Seeing Mr. (or Ms.) Mole toes up beside the fresh mole hill was a wonderment, indeed.  It seemed unbelievable that such a small creature could move so much dirt in one night and never mind that there were three or four other fresh mounds nearby.  It seemed equally unbelievable that the mole trap that had finally worked.

It was more than a month ago at one of the summer gatherings in our yard that Nyel got to talking with someone about our recent mole problem.  It turned out that this man was a Mole Catcher of the First Order.

“I’ve caught over a hundred moles on the peninsula in the last few years,” he said.  Apparently, his best killing field is one of the golf courses.  He offered to set a trap and showed Nyel how to check it out.  A month of checking had resulted in nothing. Zip. Nada.  Until yesterday.

I felt a slight twinge as I looked at the velvety little body, but my reaction was not even close to comparable to my feeling about the dozens of spots where the mole people have ruined our lawn.  I don’t begrudge them their living which is apparently mostly dependent upon earthworms, but there is an entire meadow adjacent to our yard where they have free rein.  This is definitely a case of  “not in my backyard.”

I thought it was interesting, though, to learn how moles catch their earthworm dinners.  They trap them!  A sort of poetic justice, if one takes the side of the earthworms.  Which I do.  According to Wikapedia:

The mole runs are in reality ‘worm traps’, the mole sensing when a worm falls into the tunnel and quickly running along to kill and eat it.  Because their saliva contains a toxin that can paralyze earthworms, moles are able to store their still-living prey for later consumption. They construct special underground “larders” for just this purpose; researchers have discovered such larders with over a thousand earthworms in them. Before eating earthworms, moles pull them between their squeezed paws to force the collected earth and dirt out of the worm’s gut.

“Verrry interrresting,” as Artie Johnson used to say.