Back in October I wrote a piece about how gardeners in the past dealt with garden pests Someone got in touch to ask why I hadn’t mention moles, [thanks  John!].  Apart from the fact I’d run out  of space in that post,  as one grows older I suspect one acquires a more zen approach to gardening. That’s certainly true for me and there are now very few creatures that I consider pestiferous enough to want to deter let alone eliminate – the coypu who are slowly destroying the banks of my lake, the newly arrived asiatic hornets who are threatening to kill off our bees, and maybe the polecats who play football in our roof-space and eat through the wiring – but  moles are definitely not  among them.

But I thought I’d investigate a bit further anyway…

 

I have very occasionally seen moles – both alive and unfortunately dead  – so I knew they were small, but they’re actually tiny at just 12-18cm long.  Most gardeners won’t ever see them because moles  live almost all their life underground and rarely come to the surface, except perhaps when pushing up a molehill.

Moles are born to dig. Their long front claws scrape away the earth to create a tunnel which  they then have to feel their way along  with their snouts and whiskers because their eyesight is noxiously poor because  of living in almost permanent darkness. Their glossy coats are the subterranean equivalent of aerodynamic and help them glide through the soil, without it sticking to them.   They can  tunnel up to 200 metres per day creating semi-permanent  tunnel networks, usually not more than 50cm down.  These are constantly expanded to reach fresh supplies of food because they need to eat at least half their bodyweight in worms a day. What I hadn’t  realised is that moles are solitary and very territorial animals only getting together to breed and raise their young .  [For more on this see this old but still useful article“An Ecological Study of the Mole” by A V Arlton]

The word “mole”  itself is late Middle English and  derives from moldwarp, meaning ‘earth thrower’ and it  first appears in the early 15thc.  Even by then it’s clear, as examples in the Oxford English Dictionary  show,  the poor creatures  were not popular with everyone.  In 1483, for example, the accounts  of the Duke of Norfolk show that “My Lady gaff Braby for takynge of mulles xij.d.”

Mole control became a national policy in 1532 when Henry VIII introduced the first of a series of acts of Parliament which called for the destruction of a long list of creatures thought to be prejudicial to agriculture or fishing.    The most significant of these  Tudor vermin laws was “An Acte for the Preservation of Grayne”  passed in 1566 under Elizabeth I.

 

The act, which  remained in force for  three centuries only being repealed in 1863,  covers  not just the obvious pests such as rats, mice and foxes  but also hedgehogs, kingfishers, and wildcats and put a price on every head. Literally. Amongst other things it laid down  a penny for every 12 starlings heads, fourpence for each magpie’s head, a shilling for every badger and a halfpenny a mole. Responsibility for organising payments  was, in theory,  down to the churchwardens of each parish.

Richard Lovegrove researched the effects of the Tudor vermin acts for Silent Fields his 2007 book, on the decline of wildlife in Britain, writing a chapter each on many of the targeted species including moles. He goes through the very patchy records that  survive, suggesting that although some molecatchers often travelled widely looking for work other parishes and communities employed locals on a contract.

In some parishes there  seem to have been no appointments or few moles recorded, perhaps because a large estate nearby employed their own catcher. There was even  a royal mole-catcher, although that post lapsed around the early 18thc only to be  revived at Sandringham by the late queen in 2002.   Lovegrove’s overall conclusion is that while individual parishes might have listed large numbers the  overall totals were probably modest by modern standards and amounted to no more than an annual cull without impacting much on the total population.

But why the obsession with destroying moles anyway?  Gardeners blame them for damage to lawns or flower beds, and  it was thought that they damaged farm crops too.  In fact, moles are definitely not interested in eating plants or their roots because their diet consists mainly of earthworms, with whatever grubs and other small creatures they find. Any damage tends to be limited to their tunnelling  separating roots from the surrounding soil  so the plant wilts and dies, or burying grass under the spoil of the molehill.  It’s also true that molehills, if left undisturbed in permanent pasture, provide good conditions for invasive plants and coarse grasses to establish. They can also cause problems for some farm machinery and if silage is collected then soil from the molehill can spoil the stored crop.

Of course they can be a hazard for horse riders.  You’ve only got to think of William III who , in 1702, was thrown from his horse  when it tripped on a molehill.  He broke his collarbone and developed pneumonia, which killed him two weeks later. His enemies are said to have raised toasts to “the little gentleman in the black velvet waistcoat”.

