Bog Myrtle & Peat

The last month has seen a massive explosion of moles across the Chayne. The small areas of grass between the rushes have been churned up into thick black stacks of peaty soil, and entire fields have been quite literally turned upside down. I have worked as a mole catcher over the past seven years and I have enormous respect for these little creatures. Trapping them in silage fields and golf courses has sometimes been a serious challenge, and I’m not ashamed to say that there are a handful of moles still working around underground who have exhausted every attempt of mine to catch them.

When a mole cottons on to the fact that you have set a trap for him, he will dig soil from the walls of his tunnel and push it into the trap, blocking the mechanism or springing it uselessly. He will then either turn around and never return to that area, or dig a new tunnel around the obstacle, bypassing it altogether. Only the faintest whiff of human odour on a trap will give it away, and sometimes moles are so particular about avoiding the trap that they will dig them out of the ground altogether, leaving the clogged metal shape sitting on the summit of a fresh hill.

They are clever little animals, with individual personalities and characteristics, and aside from the fact that the soil from their hills can be a danger to livestock if it is allowed to contaminate silage, they are almost entirely harmless. When I am asked to remove moles from a lawn or garden, I often have some reluctance about it. I have turned down jobs before because the only reason given for wanting moles killed was the messiness of their hills, and as far as I am concerned, killing in the name of tidiness is never justified. Often, the only sign of nature in an immaculately primped lawn is a ragged system of mole hills, and even though “the customer is always right”, I try and explain that once the mounds have been removed, noone will ever know that one of the nation’s most attractive and appealing mammals is living right under their noses.

There is no point in trying to catch the moles on the Chayne because they are doing no harm at all. If nothing else, they are building hundreds of yards of underground tunnels every week, and that can only be a good thing for my drainage problem.