I have blogged in the past about the little mole cartoon character that is so beloved by the Czechs. Well this post is about the real three-dimensional version.
With the arrival of Spring trails of brown soil heaps have exploded in people's lawns like spots on a teenager's chin. Everywhere I go, people are moaning about them. Plastic bottles have been shoved upside down into the burrows to scare away the little gentlemen in velvet.
The other day I was walking down the lane when I found two dead velvet gentlemen. They lay in the middle of the tarmac on their backs with their large paddle-shaped front paws held up as if surrendering to the sky. I don't know what has caused this. Maybe the moles were making a dash for the field on the other side, unable to dig their way across, they decided to go over the top into no-man's land only to be mown down. Perhaps some animal - a fox perhaps - was collecting them. Then in my garden I found another, already far gone - the black and orange graveyard beetles were crawling over it. So what is catching them and not eating them, I wonder? And did the rest of the mole platoon make it to the field on the other side?
