Russel Wills with a mole fortress

Dear Readers, most of us are familiar with the little raised ‘molehills’ that you can see when walking in the country – the soil on the top is apparently perfect for seedlings, and moles do a great job of aerating the soil and recycling nutrients. They can dig 4.5m of soil every day, and in addition to munching on earthworms they also eat leatherjackets and chafer grubs. Their velvety coats help them to slip through the soil in a network of tunnels that can be the size of two tennis courts.

Normal molehills (Photo By I, PRA, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2304758)

Occasionally, though, moles build something even more impressive: a mole fortress, a small hillock which can be up to 1.6 metres across.  Scientists aren’t exactly sure why they do this, but fortresses  often occur in areas which flood, or where the soil is particularly thin. At the top there’s a worm store – moles can eat up to six big fat earthworms today, and the largest worm store ever found weighed two kilograms, which is a lot of worms. Furthermore, they bite the tips off of any surplus worms so that they can paralyse them and keep them nice and fresh. Beneath the worm store they make a cosy nest, well above the water table, where they can wait out any flooding. Three mole fortresses have just been discovered in the RHS Garden Bridgewater, near Manchester, and Dr Robert Atkinson, a mole expert, is delighted. He explains that the amount of energy required to build a fortress is the equivalent of a forty-year-old woman walking for fourteen hours, a somewhat curious metric. Is it therefore the equivalent of two twenty-year-old women walking for seven hours? Or even a sixty-six year-old woman (ahem) walking for 18.86 hours? I think we should be told. But, pedantry aside, that is a lot of calories for a small velvety insectivore to burn, and apparently only the ‘fittest moles’ are capable of building a fortress.

Hopefully a very fit mole (Photo By I,Stanislaw Szydlo, CC BY-SA 3.0,as if https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6433426)

Moles are very common mammals in the UK, but because they live underground they are very rarely seen. But if you meet a female mole, you should be respectful – according to the RHS, female moles have a ‘rare masculinised biology’ and produce high levels of testosterone, which means that they are aggressively territorial. Personally, I feel as if a little better hormone balance between the human sexes might help things along – if women had a smidge more testosterone, and men a whole lot more oestrogen maybe things would balance out more nicely. Or not. But at any rate, I have acquired a new-found respect for the mole, small and inconspicuous as they are. And here is a poem by Michael Bazzett, which I rather like. See what you think.