How to Catch a Mole Read online

  The effect of his burrowing far outweighs the mole’s physical size. When I show a customer a dead mole, many urban gardeners are surprised at how small they are. In the imagination the troublesome mole can grow to gigantic proportions. But usually they don’t want to see the dead enemy, just the lawn, the bright shiny lawn, just grass all neat and flat and stripy, under control, safe, for ever.

  The mole disrupts the artificial serenity of a lawn in a way that is unacceptable for some. Gardening is not nature: it is using the laws of nature and science to impose our will on a place, and for some people this need for control goes to extremes. I once had a customer with a neat town garden who was obsessed with the branches on his gorgeous magnolia tree being uneven – there were more on one side than the other. No living thing is ever perfectly symmetrical, and imperfection is where beauty is found. But this man counted the branches and cut some of them off to try to make the tree balance. He had no vision of what he wanted, he could only see what he didn’t want. I was there setting mole traps when his poor wife returned to see him covered in sawdust, holding his new electric chainsaw, and standing next to little more than a stump. The stump leaned a little to the right.

  One of the gardens I work in has a vast flower meadow, and every year I cut this down with a scythe. I use a scythe because it is quiet and doesn’t pollute, but mainly because the wildlife has a chance to escape. Brush cutters and strimmers are devastating for wildlife: they slaughter everything in their path. Frogs, toads and hedgehogs are slashed; their flesh is blended into paste. I’ve done it, and been splashed with blood. Deeply upset at this needless slaughter, I researched alternative ways of cutting down a meadow, and found that I could either invest thousands of pounds in another machine, or I could learn how to use and look after a scythe. I chose the scythe.

  The stones in molehills in the meadow take chips out of my scythe blade, which begins every season as sharp as the razor in my bathroom cabinet, but I tolerate them. Every few strokes I stop and hone the carbon steel blade again with a smooth whetstone. At the end of the season I tap out the chipped edge using a peening hammer and anvil, to create a new edge which, like a razor blade, is a single crystal thick.

  Scything is a physically hard job that requires plenty of rest breaks, especially as I get older, and so it’s a pleasure to stop and put the stone to the blade: it makes a lovely ringing sound when the stone hits the steel, and then a schwee sound as it slides along the edge from base to tip, three times usually, alternating from one side of the blade to the other. Then the stone plops back into the water-filled tin holder hanging on my belt and I carry on scything, or just watch the birds for a moment while I get my breath back. Scything too creates a pleasing sound, a long swishh with each stroke. It has a good rhythm: swinging from the waist, cutting from the right to the left with relaxed arms outstretched, and striding slowly forward step by step, cutting a swathe up to eight feet wide, and leaving a neat windrow on my left as the stalks fall off the three-foot-long blade. Swishh, step, swishh, step, swishh. Without my even trying, it all ends up co-ordinated with my breathing. In as I swing back and step, out as I swing for the cut. Long and slow. It used to take me two full summer days to cut down the meadow: now I’m older and it takes me more than three. Next year I may no longer be able to do it at all.

  Ahead of me I can often see the small creatures running, shuffling and hopping to escape into the long grass ahead. There’s no vicious two-stroke motor screaming and making smoke, so I can hear the hedgehogs rustling and gently move them out of the way. The toads and frogs hop and crawl in front of me and I slow down, or half a dozen field mice rush along and dive into their burrows.

  It is a human process, and the tools are simple and brown and honest. I have grown old with these tools: they are handmade of wood, steel and stone, and they have grown old with me and have moulded to my hand. I have a relationship with tools like this: I feel that all the things in the world that I touch are touching me back.

  A reaper with a scythe traditionally leaves the last sheaf of grain standing in the middle for the spirit of the crop, ‘John Barleycorn’, to hide. Then it is bundled and tied and cut with a knife or sickle and taken indoors. I continue this tradition, and bring the bunch of drying wild flowers home.

  The meadow is a semi-wild place by a small lake, and we are happy for the moles to live there. They are a part of the ecosystem which includes foxes, field- and woodmice, hedgehogs and millions of flying creatures, including dragonflies, lacewings, hoverflies, pheasants, owls, bats and hawks. The numbers of moles are controlled naturally by the hawks, owls and foxes. Everything here is part of the food chain.

  Scything the meadow is done twice a year. In the mid-spring when the grass is growing I cut the new grass back so that the slower-growing wild flowers can come through. Then in late summer, when the flowers have been and gone and shed their seed and the stalks are dry, I cut them down and leave them in windrows on the ground until the sun has dried them and the final seeds have fallen. Most native wild flowers grow best in poor soil, and if I left the stalks they would rot and increase the soil fertility, so I rake them away in warm, dry weather with a massive wooden hay rake three feet wide and carry them to the compost heap: another day’s work.

  After the autumn equinox in September, the days become shorter and my telephone starts to ring. People have discovered molehills breaking up the perfection of their lawns and want them to be gone – they make the place untidy. The word ‘lawn’ comes from the old Welsh word ‘Llan’, meaning pasture or field. The name of my own village of Llandaff in Wales means ‘the field by the river Taff’. This was the language of this island before the Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrived.

