At first I thought maybe the landscaping company had laid some curious manner of sod in the front yard. A sort of spongy, randomly furrowed fescue that sinks slightly when walked upon.
Before long it became apparent that something else was going on. Something subterranean and active. Two and two came together: I’d been invaded by moles.
A first for us, but not uncommon in the great scheme of things. In his book “The Southern Wildlife Watcher,” the local naturalist Rob Simbeck tells of a neighbor some years back facing the same situation.
“Dissatisfied with the traps proffered by Tractor Supply and home remedies like cayenne pepper and mothballs,” Simbeck wrote, “he would tamp down the freshest tunnel in his yard, pull up a lawn chair and a .45 (pistol) and wait silently. A window-rattling ‘blam!’ let us know when one more mole had been reduced to airborne components.”
It’s a colorful tale that conjures vivid imagery, but not a remedy Simbeck advises. Nor is it one suited to Kayne and me. We are the kind of people who take pains to relocate into the wild the spiders, flies and other such bugs that find their way into our house.
Some years back, when mice took a notion to move in with us, we set nonlethal traps and would drive a mile or so away to rehome the captured creatures.
Given those inclinations, mole-icide was not on the table. I needed more options. Simbeck, who has helped me with such research in the past, pointed me in the direction of Amy Dunlap, an agent with the University of Tennessee Extension office in Davidson County. My email to her was not the first of its type.
“A shocking number of them are asking how to get rid of small mammals in the landscape!” she wrote.
“Through on-the-job experience and learning from the experts, I came to know much more about moles than I ever imagined.”
And, I suspect, more than she ever cared to know. Her response did confirm the type of animal I am faced with. With my limited – practically nonexistent – knowledge of wild fauna, I wondered if they might be voles. No.
“Moles are the only animals that create surface tunnels,” Dunlap wrote, a result of their foraging for food. Which, in the case of moles, consists primarily of invertebrates: earthworms, snails, insects and such. Lots of them, maybe 70-100 percent of their body weight daily.
How might I encourage them to meet their dietary needs elsewhere?
“Trapping is the most effective method of removal,” Dunlap wrote. “There are many kinds of traps, but livetrapping with a cage-type trap is most common.”
There are at least a couple of problems with that approach, Dunlap says. For one thing, there’s no guarantee that the trapped moles won’t simply be replaced by others looking to take advantage of the same conditions that attracted little buggers in the first place.
“These are sneaky critters that will capitalize on prime real estate,” she wrote. And evidence suggests my front yard is quite prime.
But a potential re-moling is not the biggest issue with trapping. “Once an animal is trapped, it must be disposed of,” Dunlap wrote. “Releasing livetrapped mammals is illegal without a permit from the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency.”
I do not have that kind of permit. Who does? People like Zion Lutz. Lutz owns Smoky Wildlife Control, which advertises services to remove raccoons, bats, squirrels, skunks, opossums, groundhogs, armadillos, chipmunks, muskrats, birds, beavers and foxes.
“There’s a lot of nuisance animals that can be relocated,” he told me. He also owns another, more specialized business: Mole Miners.
“In all of my years handling moles,” he told me, “all the forums and conferences I go to, I have never once seen anyone trapping a mole live and relocating it.”
Nor, he said, are his customers inclined to mercy when they contact him about moles. “Just kill them all,” they tell him. “We don’t want them.”
Lutz, like Dunlap, gave me much more interesting information about moles.
Chief among his views is that all methods of control other than trapping are nothing more than useless gimmicks.
The bottom line of it all, though, was this: I can either learn to live with my moles or render them unalive one way or the other. Well. We’ll see. Have I mentioned we have an opossum living under our porch?
Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville. He can be reached at [email protected]