About MoleWatch
Although the familiar sight of molehills betrays their presence, very few people have actually ever seen a mole. They are so well adapted to life underground, excavating tunnels and feeding on any worms or insects that accidentally stumble into them, that they rarely need to come to the surface.
The mole is thought to be one of the most common mammals here in the UK, however there is very little basic information about them and their numbers. With continuing changes to our countryside it is important to monitor species that can be affected by farming methods and the fragmentation of their habitat, before something happens and it is too late to help. Currently there is no detailed distribution map for moles in the UK, so we have decided to carry out MoleWatch, to find out more about these secretive creatures.
Of course the very fact that moles are so rarely seen means that MoleWatch will, strictly speaking, be ‘molehill watch’. Molehills are among the easiest wildlife signs to recognise and we’re going to take advantage of that. At present seeing a molehill in an area is the only reliable means we have of recording the presence of moles. We don’t know how many molehills a single mole makes and a mole can live in an area without creating any molehills so an absence of molehills does not necessarily mean that there are no moles in the area.
In undisturbed populations of moles, once feeding tunnels have been created, there can be very little or no new digging activity and some areas - even though they have large numbers of moles – may bear no molehills for most of the year. It may well be that our perception that there are plenty of moles is unfounded and based on fewer moles creating more molehills. So mapping molehills will tell us whether at least one mole has been recently present in a particular place. For the purposes of creating a distribution map, this is all we need to know.