  My first moles were caught in an immense and rolling country garden in South Wales that I look after, where I am the gardener, but later on I started catching moles in other gardens, too, as it brought me an income in the winter when otherwise I would have none.

  In my early days as a gardener I was concerned that the few molecatchers I had come across showed little sensitivity, and that creatures were suffering. Looking back, of course, I have no idea what they felt. I judged them to be brutal men, but I am no different, not any more: the hammer shapes the hand, and I am moulded by the life I chose.

  I was aware that the moles were going to be curbed by somebody. I wondered if there were ways other than killing them. I knew that somebody would be called on to do it, and I wondered if that person could be me. So I set about researching and studying the most efficient and humane ways of dealing with moles. I like to learn new skills, especially simple ones that allow me to have a relationship with natural materials, and simple hand tools. I read about the life cycles and habits of moles in books, on websites and in molecatchers’ advertising leaflets. I read again and again that the recommended and most humane method of controlling moles was to kill them in traps, and although I looked at all the other options it kept coming back. To get rid of them, you have to kill them.

  An old farmer that I met who had been catching moles since he was a child taught me something of what he knew. Leaning on a rickety wooden four-bar fence, wearing his battered hat, he told me how to catch a live mole by creeping along in bare feet while the molehill was moving, and stopping when the mole stopped, and then at the last moment, to pounce on it with a spade and flick it into the air. I have never even tried to do this – I move too slowly. By the time I’ve got to a molehill its maker has usually finished what he was doing and moved on, and my life is too short for me to hurry.

  The farmer said that moles like to build permanent tunnels along fence lines, and pointed with one of his massive hands to one such tunnel. This, he told me, had been there since he was a boy, and had been inhabited by generations of moles, one after the other, just as the traditional techniques used to catch them have been handed down through the generations of molecatchers for hundreds of years, one after the other. Farmers are often solitary people, and tend to speak from a distance for a while. The countryside is big, and they are not used to standing close to each other, but once they have started to feel comfortable they like to talk. I usually have a good relationship with them, because I’ve learned that they have a real and visceral love for the land that they are tied to.

  I sat and walked on hillsides and watched the molehills and thought about them, imagined the moles’ lives and what they were doing down there. I put my hands into molehills to see what was in them. I tried to work out what kind of pattern the hills made on the surface, and how that might relate to what was going on underground. I wondered why they were on riverbanks and encircled trees, and why they were never in the middle of the playing fields, but were always around the edges.

  I wanted to become the best and most humane molecatcher I could, so I bought many varieties of traps. I studied their construction and paid attention to how fast and efficient they were; I tested them by setting them and triggering them with a stick. Some of them were highly technical and would kill a mole quickly, and some simple and brutal traps would just hold the mole in a tight grip until it died, perhaps from blood loss or starvation or cold. I tried to imagine what would happen if a badger or a fox, or a domestic dog or cat, dug the traps up, and I made choices about what kind of trap I wanted to use. Then I started to catch moles. I didn’t enjoy killing, so my methods had to be efficient, detached, fast and technical. I had to work to depersonalise the moles, because if, as I believe, all living things have equal value and we are all the same, then I was killing myself. I didn’t look at them. I became good at disassociating myself from their deaths.

  I used the techniques I had learned, never quite sure if the stories and beliefs were genuine, but I caught all the moles I wanted to catch, and that was enough. I became a very good molecatcher, and word got around. Soon I was getting telephone calls from people who had been given my number by a friend of a friend, and I was getting up on winter mornings to go and meet angry householders who had tried to deal with the mole themselves, and succeeded only in making their lawn worse and training their mole to avoid capture.

  I have caught moles in pastures, sports fields, tiny city gardens and immense rolling country estates, and no matter what the land is used for by humans, it is mole territory, and catching them is always the same.

  I catch moles for money, and it keeps me busy when the gardens are resting. But of course there are personal reasons that make somebody attracted to this kind of work. When I tell people at parties how I earn my money they laugh. Not that I go to many parties. To people of the towns, understandably, molecatching is some kind of music-hall joke, something from the colourful rustic past, like being a chimney sweep or a comedic mechanical from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  When they stop laughing they become curious and ask lots of questions, mostly about killing things. When I tell them that I have been a vegetarian for fifty years they show me their confused face. Things don’t seem to add up. Life is rarely as neat and tidy as we would like. I prefer it that way. Reason is just one of the many important ways of experiencing the world.

  When I was young, people would taunt me for being a vegetarian, and call me feeble, weak or squeamish. My younger brothers used to wave meat from their dinner plates at me and say ‘Meeeat, it’s delicious!’ I called them coffin-gobblers, and said I was not a zombie and would rather not eat bits of a corpse. I got slapped across the face for trying to put them off their dinner. None of us changed our minds. We all do what we want to do, and we rationalise it afterwards.

