At what depth do moles live and dig?

Is it possible to fill a mole hole with water?

To get rid of moles, you can fill their holes with water. But you need to be prepared for the fact that you will need a lot of water, since the mole tunnels are very branched. It is best to insert a hose into the mole's hole and run water.

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How deep is a wormholeTen facts from a book written by a professional mole catcher

Mark Hamer. The mystery of the wormhole. How to catch a mole, find the meaning of life and your place in nature. M.: Bombora, 2022. Translation from English by T. L. Platonova

Mark Hamer is a gardener who has spent many years catching moles. At the same time, in his youth, he came to vegetarianism for ethical reasons and always sympathized with moles, choosing the most humane methods of capturing them and (when necessary) killing them. He almost never made mistakes, but one day a turning point came in his life: one of the traps worked poorly, the mole did not die instantly, and he had to be killed manually. After this incident, Hamer gave up his craft forever, but thought a lot about it and eventually wrote a lyrical and heartfelt book. This is largely a work of fiction: in it the author reflects on life, shares observations of nature and asks philosophical questions, and ends each chapter with poems of his own composition. In general, this is, to put it mildly, not exactly a popular science work, and the story about it looks especially unexpected in the “10 Facts” section, given the words with which Hamer introduces his story:

“For me, it matters much more how things appear to me than how they actually are. What they really are is in the realm of the unknown. I don't like this prison of hard, cold facts. Facts do not give you freedom, they push you towards a clear, once and for all fixed perception of reality.”

But, despite all of the above, the book contains a lot of non-obvious and surprising information both about the moles themselves and about the history of the craft associated with them. Here's just a small part of it.

1. A wallet with a mole's tail attached to it will always be full.

Well, okay, let's say this is still not a fact. But the fact is that a large number of superstitions and signs are associated with moles. For example, mole catchers believe that dried mole feet heal rheumatism (and generally protect against misfortunes). Hamer O. To prove this, he even appeals to the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder, which says that mole blood and offal can give a person the gift of predicting the future: and, in order to gain this gift, you need to swallow the fresh heart of a mole, which is still beating. Different parts of the mole's body have different magical properties: some prevent epilepsy, others heal teeth, reduce seizures, remove warts, and so on. And if you hold the mole in your hands until it dies, you will gain the gift of healing. In general, it is not surprising that in the past, wandering mole catchers were often associated with magicians and healers - and they took advantage of this, earning good money from the sale of potions.

2. A hat is one of the traditional tools for catching moles.

Under the ground where moles live, there is usually very little oxygen, and this affects the properties of the animals’ blood: their blood retains hemoglobin for a very long time, but does not clot well. And this is another reason why moles are very vulnerable: even minor damage can doom them to death from blood loss. Fortunately, moles are characterized by extraordinary caution: as soon as they feel that an outside invasion has occurred in their tunnel, they determine its source and barricade the corresponding passage. By the way, this is why mole hunting should be trusted to professionals: often independent attempts to catch a mole only push it to create more and more underground passages.

So, the mole finds out about the invasion when he notices that his underground system has filled with fresh air from the surface. Therefore, the hunter tries to confuse him by making holes in several places at once, so that it is more difficult for the mole to determine the source of danger. And it is precisely at this stage of work that a wide-brimmed hat helps him: its main function (in addition to all other functions typical for a hat) is that the hunter closes with his hat one of the holes in the tunnel, which the mole should not know about: then it will not penetrate there air and light, and a mole running through such an area can be taken by surprise.

3. People sometimes became victims of mole hunting.

When Hamer describes more or less traditional ways of getting rid of moles, it becomes clear why he devoted his life to searching and studying the most humane methods: often dealing with moles turns out to be too cruel. In places where there is no danger of infection for children or pets, they are simply poisoned: this is done by licensed specialists who place aluminum phosphate granules in the mole holes. The poisonous phosphine gas that the granules emit spreads through the underground tunnels and kills the moles, but this never happens instantly: the smaller the dose of gas the mole inhales, the more painful and lengthy its death.

Hamer notes that this method allows people to avoid confronting the unpleasant procedural murder: they do not see any traps, mole catchers, or the moles themselves, which die somewhere underground on their own. However, sometimes it is not possible to hide from death: several times people became victims of the gas intended for moles. The gas penetrated to the surface from cracks in the ground, and rats living near human habitation brought this infection into the house.

