I’ve recently become a bit obsessed with moles…
After exploring the ideas of ‘sensescapes’ and sensory difference I’ve been pondering how my aural diversity means that I experience the land here differently to those with what some would call ‘normal’ hearing, whilst acknowledging Alison Kafer’s words “We all have bodies and minds with shifting abilities” and reflecting on how people who have different embodied experiences of a place perceive a more “nature-full” space.
This has led me down a “rabbit hole” (or should I say mole hole) thinking about how different species with different ways of hearing exist in our place, and how they might sense their environments differently, such as by using tactile cues from fur or whiskers to interact with the world outside.
We are lucky enough that moles have found a home at Hill Crest. They tunnel away and unless they surface at an inopportune moment of a passing owl or stoat, are rarely ‘seen’ here at Hill Crest but the evidence of their daily toil pepper the landscape, where their crumbly piles of soil are a testament to the time they spend digging away looking for the jewels of earthworms or ant pupae.
In Rob Atkinson’s fantastic “Moles” book he describes how Moles will eat up to 60 grams of earthworms a day which is more than half its body weight. To seek out these treasures, moles are equipped with wondrous articulated shoulders and forelegs with broad ‘hands’ and nails that are perfectly compatible for chiselling and scooping away the soil to create a network of interconnected tunnels.
These ‘scoopings’ are sometimes deposited above ground in domes of soil- often the only indication that moles are present. These soil piles provide golden opportunities for seed establishment. Wood ants often colonise molehills, which in turn become food sources for many birds.
Nevertheless, the mole has a chequered history of co-existing with humans. Seen as a pest creating ‘trip hazards’, disrupting immaculate lawns, with soil from molehills contaminating hay or silage which could lead to listeriosis in livestock.
However here at Hill Crest, the moles are integral in our rewilding efforts. I collect some of the soil for mixing in with our homegrown compost for use in the Tree Hub, with the thought that perhaps mycorrhizal spores will enrich the saplings and acclimatise them to our local soil type. But as I do so, I ponder how these moles live their lives.
Rob Atkinson has a great chapter about the physiology of moles and how the tunnels they live in often have oxygen levels that are “15% lower” than at the surface, “Moles' blood contains a lot of haemoglobin- the protein that carries oxygen to the organs.”
If you search for images of moles nearly all the characterful renditions are bespectacled. Isn’t it funny how humans have assumed that moles' visual inputs require some sort of intervention… the reality of a mole’s eyesight is that they see differently than humans and can perceive UV light. This sensory difference is also apparent in their auditory system. To protect their hearing system from soil encroachment moles do not have fleshy ear flaps (pinnae), and they are known to have a hearing range of 0.1-15kHz. This astonishing ability to hear low-frequency sounds means that moles can hear much lower-pitched sounds than humans, bats or even mice.
But are these hearing ranges assuming that auditory perception is solely by air conduction (how sounds travel through the air to reach the auditory system- the ear), could moles have a much more sensitive system for perceiving sound vibrations via bone conduction?
If their bodies; bones, fur and whiskers are more attuned to direct vibrations could this 3D embodied visceral detection of sound create much more information about their surroundings and influence how they interact with the structure of the place and those other beings that also inhabit it?
As I walk the tracks above them how do they perceive me…? Do we perceive this place differently, together?
As I watch the clock and rigidly plan a day which is driven by a capitalist society’s timeframe, how do moles spend their lives? As they spend most of their days in the dark below ground are they driven by the night and day circadian rhythm? Do the other creatures that inhabit the subterranean mole’s realm have their own rhythm and does this rhythm impact the mole? Does a mole have any reference to time?
Being driven by society’s clock is something that Disability Studies theorists and activists have explored. This non-normative framing of time is often referred to as ‘Crip Time’. Crip Time may be where time becomes elastic and negotiating societal barriers requires time to assess and overcome. Similarly, Crip Time might also encompass the time needed to negotiate life admin, the time needed to interact with medical professionals, and the time needed to rest.
In my own case, my long-term health condition means that sometimes during the month I can be turbocharged, time flies, I’m energised and can interact with society at my pace- sometimes society is moving too slow for my “zingy brain”, but the moment passes and my desire to crawl into a hole and slow down creeps over me. My ‘productivity’ slumps and I spend my time wondering how I can crawl through the day where time stretches only long enough to get the nitty gritty done.
This awareness of how my timeframe shifts has in some respects been revelatory but in a society that requires everyone to work at its supercharged pace, with little understanding or accommodating of immovable deadlines, frustration and feelings of failure are often the end result.
My beloved Gramps used to have a saying that he often used: “Time waits for no man”- but as I get older I can now understand this to mean “Society has no time to wait for anyone”.
As Alison Kafer says “Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, Crip Time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.”
In her beautiful essay, Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time Ellen Samuels reflects:
“For crip time is broken time. It requires us to break in our bodies and minds to new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and feeling and moving through the world. It forces us to take breaks, even when we don't want to, even when we want to keep going, to move ahead. It insists that we listen to our bodyminds so closely, so attentively, in a culture that tells us to divide the two and push the body away from us while also pushing it beyond its limits. Crip time means listening to the broken languages of our bodies, translating them, honoring their words.”
I often talk about Rewilding being on a spectrum, but the reality is that this is not a linear journey.
Trees grow at various rates- squirrels come and ring bark some trees “setting them back”- storms come, death intervenes but new life is injected into the system via the mycorrhizal network. Where does time really sit within all these ‘natural processes’?
So I reflect on how much of nature’s rhythms we don’t understand; the interconnectedness of nature and the interdependence of each species’ timeframe upon each other. The timeframes that shift seemingly imperceptibly ensure that the timings of when a flower emerges and the anthers unfurl to feed a passing insect, which has bred and flourished at a time that coincides with the return of the swallows. This intricate timing and synchronicity of a multitude of species is a complex attunement of so many systems, but in a changing climate, do all these beings have time to adapt?
As we move towards a more nature-full space here at Rewilding Hill Crest I puzzle and wonder what time means to the returning nature, and by rewilding the land we are in turn stretching and moulding what we mean by timeframes, timelines and shifting baselines…
So mole, I shall sit in my world and my time and ponder on your life. Are you having the “time of your life”? I’m just grateful that you spend your time near to mine.
Further information:
Atkinson. R. (2013). Moles. The British Natural History Collection. Book 3. Essex: Whittet Books.
Bell, S.L., Hickman, C., and Houghton. F. (2023) From therapeutic landscape to therapeutic ‘sensescape’ experiences with nature? A scoping review - ScienceDirect
Harrod, A. and von Benzon, N. (2024) Untangling nature-based interventions’ influences on participants’ mental wellbeing Critiquing ‘nature on prescription’. Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Mental Health and Wellbeing. Eds. Boyd, C.P., Boyle, L.E., Bell, S.L., Högström, E., Evans, J., Paul, A., and Foley, R. London: Routledge.
Samuels, E. (2017) Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time | Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol. 37 No. 3: Summer 2017
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