Animal Life in Field and Garden

by Jean-Henri Fabre

Mole

“Was the animal satisfied for long? By no means. The next morning the mole was wandering restlessly about in the bottom of its cask, apparently wild with hunger. Food, quick, quick! or it will die of starvation. The remains of the sparrow left over from the evening before, with a frog which it promptly disemboweled, quieted it for a while. Finally, a toad was thrown to it. As soon as the mole approached to rip it up the toad inflated its body, hoping perhaps to frighten the enemy with its repulsive appearance. At any rate, it succeeded. After sniffing at it, the mole turned away in disgust. Ah! you don’t want the toad, you greedy creature; then you shall have turnips, cabbages, and carrots. Plenty of these were given it. But fie on roots! Rather perish than eat turnips! The next morning the mole was found to have starved to death amid [[71]]the vegetables. It had scorned to touch them with so much as a tooth.

“Had this animal an exceptional appetite, a taste for unusual things, that it should have preferred to die of hunger rather than touch vegetable food? Not at all; it merely followed the preferences of all its kind. Many other experiments have been performed both by Flourens and by other observers. All the moles they have tried to feed with vegetable substances—with bread, lettuce, cabbages, roots, herbage of any description—have starved to death without touching their provisions. On the other hand, those that were fed with raw flesh, worms, larvæ, and insects of various kinds, remained alive.

“Another very simple way to determine positively the kind of food eaten by this animal is to examine the contents of its stomach as it lives in the freedom of its customary haunts. Everything eaten by it must find its way to the stomach. Let us catch a mole, cut it open, and investigate. The stomach is found to contain, sometimes, red pieces of common earthworms, or it may be a pap of beetles, recognizable from the scaly remains that have not been digested; or still again, and rather oftener, we find a marmalade of larvæ, especially the larvæ of June-bugs—undigested bits of mandibles and the hard shell of the skull. In short, one is likely to come upon a mixed hash of all the small creatures inhabiting the soil, such as wood-lice, millipeds, cutworms, moths in the chrysalis state, caterpillars, and subterranean [[72]]nymphs; but no matter how carefully we search we cannot find a bit of vegetable matter.

“All possible observation points to the same conclusion: despite what is believed by so many it is certain that the mole’s diet is confined to animal substances. And could it, I ask you, be otherwise? Would the stomach’s contents belie the savage set of teeth you have just seen in the picture? Do not its teeth show that it is a flesh-eater?

“Yes, the mole eats flesh and nothing else; everything proves this. Besides, remember its big appetite, if one may call appetite the raging demands of a stomach that in twelve hours requires a quantity of food equal to the weight of the animal. The mole’s existence is a gluttonous frenzy. This frenzy seizes the creature three or four times a day, and it dies of starvation if it has to go without food for more than a few hours. To satisfy its appetite, when its food melts away and disappears almost as soon as swallowed, what can the mole count on? Live sparrows, which it devoured with such zest in the experiments of Flourens, are evidently not for a hunter that burrows underground; at most, some stray frog, found in the field, may fall into its clutches. What, then, is left for it to count on? The larvæ buried underground, and especially those of the June-bug, tender and fat as bacon. That is very little, I admit, for such hunger; but the number to be had will make up for the smallness of the prey. What a slaughter of white worms must take place when the soil abounds in this small game! Scarcely [[73]]is one meal finished when another begins, and each time, no doubt, other small insects are eaten by the dozen. To free a field of these destroyers of our crops there is no helper equal to the mole.

“A valued destroyer of vermin—that is what we defend when we take the mole’s part and give to it, even if somewhat reluctantly, the honorable title of helper. That title, in truth, it only partly deserves. To catch the crickets, the larvæ, the white worms, and the insects of all kinds that it feeds on, the mole is obliged to disturb the roots amid which its prey is to be found. Many that interfere with it in its work are cut; plants have their roots laid bare and are even uprooted altogether; and, finally, the earth dug up by this untiring miner is piled on the surface in little mounds or mole-hills. With such upturning of the soil a field of vegetables may be speedily ruined and a crop of grain badly damaged. One night is enough for a mole to undermine a large tract; for the famished creature is singularly quick in boring the soil where it hopes to find something to eat.

“It is well equipped for making its underground galleries, which often are hundreds of meters long. The body is stubby and almost cylindrical from one end to the other, so as to slip with the least resistance through the narrow passages bored by the animal. The fur is short, thick, and carefully curried so that it shall not catch the dust and may be kept perfectly clean even in the most dusty soil. The tail is very short and the external ears are wanting, [[74]]although the hearing is remarkably acute. Ears like those of animals that live in the open, would be in the way underground; in the mole they are made very tiny, for the animal’s greater convenience. No luxurious outfit does it ask for, but only what is strictly necessary for its work of mining. Eyes wide open so that the dirt could get into them would be a perpetual torment to the creature; and, besides, what use could it make of them in the total darkness of its abode? The mole is not exactly blind, as is generally believed; it has two eyes, but these are very small and set so deep in the surrounding fur that they can be of little use. It is guided by the sense of smell, in which it rivals the pig; and like the pig it has a snout of the right shape for digging up a toothsome morsel. With its snout the pig finds and roots out the savory titbit buried in the ground; the mole in like manner discovers and digs up the plump white worm. To reach it amid a network of roots and under a considerable thickness of soil, the animal has its fore paws, which spread out like large strong hands with exceptionally tough nails. These hands—stout shovels which, if need be, can open a passage through tufa, a soft sort of rock—are the mole’s principal tools. As the animal advances, digging with its snout and clearing away with its hands, the earth is thrown to the rear by its hind feet, which are much weaker than the hands but strong enough for the far lighter task. If the mole proposes to return by the same road, the track must be kept clear; [[75]]accordingly, the earth dug up is thrown outside to form mole-hills at intervals.

“For the present these details will suffice. Now let us take up the much-discussed question of the mole’s usefulness. Should we, considering the undoubted services it renders us, let it live in our fields, or ought we rather, on account of its destructive digging, to look upon it as an enemy and wage war on it? Most people seem to feel we should make war on it—war to the death. Some persons make it a practice to destroy every mole they find and there is small pity bestowed upon the little creature unearthed by the spade. But I should like to remind the mole’s pitiless enemies that insects do far worse damage, and that for ridding a field of insects nothing is equal to this bloodthirsty hunter. Notwithstanding all opinion to the contrary, I believe that moles in moderate numbers are needed in a field, that it is unwise to destroy them all. Indeed, experience has proved this. I know of regions where the moles have been hunted down and destroyed until not one was left. Now, do you know what was the result? The white worms multiplied so that they ate up everything in the fields. To get rid of the worms it was necessary to let the moles come back and to let them stay so long as they did not become too numerous.

“And there is something else to be said for the mole. Mole-hills are formed of well-worked earth which, when spread about with the rake, is very good for young grass. Further, the creature’s subterranean [[76]]galleries serve as drains for keeping the soil in a sanitary condition, letting off the extra water just as regular drains would do. On the whole, then, after weighing the arguments on both sides, I am of the opinion that the mole ought not to be banished from our fields unless it multiplies to excess.”