  I am old; I have done many things. I went to art school and studied painting and sculpture; I gave it up because I wasn’t good enough. My hands are too big and clumsy: they were bred to handle a soldier’s rifle, a pickaxe or spade, not a pen or a brush. My body is lumbering and incapable of delicate movement; I am uncoordinated and I make a mess. My handwriting, too, is illegible, but nevertheless my sketchbooks were always full of words. Alongside the scrappy eager drawings of naked women and hopeful flowers and birds were instructions on how to temper steel tools, copied notes about what fire was made of, instructions on how to make a particular shade of blue and why I liked it. There were poems and haiku, but I was at my happiest outdoors swinging an axe, or climbing a hill.

  I became a gardener to pay the bills, and to maintain a creative kind of life. When I was homeless I brushed through plants and walked on them, made beds in them, and slept with them against my skin. Woke with green juice on my cheek. I smelled of them. Plucked and chewed on them. How could I spend the rest of my life isolated and not touching their flesh, smelling their infinite palette of individual scents? I began painting with flowers instead of pigment, making and tending gardens. Although poorly paid, there is always work for decent gardeners, and I was determined to learn all that I could.

  Naively, when I first began to teach myself about gardening I thought that it would be a nurturing, pastoral and sensual occupation, mostly about flowers, lawns, fruits and trees. I soon learned the pests were part of my job, too. I had to deal with moles, slugs, greenfly, wasps, rats, weeds and many other things that were just getting on with living. For some people much of gardening is about killing things. This has always been an area of conflict for me: my favourite places were the wild ones where I had no killing to do. Killing came hard. But it was either them or me: I had a job to do, a job that I needed in order to feed myself and my family. But killing an insect is one thing, killing a mammal is another. Before I started I wondered what my limits were, what kind of man I was: could I actually do it, and how would I feel when I did?

  I was brought up with violence but not with killing. Killing can be, but rarely is, peaceful and kind. Violence is never either. The countryside is full of both. Before molecatching I had never had any need to kill anything deliberately. If there was a fly in the room I would encourage it out of the window. Eventually the time came when I had a real reason to kill something, and I needed to see if I could do it. I tried to focus on killing the moles without doing violence, to do it as humanely as possible.

  At 7 a.m. I took her tea in her big white mug

  she smiled her waking smile from our white bed

  slatted with diagonal lines of cold sunlight

  I ate porridge, pulled on thick wool socks

  and boots and left

  driving my van to the red-edged morning sky

  through narrow country lanes and to the hills

  the invincible planets move on and

  creatures stir, and drawn to play my part

  as if on a chain with a ring through my nose

  I drive the ‘A’ roads that coil through small towns and villages

  and tie people’s lives together

  the dry copper bracken

  rolls in redhead waves

  to black mountains crushed squat and bowed

  under heavy watered blue-black-ink flat cloud

  and round a corner slashes of sunlight

  flashing off the jagged river far below

  then in the dip, autumn’s muted shades

  distant trees ghostly in dawn’s cloud

  and the flat-topped flailed leafless hedges

  glow pink in the stormy morning sun

  as I drive my little van between neat hedges singing

  into a mist-filled dip then up a hill

  and suddenly I’m looking into clear blue sky

  and I am not at home any more.

  Golden Moles, Star-nosed Moles and Famous Moles

  Moles are immensely strong. His massive hands, each of which have two thumbs, are as wide as his head. He has a thick knot of muscle in his neck and shoulders which is as hard as a pebble. I am a working man who lives by the spade and a mole’s hands are stronger than mine: a living mole can easily peel my closed fingers apart and escape. The rest of his body is fragile, soft and flexible, so that he can turn around in a tunnel no wider than himself. His nose is wet and pink like a dog’s. The mole that I hunt, Talpa europaea, the European mole, is as long as my hand and weighs around as much as an empty leather purse. He is covered by dark, blue-black hair that is soft and velvety and brushes just as easily backwards, forwards and sideways, so that the mole can go backwards in the tunnel.

  He feels like the best piece of velvet cloth you can imagine. He has whiskers and tiny needle-sharp teeth, so small they look like slivers of glass found sparkling on the kitchen floor days after an accident, which, if I don’t catch him, will wear out in a few years as he eats worms filled with sandy soil. There are no visible ears and, if you look carefully by brushing the fur, his eyes can just be seen in the darkness as shiny black dots not much bigger than this full stop. He is a smooth velvet sausage. His back feet and legs are tiny, thin and fragile like a mouse’s, and he has a bristly tail an inch long that stands up to feel the roof of his tunnel.

  It is said that if you have a purse with a mole’s tail attached as a tassel, it will always be full. Moles and magic rituals seem to go well together. It is known among molecatchers that carrying a pair of dried mole hands will prevent rheumatism and protect you from evil; this superstition is found across Europe. Witches love moles as familiars, perhaps because they are dark and secretive. Mole blood and organs can give a person the power of divination if they swallow a fresh, still-beating mole heart (according to Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia), and holding a mole in your hands until it dies will give you healing powers. Various mole body parts have the power to cure epilepsy, prevent toothache and ague, control fits and remove warts. Molecatchers of old could make a pretty good extra living by dealing in these ‘natural remedies’, and were sometimes regarded as ‘cunning men’, vagrant male witches who appeared when the moles did and left when they were gone, taking their secret knowledge with them.