LittleField Notes: Mole Mounds
by Ryan Foxley of Arlington, WA
I plunge my favorite, antique digging fork into the dark, moist earth, pushing the tines deep with my booted foot and in one motion guide the handle down, heft and turn the forkful of moist, brown soil. I take a step to the right and repeat the motion, then again, and again. I step back, and repeat, working backwards until the whole bed is loosened and turned. This is familiar and comforting work, quiet, repetitive, requiring just enough exertion to feel it in the body. I bend at the waist, then as the arms push the handle down, the tines come up, followed by a lift, a twist, a turn, and finally a shake, the black earth falling through the tines, compaction giving way to crumbling, weeds uprooted, displaced, buried. My back feels the work particularly. These forks are always too short; one must bend to the task, an upright stance being out of the question. Someone important long ago decided that digging forks should have short handles, end of discussion. And really, if farming tools didn’t make your back ache how could modern urbanites continue to feel smug about finally escaping a life of “backbreaking drudgery.” Backbreaking work must be, well, backbreaking, and should be felt—back there, in the back. Me, I think of it as back strengthening, character honing, soul sharpening. And to be fair, there exists a digging tool that allows one to stand upright, the broadfork, but it is a tool for aerating, not so much for digging and tilling. I very much enjoy the broadfork and make use of it regularly, but I had let this particular bed go too long fallow and it had grown a healthy crop of weeds which necessitated that the soil be lifted and turned, not merely loosened and aerated.
And so there I stood on a sunny, mild morning in late April, digging fork in hand, twinge in my back, nothing in particular on my mind. The weather was fair, the world fresh with the promise of new growth; a bit of snow still lingered on the peak of the mountain; trees donned new leaves of fresh mint green, while three or four does browsed in the fence row far over at the end of the field: a lovely scene that, in all its seasonal variation, I never tire of. I cast an eye downward, to the freshly turned earth, to the soil at my feet. It’s easy to forget that there’s a whole beautiful world down there as well, just as hopeful and joyous in its own springtime rebirth, even if not as obvious or glamorous as the wide world above. I hunkered down for a closer look. I set down the fork and sifted through the moist soil with my bare hand. With the recent mild temperatures the good dirt was finally warming. It was dark, friable, and multi-textured, the result of years of what I hope has been adequately careful attention: green manuring, generous compost additions, and sensible crop rotations. As the soil crumbled satisfyingly through my fingers though, I noticed something different: earthworms—many, many worms, wriggling and brown, in numbers way more plentiful than in previous years. I paused in thought, then stood as upright as my stiff back would allow, scratched my head, hunkered down again and picked up a handful of soil from further down the bed: same thing—lots of reddish-brownish earthworms. It’s not that the garden didn’t have worms before, they were there, but not in numbers like this. Indeed I have puzzled over why there were so few. There really should have been more considering the good health of my soil. And now I had them in spades. This was incredible. But what had changed? Why now so many? I worked the thing over in my mind until it came to me. It was moles, or rather the absence of moles. The only thing I had really changed in my management of the garden lately was to reduce the abundant mole population.
A couple of years ago, after years of allowing moles to run roughshod all over the farm, I finally had had enough of their damage and I served them an eviction notice: “Out of the garden, and while you’re packing, out of the lawn as well! And would you mind also giving my hayfields a break!” It took time to make an impact, but there could be no doubt—with fewer moles there were many more worms. Of course the moles didn’t merely take their leave voluntarily and head off into the subterranean sunset. In order to reclaim a bit of my domain, I first had to learn a bit about the nature of these pesky ground dwellers.
I was dealing with the Townsend’s mole (Scapanus townscendii). They only live in the narrow slice of land between the mountains and the sea from southern British Columbia to Northern California. By size, it is the largest mole species in North America, and the only one that eats vegetable matter in addition to bugs and grubs. Since they can tunnel up to 18 feet in one hour, it’s no surprise that they require an enormous amount of food to fuel all that furious digging. Incredibly, they can eat up to 150% of their body weight in one day, of which, 70% typically comes from earthworms. Because they so enjoy worms, they are particularly attracted to fertile farm and garden soils, specifically fields fertilized with manure. Turns out well intentioned farming practices were giving me unintended negative consequences.
All that soil from all that tunneling has to go somewhere, so every few feet a mole will remove excess soil from the tunnel and push it up into a mound. I have witnessed one mole construct up to eight mounds in one night, though five or six seems to be about the average. If left alone, a mound on a popular route will be added to, becoming larger and larger over time, such that I have seen older established mounds in my hayfields so large that the soil from a single mound would fill a five-gallon bucket. Left untouched for a year, after an initial crop of weeds, grass eventually grows up over top of the mounds, rendering a field so bumpy as to be almost impossible to stand on a wagon while loading loose hay. Before I added sides to the hay wagon, occasionally we used to lose the top third of a load of hay after hitting a particularly bumpy patch, especially if the horses were stepping it up. Whoever was doing the stacking ended up right down there on the ground on top of the hay. Fortunately, no one was ever hurt. Our pastures are so bumpy that I generally stand during most fieldwork so my legs can act as springs to protect my back from being jarred by 10,000 ancient mole hills all the day long. I have considered plowing and replanting these hayfields so as to get a fresh level start, though I continue to hesitate on account of not wanting to bring up a hundred years worth of weed seeds, or disrupt the lovely diversity of forage that has naturally established itself over the years.
