|
|
Living with Moles |
Your heart sinks when you see the small piles of earth on your carefully tended grass. Your garden has been invaded by a plague of moles. The lawn is going to be ruined.
You remember a few folklore remedies that might work: fragrant moth balls, children's whirring windmills, bottles buried up to their necks humming mysteriously, electronic repellents, or the Caper Spurge. Just the name of that plant should frighten the mole away.
When one of these has been tried and the molehills cease, it looks as if it has worked. This is more likely though to have been a coincidence; there is no evidence that any of the folklore remedies work.
If you are lucky, you may have a local molecatcher. For a fixed fee, he would set traps that would despatch the mole instantaneously. He would probably also guarantee that if no mole was caught, he would not make a charge. However it is likely that he would keep trying until the mole was caught. Pest control companies can also catch moles, but usually for a greater fee and without the 'no catch, no fee' guarantee.
You could try to catch the mole yourself. There are mole traps for sale in garden centres and there is plenty of advice on the Internet. The British Traditional Molecatchers Register at www.britishmolecatchers.co.uk will help you find a molecatcher, and runs one-day courses to teach you, as well as budding molecatchers, how to catch the mole yourself.
Another alternative is to try living with the mole. You would not have to share the same space. The mole would still be scurrying happily through his network of tunnels while you continued to enjoy the sunshine above the surface.
Your contribution to this harmonious existence is to clear away the molehills when they appear. Unaware of your kindly disposition towards him, the mole continues tunnelling and building molehills. After a few days he will have enough tunnels to provide him with as many earthworms as his hearty appetite could desire, and he will stop digging tunnels and building molehills, for a while at least.
Support for this theory is provided by Dr. Kenneth Mellanby (1908–1993) in his book 'The Mole', published by William Collins in 1971. Dr. Mellanby says that if the soil is rich in earthworms, a large enough system of runs to collect food will soon be constructed, and then the production of molehills will, at least temporarily, cease. Some individuals, he says, are fortunate enough to find an unoccupied burrow in their youth and may never need to do any more digging than to repair and maintain the system. He adds that in clays soils a settled population is often there without the householder knowing.
The excavation work is not so much a pleasant pastime for the mole: the tunnels are created for the earthworms and other delicacies to enter unwittingly and take their place on the mole's daily menu.
Although the sea of molehills may look as if it has been thrown up by a frenzied horde of moles, it is usually the work of just one mole. Moles are solitary, territorial creatures that defend their territory from other moles. The area they occupy covers about half an acre, although the shape of the area is not normally regular. It would be unlucky if the boundary between the territories of two moles runs through your lawn, but it does happen. Then you would have more than one mole.
Yes, male and female moles do meet up once a year for traditional reasons, temporarily moderating their hostility towards each other, before they return to their old ways.
Some outraged gardeners will flatten the molehills with a powerful blow of the back of a spade. Although this will undoubtedly make them feel better, it will create unattractive bare patches, damage the tunnel system and give the mole more tunnelling work to effect his repairs. More tunnelling work means more molehills.
If you scoop up the molehills with a spade, you will find that most of the grass underneath is intact. If some of the turf has been pushed up, it can be pushed back down. If you uncover a small hole through which the soil has been pushed, the light and air entering it could lead the mole to think that a predator had been digging into his tunnel system. The mole might block the hole and do some more digging to bypass the site. You would cause less disturbance by just blocking the hole yourself with a small amount of soil.
Unfortunately the soil from the molehills you have scooped up is no more nutritious than the rest of the soil, and so it can not be put to any particularly good use. But after a few days there may be no more molehills to scoop up. It may look as though the mole has moved to other pastures, but the likelihood is that he is ambling peacefully through his tunnels and feasting on the earthworms that await him.
The mole is neither particularly harmful nor beneficial for his environment. The valuable earthworms that he consumes are a negligibly small proportion of the earthworms that are in the ground. The tunnels do not help to aerate or drain the soil. The main problem in gardens is the unsightliness of the molehills, and this can be overcome if the mole can be encouraged to live underground without building any more. Regrettably this will not work if the mole is digging shallow tunnels that push up the turf and are also unsightly. Nor will it work if the soil is sandy, where the shortage of food requires the mole to tunnel relentlessly.
In our consideration for the mole we should not overlook our concern for the molecatcher and his hungry family. However it is unlikely that his business will be affected, because of the abundance of moles and the profusion of householders who would still like an instant solution to their molehills.
We enjoy sharing our gardens with most of the wildlife that inhabits it, and the hard-working and ingenious mole need not be an exception. It is possible that in time another molehill will appear, but to scoop it up with a spade would be, as P.G. Wodehouse would say, the work of a moment.
