showing a man fitting an explosive charge and sensor in a burrow leaving an opening to the air above. This was followed by a lengthy description of how the mole would push a mass of earth along its burrow to fill the opening, in doing so it would trigger the explosive charge. The owner of the lawn was then shown retreating to a deck chair to read his magazine whilst the poor mole was exploded by the develish device (cost about 55 Euros including a set of six explosive charges).

The diversity of method clearly showed that men and moles have had a long and difficult relationship. I felt like someone who has had revealed to him some dark family secret. I should have known better, after all, in my childhood walks in the bosky Hampshire countryside I had once come upon evidence of an atrocity: I counted 19 dead moles tied to a fence wire, evidence to the landowner that the gamekeeper or farm labourer had been doing his job properly and the clumsy cows in the adjacent field would no longer trip over the mole-hills or break their legs by putting their feet down holes.

In the end I distributed a bit of bait and asked them to leave the field of walnuts. By the end of summer the field showed almost no signs of mole activity but the garden was a mass of molehills and shallow tunnels grooved the lawn. They are welcome there, who cares about a flat lawn when they can instead support these silken coated wonders of nature?

Paul Munton.