Look carefully at his statue in London’s St. James Square  and just near the rear left hoof, you can spot the offending molehill. There’s a similar  statue in Queen Square, Bristol.

 

Yet it’s equally clear that, even in Tudor times,  others were less hostile.   In Hamlet [i. v. 164 ] William Shakespeare saw another, more beneficial side to their digging “Well said old Mole, can’st worke in the earth? so fast, a worthy Pioneer”. That was echoed in an early translation of  Palladius’s  De re Rustica   “The molde & other suche as diggeth lowe Anoy hem not, in hard land yf they growe.”    This is because with their burrowing moles improve soil drainage and aerate the soil and actually  help make it  healthier, allowing more types of plants to grow. And on a humorous note in 1684 the Royal Society heard a paper showing how moles were thought to dig up diamonds, so maybe we should all be encouraging them and live in hope of one turning up the next Koh-i-Nor!

All of these anti-mole  “remedies” and many more were collected together in a 1765 book delightfully entitled  The Vermin Killer.  However there wasn’t much by way of “new” methods throughout the 18th or early 19thc in Britain, and even the usually inventive John Claudius Loudon fails to devise an effective mole remedy. His Encyclopaedia of Gardening of 1825  has a drawing of a simple trap but no explanation of how it might work, and otherwise he merely suggest catching and destroying them as helpless babies in the spring.

However during the revolutionary years in France the first book dedicated to moles and how to deal with them appears in 1797. It was the L’Art du taupier, by Etienne Dralet.  It has the first illustration I’ve seen of a mole tunnel network.

Traps were the main method of catching moles. The earliest ones are primitive and undoubtedly cruel, but our ancestors did not share modern sensibilities about animal welfare.   These devices were usually home-made   wooden contraptions coupled with twine, or a pitfall tap such as a pot sunk into the ground baited with worms so the mole would fall in but be unable to escape.

I’ve decided not to include images of other common traps  here – too unpleasant – but just google mole traps and you can find them if you’re interested.

These traditional methods continue to be employed against every creature considered a pest and believe it or not that even included house sparrows with campaigns to exterminate them completely.

Richard Lovegrove gives examples of  clubs who paid out prize money for various pests” eg in 1925 one at Vines Cross in Sussex paid, amongst other prizes,  6d per hawk or stoat, 2d for moles, rats or queen wasps and a 1d per sparrow. Indeed he shows that the last of these clubs didn’t shut down until the end of 2003.

But it was poison that began to take over in the 19thc, particularly  the product of a tropical tree [Strychnos nux-vomica] and a tropical climbing bean, named after St Ignatius [Strychnos ignatii]. Its toxic and medicinal effects  were known across south and east Asia, and were recorded too in the classical world and many early European herbals and there are reports of  the powdered beans being used as a pesticide from the 17thc but in 1818 the active ingredient,  strychnine, was identified and isolated from the Saint-Ignatius’ bean by two French chemists.

 

 

 

 

It was apparently simple to create a form which could be used in incredibly minute quantities medicinally but otherwise as a quick-acting poison. It soon entered commercial production and became so  readily available over the counter, just like arsenic, from any chemist with no questions asked as I showed in an earlier post.

There were at least two problems with poisoning the poor moles compared with  trapping.  Firstly,  there was no way of the mole-catcher showing the garden owner how many moles they had caught because, of course, the moles died in their tunnels.

More importantly there were welfare concerns  because death by strychnine poisoning is slow and agonising, and residual strychnine is highly dangerous to other wildlife, domestic animals and humans. Its use was eventually banned but not until 2006.

Instead the poison of choice these days is Phostoxin which reacts with the damp of the soil in the tunnels to create a short-lived toxic gas.  

There was another way that was tried to deal with moles – albeit a short-lived and very eccentric one.

It was promoted by the naturalist Reverend William Buckland (1784 – 1856) ,  who famously attempted to eat his way through the entire animal kingdom.  The reason it was short-lived because he reported that moles were one of the nastiest tasting things he had eaten – alongside bluebottles!

One side benefit of mole catching was the use of their pelts for making into gloves, waistcoats or coats. For that huge numbers are needed – a waistcoat apparently required around 100. Although the market varied Lovegrove cites figures ranging from 1d a skin to 2s6d in times of shortage