When I finally decided to take them on, the mole situation had become untenable. In addition to eating worms, they were destroying my lawn, upending my fields one mound at a time, and eating my winter carrots from the bottom up. One fall we planted hundreds of flower bulbs around the house; two precious tulips came up the following spring. The lawn by late winter looked like some kind of green and brown moonscape, with large brown mounds interspersed with a precious few patches of green grass. My horse-drawn riding lawnmower was impossible to use in such a molescape, and all that dirt was not at all kind to the power mower blades. I’m not obsessed with having a perfect lawn by any means—I’m certainly not trying to host the US Open—but this was getting out of hand.
Over the years I had made some half hearted attempts at trapping, but never with much luck. I also tried a product that supposedly would drive them away with an unpleasant smell, but from what I could tell they were intrigued rather than repulsed by it, and they appeared to summon friends and family to whatever area I was targeting. The first traps I tried took a mole mess and made it messier and required a lot of digging and fussing. Finally I settled on a trap called the Gopher Hawk. It’s easy to use, doesn’t require digging, and kills instantly.
Here is how to catch a mole: In an area where there are active moles, rake or harrow down all of the mole hills. The next morning take note of the fresh mounds pushed up overnight. This shows you where the mole is active. Set a trap in a tunnel a few inches off of each fresh mound. Next morning check the traps. If you didn’t catch him, any fresh hills will show where he’s working now. Move traps as necessary. Most important is to be consistent. If you let a couple of days go by there will be so many new mounds you’ll lose track of his location.
The Townsend’s mole is a healthy and extremely well adapted species. They are not considered in any way endangered, but are labeled, “of least concern.” After a few years of trapping, I see that it would be impossible to eliminate them all from the farm as there are always fresh ones moving in from the surrounding woods. That said, my relationship with the moles is now more balanced. The worms are back in the garden, the lawn features grass now instead of dirt, and by trapping an area immediately after harrowing, my fields, if still not exactly level, are not getting worse.
I’m not one to needlessly kill the many marvelous creatures of creation, and I let the moles be for many years, though we didn’t exactly live in harmony. The interface of the wild and the cultivated is one of the things I love about farming. Littlefield Farm is surrounded by woods on three sides, a substantial river on the other and is nestled up in the foothills of the Cascade mountains. We are very much surrounded by wild lands inhabited by all sorts of creatures: deer, bears, bobcats, coyotes, mountain lions, all sorts of birds, along with the less exciting animals, like slugs, field mice, shrews, and yes, moles. I recognize these creatures’ right to exist and their need to make a living. But I also have that same right and same need, and sometimes my aspirations come up against those of our wild neighbors’, and boundaries have to be drawn. That is farming.
Farming though, is never simple. I ask myself regularly if I am falling into that tired old man-against-nature scenario where nature must be subdued and destroyed, bowed and bent to man’s will. When I think of how wolves, bison and other species were nearly exterminated in the 19th century West, it gives me pause when I head out to check my traps. I don’t wish to be a cold hearted aggressor on my own land.
And I hope I am not. I do believe there is a middle way between the ruthless taming of nature on one hand, and a laissez-faire, anything goes approach on the other. In fact, man made a bargain with nature the day he decided to give up a roaming life living off of what the wild provided, and to instead stay put and start raising his own food. Hunting and gathering was difficult to be sure, but it was simple: eat whatever you can find or kill. Never again would the calculus be so simple. In embracing agriculture we placed limitations on the wild, drew boundaries, lines of exclusion. Limits though, do not imply destruction. I mow saplings that sprout up in the field, have a zero tolerance policy for slugs in and around the garden, and I happily kill weeds all day long, but that does not mean that I would advocate for the extinction of any troublesome species. If we are honest with ourselves, we accept that farming activities, from plowing to harvesting and everything in between cause a certain amount of death, both plant and animal, intentional and not. Fortunately though, our agricultural contract with nature is not all death and destruction. It works the other way as well. I plant flowers to attract pollinating insects, encourage owls and weasels for rodent control, and swallows for fly control, provide open space protected from development for all manner of creatures. I even welcome one invasive species, Himalayan blackberries, on certain steep slopes to prevent erosion. I manage the farm as a farm, and that means making a multitude of decisions, affecting a multitude of species, wild and not. Many of these decisions are difficult and I do not make them lightly. I have a standard of management for field and garden that is not necessarily applicable elsewhere. For example, when I take a walk in the woods I would never kill a slug, needlessly cut down a sapling, or indeed set a mole trap.
The intersection of the wild and domesticated is not only complicated by the nature of the interaction itself, but also by the fact that in our modern world many so-called “wild” species of both plants and animals are themselves not native, often further disrupting any natural balance that once existed. The Townsend‘s mole is an interesting example of this in that their preferred food is the earthworm, a species which was actually imported, mostly unintentionally, from Europe starting in the early 17th century. It is likely then that mole populations would be significantly lower without the importation of the earthworm. To add to this complication, I was recently surprised to learn that, although we gardeners highly value the work of these imported earthworms, they are actually harmful to certain forest ecosystems.
So we, the moles and I, are competing for a resource that we both value highly and that is not even native to our place. I do not know what the moral of this story is, but it is interesting to think about, and I suppose at the end of the day, the moles and I will go back-and-forth on this patch of earth in fierce competition for a tiny, seemingly insignificant creature that never should have been here in the first place.