4. Not all moles dig the ground.

There are many species of moles in the world, and they can be very different from each other in habits and appearance. Hamer rightly notes: “There are animals that look like moles, but are not moles, and animals that do not look like moles, but are them.” When he talks about moles in the book, he refers to the specific species he has most often encountered in the UK - Talpa Europaea. And, for example, in North America there are seven species of these animals: hairy-tailed mole, eastern mole, Townsend mole, coastal mole, broad-footed mole, American shrew mole and star-nosed mole. Almost all of them are similar to each other in behavior and lifestyle, but not the shrew. It doesn't have large digging feet, so all it can do is dig shallow holes in the leaf litter of the forests of the Pacific Northwest to look for worms, snails or slugs. But this mole can climb trees and swims well.

5. The life of a mole is drama and loneliness.

It is difficult to determine the sex of a mole: the female’s clitoris is very similar to the male’s penis, and she does not have a vaginal opening at all. Females produce quite a lot of testosterone, which makes them aggressive, which is why they do not let anyone near them for most of their lives. But during the breeding season, testosterone levels decrease (this contributes to the development of the vagina), females allow males to approach them and mate. Then testosterone jumps again, and the vagina, as Hamer writes, “closes.”

But before this, the baby manages to give birth to moles, which she carries for a little less than a month. In the first days of the babies’ lives, she feeds them with milk, then, when her maternal instinct fades away and the moles acquire the ability to eat live food, the female drives them to the surface. There they will crawl blindly through the grass until the birds eat most of them. The lucky survivors will dig a tunnel for themselves or find someone's old abandoned home, in which they will begin to lead a solitary existence, interrupted only by short mating seasons. Moles, as is clear from the book, are generally very lonely: the happy exception is the Russian muskrat.

6. You can take a mole home, but it is expensive, difficult and pointless.

The mole is an unusually strong (for its size) animal: in a day it can dig a tunnel up to twenty meters long, and with its front paws it is quite capable of unclenching the fingers of an inexperienced trapper. But after this he is not able to escape: on the surface, moles move clumsily, they are slow and therefore become easy prey for a variety of predators. This circumstance may be important if you caught a mole in a humane trap (most often it’s just a tube made of metal or plastic, the door of which closes in one direction) and decided to move it somewhere far away so that the mole remains alive, but stopped ruining your lawn. The bad news is that it will probably die anyway: moles are very picky about the soil, and, finding itself in an unfamiliar environment, the mole is unlikely to find a place for a new home - rather, it will simply be eaten by someone or die from stress and exhaustion. Therefore, you should not move the mole unnecessarily. However, it is still possible to take it to your home - purely theoretically. If you want your mole to have a good life as a pet, Hamer advises setting it up in a tank filled with dirt that's "two feet deep and the size of an entire floor of the house." And one more thing: if you release the mole into this tank, you will most likely never see it again.

7. The Romans caught moles with pots.

The mentioned tube with door is a rather primitive, but effective design that has a rich history. Mole traps were never particularly sophisticated in engineering, but their appearance still varied from era to era. The first such traps appeared in ancient Rome: they were simple clay pots with water. They were placed in a mole tunnel, after which the mole fell inside, floundered and drowned. Later, traps were invented with structural elements in the form of twisted loops that captured and immobilized the mole. Even later - absolutely fantastic things like installations that shot metal spikes at moles. Before giving up his craft, the author of the book himself used two types of death traps that made it possible to kill a mole most quickly and relatively painlessly: a barrel trap and a scissor trap. “The process of killing a living being should not be cheap or slow,” Hamer notes, just before interrupting to talk about Buddhism.

8. Mole dwellings may include fortresses and worm pits.

Typically, moles do not live under earthen mounds, which are only a by-product of their life activity, unnecessary earth pushed to the surface. But there is an exception, which mole catchers call a “fortress” - this is simply a huge hill by mole standards. Hamer writes that it is "about the size of an overturned cart" or "the size of a sheep." When a pregnant female mole for some reason is unable to build a nest underground, she builds a “fortress” above the earth’s surface. And if such a structure appears on your garden plot, then, as the author of the book notes, you are really out of luck: very soon moles from all over the area will be there.

Another non-trivial element of the mole’s home is the worm storage. From a constructive point of view, nothing remarkable - just a small section of the tunnel. However, when filling it, the mole shows some kind of devilish intelligence. You can’t just put worms on the ground without them biting into it and crawling away. Therefore, knowing that the worms grow a new head for several weeks and during this period are not able to dig the ground, the moles bite off their heads, and only then place them in storage: this way they deprive the worms of the opportunity to escape and get a supply of the freshest food.

