Moles

I have been thinking a lot about moles this week.  Not because I have been reading Wind in the Willows, excellent book though it is, rather I have been chatting with a friend who will be leaving the military soon and is retraining as a mole catcher.

As a youngster I considered this the perfect job, but when I came to an employable age I found I had to do other work to make ends meet and my mole catching, was not catching, but poisoning; at that time using strychnine.  I would buy my little pot of poison from Boots and mix it with earth worms then off to some farm to walk miles baiting mole runs with worms. Could you imagine popping into Boots now and asking for strychnine?

Now of course strychnine is banned, and while we may grumble about the pathetic nanny state we live in, which assumes if a person has a gun he will run amok, or if a mole catcher buys poison he will be using it for nefarious purposes, such a finishing off worthless politicians, the up side is the art of mole trapping has come back.

I learnt the art of mole trapping mostly through trial and error.  My father gave me the basics and then I picked the brains of others and read as much as I could on mole trapping, and there was not a great deal in the public library about trapping moles and certainly no internet

I started with two scissor traps bought from the Farm Store, they were heavy, stiff, and the mole had to be built like Arnie to trip them.  I soon learnt that an hours work with a file would would reshape the trigger part of the tongue so that it moved as soon as touched and caused the trap to snap shut immediately.  Another lesson I quickly learnt was; always mark where your mole traps were set. It was most distressing having to spend hours digging in hopeful places trying to locate the mole trap that had disappeared into the ground because a load of sheep had rioted over it or worse cattle.

My father paid me the princely sum of 20 pence each, I think now the cost is £5.00 a mole.  There is nothing like the promise of pocket money to a kid to motivate, and I soon became very good a catching moles and had added to my small collection of traps a Duffus trap which could catch a mole in both ends. This trap too need the judicious application of the file to make it trip easily, and was even harder to find if buried and not marked.

The runs I found by running my the heel of my wellie between two fresh mole hills, by applying pressure you can usually feel the turf give if you are over a run, unless its really deep.  I used a heavy sheaf knife to cut a trap sized hole in the turf and would try and lift the plug out whole.  By using a knife it was usually easy to see the mole run.

These were the basics of catching moles, but the art took much much longer to learn.