A night time nature walk in search of Mouldy Warp

On our wildlife adventure in Gruffalo wood the other week we had great fun discovering a circle of enormous toadstools, holly rich with berries, sadly fallen crab apples no one had picked, some snooty swans and very friendly little robin.  The toadstools sparked all sorts of stories about the pixies who live in the "magic" circle but it was Mouldy Warp the Mole who really caught our fancy.

He had been working very hard making over 30 hills by the canal and ponds and we spent a long time examining his efforts - poking them very gently with a stick - and talking about what he was up to and where he might be.

I know absolutely zilch about moles, which luckily ruled out a tedious "mummy monologue" and provided a great opportunity for us just to look and build a hypothesis have a guess about what it all meant.  We noticed that there were:

• Different sizes of hills
• Not much difference in shape but some of them looked like mini castles
• Some close to the water but most clustered up the hill
• A few in each cluster with very crumbly dark soil that looked as if it had just been finely raked by an expert gardener whilst most had compressed, rained-on soil

When we got home a quick search on mummy's 'puter before lunch found some facts that really grabbed our imagination:

• Mouldy Warp is an old English word for mole that came over with the Vikings
• Moles love water & are good swimmers
• Like pandas they have an extra thumb
• Their hills are known as "fortresses" so we were spot on about them being castle like
• They store paralysed worms in "larders" in their tunnels so they can enjoy them fresh later!

And Wikipedia did us proud with a brilliant picture that really showed off the outsize hands and nails that make them such good diggers.

All this tickled our fancy even more and prompted us to go on a "night-time" - i.e. after 4pm in England at this time of year - walk to see if we could catch a site of Mouldy Warp at work.  To avoid too much disappointment, we talked about the fact that we probably wouldn't see him and then armed with a big torch walked very bravely back through Gruffalo wood to the ponds.

We sat very, very quietly - fingers shushing on our lips - at the top of the hill to wait for Mouldy Warp.  He didn't put in an appearance so we tiptoed over to a enormous fortress of fresh soil, shone the torch on it and almost fell over in excitement - the whole mole hill was pulsing up and down and shaking right by our feet.

Although we stayed another 10 minutes he didn't come up and so we didn't actually see him but strangely, just knowing he was right there under our feet digging away was exciting enough for littl'un and mummy!

We've completely fallen in love with the velvety little fellows and we're going to see if we can find some of the following books about moles in the library and I'm trying to come up with a creative way to work him and his friends into some number play:

Moldy Warp the Mole by Alison Uttley
Bringing Down the Moon by Jonathon Emmett
Mole and the Baby Bird by Marjorie Newman
The Little Mole Who Knew it Was None of His Business by Werner Holzwarth
Wind in the Willows is a bit old yet but we do love the first few pages as mole emerges from the soil in spring and mummy can completely identify with mole when he shouts `Hang spring-cleaning!' ...