9. English moles may suffer as a result of Brexit.

Hamer says that several decades ago in the UK there was a drama involving mole catchers and mole exterminators. The exterminators had neither skills, nor culture, nor understanding of the craft, for which they were deeply despised by the catchers, but they took away their work because they acted rudely and harshly: the only tools they had were a jar of worms in a solution of strychnine, which they put in molehills moves. These people did not even report mole carcasses to the customer (although this was always customary among hunters), so it was impossible to calculate what damage they caused to the mole population. However, it was not only about moles: say, a cat that ate a bird that caught a mole poisoned with strychnine could also die a painful death. Therefore, environmentalists raised the alarm, and in 2006, fishing for mole exterminators was banned throughout the European Union. Hamer now fears that Britain's exit from the EU could prompt a review of this rule, which would send mole exterminators back to their toxic trade.

10. Moles are capable of accidentally interfering in politics.

So, in February 1702, the horse on which King William III of Orange was riding stumbled, the king could not stay on it, fell to the ground and broke his shoulder. The injury had tragic consequences in the form of pneumonia, from which he died a little more than a year after the incident. As the author notes, at that time in England, Scotland and Ireland there were many Jacobites - supporters of King James II, who was overthrown by William and his wife 14 years before the events described. As rumors spread after the incident that the horse's leg had fallen into a wormhole, a toast "To that mole", who was nicknamed "the gentleman in the black waistcoat", became popular among Jacobites.

Year-round hard work

Moles remain active throughout the year; in winter they can make their burrows even under the snow or deeper, where the soil does not freeze. Constant movement and aeration of the earth is a condition for the survival of the mole, which breathes ordinary air; for the same reason, moles do not settle on clay soils.

Adult moles are usually attached to their areas, they do not change them throughout their lives and usually always return to them, even from very long distances. Young moles leave their parental nests at a distance of up to two kilometers and there begin an independent life. Moles do not live in pairs; they unite only during mating games; after the female becomes pregnant, the male leaves her nest.

Appearance and structural features

The appearance of this animal very smoothly emerges from the way of life that is characteristic of all their varieties.
This animal is difficult to confuse with some mouse-like rodent, despite some similarities. One look at this miner is enough to understand that the mole is an underground animal. The animal has a very compact body, the length of which usually does not exceed 20 cm, most often less.

It has a very thick cover of upright, short hair, which does not provide resistance to the animal when moving underground.

This is very important, because we agree that it would not be easy to move forward in an environment of constant friction with a thick mane

This soil mammal also has an extremely sensitive olfactory system, despite the fact that its eyes are either completely absent or extremely poorly developed. Some species still have eyes, but they are a reduced organ capable of only distinguishing light from darkness.

Most varieties have no eyes at all, and in their place you can see only small dimples.

The answer to the question of why moles are blind animals can be considered the natural environment that nature has designated for these animals as a home. After all, a mole underground does not need acute vision; it is enough for him to hear and feel vibrations.

And here we can give Mother Nature a “like” instead of a grateful mole, because the burrowing animal has an incredibly sensitive hearing, and was even given the ability to detect ultrasound. This animal is also capable of feeling the slightest vibrations in the soil due to the presence of small vibrissae hairs on its muzzle.

Moreover, moles even have such hairs on the tip of their tail, which allows the animal to move backwards if necessary. Thus, a blind mole “sees” without vision underground no worse than ours on its surface, and its eyes are replaced by other extremely developed organs of smell and touch.

However, these are not all the signs of an underground inhabitant. This animal also has a very digging-like 4 limbs, especially the front two legs, the appearance and structure of which perfectly explain how the mole digs its endless tunnels.

Where do they live?

The animals live mainly in humid areas: river floodplains, forest edges, meadows, river valleys. Moles cannot chew soil, like rodents. Therefore, they usually settle in soft, loose soil. Very often they appear in our gardens and vegetable plots.

Animals feed on small invertebrates - mainly earthworms, to a lesser extent woodlice, centipedes, spiders, chafer larvae, caterpillars, etc. Sometimes they can even attack a mouse or lizard if they are motionless.

Thanks to their fast metabolism, the animals are very insatiable and within a day they are able to eat an amount of food that is not much less than their own weight. They can remain without food for no more than 17 hours.

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Intensity and duration of the mating season in moles

The mating season begins immediately after the snow melts.
In the northern regions, the start of the rut occurs in the first third of May: 4-8. In the western and southern regions, rodent breeding begins much earlier: already from April 16-17. Cold, early spring also affects the nature of the mating season: mating occurs later, which delays the appearance of the cubs and their settlement. During this period, the body of females is weakened, and they more often fall into traps. This allows farmers to quickly and effectively get rid of garden pests.

At night, moles crawl out of their underground homes and go in search of a mate. Most often, in search of other moles, they “ask” for same-sex individuals: as a result of a fight, one of the rivals dies, and the other continues to search for a mate.

We invite you to familiarize yourself with Lightly salted cucumbers in sparkling mineral water - 5 recipes for crispy instant cucumbers

Having found a female, the mole, most often by force, drags her into its holes. A separate system of ornate passages in his home is designed precisely to hide the female from the encroachments of rivals. Often the female tries to escape by digging new tunnels from his hiding place. Having caught up with her, the winner returns the female to his home.

Basic manufacturing methods

Inventive summer residents have come up with a large number of ways to quickly build devices from improvised and even completely unnecessary things. Among them, there are several simple and quite effective options for combating moles.

Pinwheel made from a plastic bottle

The device looks like a kind of weather vane, which, when exposed to wind, produces a sound that is unpleasant for moles. It can work in any conditions.

To make a windmill, you will need a number of simple steps:

take a standard 1.5 liter plastic bottle;
Use sharp scissors to carefully cut off the bottom;
turn it upside down and draw lines for cuts with a marker.

There are five sections on the bottom. It is necessary to mark the areas from the edge of the circle to the middle parts of each ray. Cut out the selected areas. After this, making a do-it-yourself mole trap from plastic bottles will be almost complete.

In the center you need to punch a hole with smooth edges. Insert a self-tapping screw into the center of the lid and screw it in until it stops.

For a more rigid fixation, it is advisable to use a nut of suitable diameter.

On the neck of the bottle, along the middle line, make two holes for the nail opposite each other. After this, secure the windmill to a pole and stick it into the ground.

Tin repellers

These include simple devices such as a piece of reinforcement with a suspended beer can, for example. Surfaces hitting each other under the influence of gusts of wind will produce loud sounds that are unpleasant for moles. The result of the manufacturing scheme is presented below.

An additional advantage is that metal reinforcement will conduct sound into the ground to a greater depth. As a result, the moles will leave the developed territory.

In the form of an airplane

Instructions on how to make an airplane-shaped mole repeller from a plastic bottle step by step:

to make the hash brown, a metal pipe of medium diameter is dug into the ground;
a separate pin will need to be tightly attached to the top of the site;
make several cuts in the form of blades on the bottle;
make holes at the bottom of the container with a hot nail;
Place the bottle on the installed pin.

When exposed to wind, the blades will begin to rotate. The vibrations of the windmill will be directed towards the soil and scare away moles.

From several

To increase efficiency, it is recommended to install several turntables at once. The soil, especially dry soil, quickly muffles sounds. Installing individual elements will provide a much more active effect in repelling moles.

Method No. 5

To make another option, you will need a stick, garden shears and a plastic bottle. Further like this:

in the walls you need to make wide cuts along the walls;
they will require 2 additional cuts in a perpendicular direction at the top and bottom;
after bending individual sections, you will get unique blades;
the assembled mechanism must be put on the support, after which the device will become ready for action.

Under the influence of wind, parts of the system will begin to rotate. This will create an unpleasant sound that can rid the area of mole settlements.

Method number 6

To make a mole repeller with your own hands from a plastic bottle, you will need an additional plate cut from another bottle. Make 15 cm long slits in a solid bottle. Blades for a propeller of approximately the same size are made from a separate part.

Then they are stuck into the prepared holes to form a fan. You will need to make an additional puncture in the lid for the metal rods. After this, attach the structure to the stick. When rotating, the homemade product will make a peculiar noise to scare off moles.

Description of the animal

Its cylindrical, shortened, dense body helps it move through dug tunnels . It is slightly pointed at the front and rounded at the back.

The front part is much better developed. The animal has 6 main species and 11 different varieties. They differ in the structure of the jaw, skeleton, their weight, and size.

Young individuals differ from older mammals in the silvery hue of their skin. The mole has practically no neck. The head seems pulled into the shoulders.

The body smoothly touches the triangular shaped head . On the head there is a proboscis, along the edges of which there are vibrissae. Thanks to these sensitive hairs, the animal finds food.

The mole's forelimbs are wide, everted, and shaped like a spade . Initially the paws are silver-black. Over time they begin to fade.

There are 5 tightly pressed toes on the feet. They are connected by thin membranes. The claws are elongated, strong, slightly flattened. They reach 10 mm in length.

The hind feet are unwebbed, but with very sharp, elongated claws. The animal has 44 teeth , 2 of which are well-developed upper canines. In adult moles, the fangs are severely worn out.

The size of a male mole from proboscis to tail can reach 115-200 mm , females - from 105 to 145 mm. The weight of males is 90-100 g, females - 60-80 g.