The Hunt for the Golden Mole

by Richard Girling

  It is often said that the first significant work of conservationist literature, the first plea for wildlife against malign human intervention, was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962. This great and brave book did much to launch the environmental movement that grew in the decades that followed, but the echo it picked up – of nature battered and bruised – was very much older. In 1864, Abraham Lincoln’s United States was fighting the Confederates in the American Civil War. The future Chancellor of Germany, Otto von Bismarck, was still Minister President of Prussia; Napoleon III was emperor of France, Tsar Nicholas I and Franz Joseph I bestrode their empires in Russia and Austria. In London, Her Britannic Majesty’s prime minister was Lord Palmerston. In that same year Charles Dickens published Our Mutual Friend, and Jules Verne A Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Nathaniel Hawthorne and John Clare died. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Richard Strauss and Alois Alzheimer were born. The Royal Navy launched its biggest, fastest (and last) wooden warship, HMS Victoria, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge opened in Bristol. A Dutch brewer called Heineken opened for business, and James Robertson started making marmalade in a room behind his grocer’s shop in Paisley. Also in that year, nearly a century before Silent Spring, the American diplomat and philologist George Perkins Marsh published his masterwork, Man and Nature; or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. He began it with a quotation from Horace Bushnell’s 1858 Sermon on the Power of an Endless Life:

  Not all the winds, and storms, and earthquakes, and seas, and seasons of the world, have done so much to revolutionise the earth as MAN, the power of an endless life, has done since the day he came forth upon it, and received dominion over it.

  Like Alfred Russel Wallace, Marsh had one of those cavernous, polymathic nineteenth-century minds with a seemingly infinite capacity for storing facts. In Man and Nature he cites references from 210 different publications, many of them written in German, French, Italian, Dutch and even Norwegian. It is not an example that the current writer is remotely capable of emulating. To say that Marsh showed prescience is to understate his achievement by several magnitudes. ‘Sight is a faculty,’ he wrote. ‘Seeing, an art. The eye is a physical, but not a self-acting apparatus, and in general it sees only what it seeks.’ What his own eye sought was an unglossed, finely detailed picture of the earth as reshaped by human activity. A photograph shows an apparently large, bespectacled, somewhat pear-shaped man stiffly dressed in frock coat and weskit, holding a silk top hat. He wears a voluminous Abe Lincoln beard and the severe expression of a man not given to frivolity (though that might be accounted for by the need to hold a pose for the photographer). No elder of the church ever looked more forbidding, and he was not shy of handing down judgements. On bad habits, for example: ‘I wish I could believe, with some, that America is not alone responsible for the introduction of the filthy weed, tobacco, the use of which is the most vulgar and pernicious habit engrafted by the semi-barbarism of modern civilisation upon the less multifarious sensualism of ancient life . . .’

  Ancient life is a constant point of reference, an anchorage for his thoughts. He looks to the Roman empire and sees ‘a productiveness of soil of which we at present discover but slender traces’. That bygone fertility, he argues, explains how vast and hungry armies, like those of the ancient Persians, the Crusaders and the Tartars could provision themselves throughout long marches in lands that now ‘would scarcely afford forage for a single regiment’. All around him he sees the scars of ‘man’s ignorant disregard of the laws of nature’. The indiscriminate slaughter of insect-eating birds, for example, has dire consequences for crops and wild plants. Man, he says, ‘is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.’ The effect is of ‘treacherous warfare on his natural allies’. Marsh is one of the first – maybe the first – to note the risk of climate-change from deforestation:

  When the forest is gone, the great reservoir of moisture stored up in its vegetable mould is evaporated, and returns only in deluges of rain to wash away the parched dust into which that mould has been created. The well-wooded and humid hills are turned to ridges of dry rock, which encumbers the low grounds and chokes the watercourses with its debris, and – except in countries favoured with an equable distribution of rain through the seasons, and a moderate and regular inclination of surface – the whole earth, unless rescued by human art from the physical degradation to which it tends, becomes an assemblage of bald mountains, of barren, turfless hills, and of swampy malarious plains.

  Human improvidence, he concludes, threatens to reduce the earth ‘to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species’. It’s the kind of talk which these days would arouse a chorus of furies on libertarian blogs and websites. Debate 150 years ago could certainly be polarised, but it was religion and rationalism that were squaring up, not climate science and libertarianism. That conflict had yet to be imagined. Marsh was forever conscious of his Creator, and of the responsibilities implicit in man’s dominion over what the Lord had provided. God’s work, he contended, was everywhere superior to the works of man:

  Not only is the wild plant much hardier than the domesticated vegetable, but the same law prevails in animated brute and even human life. The beasts of the chase are more capable of endurance and privation and more tenacious of life, than the domesticated animals which most nearly resemble them. The savage fights on, after he has received half a dozen mortal wounds, the least of which would have instantly paralysed the strength of his civilised enemy, and, like the wild boar, he has been known to press forward along the shaft of the spear which was transpiercing his vitals, and to deal a deathblow on the soldier who wielded it.

  That may be so, but noble savagery is a flimsy defence against malevolent genius. The ‘animated brute’ had no answer to a ‘civilised enemy’ armed with guns. The ‘terrible destructiveness of man’, Marsh said, was exemplified by the hunting down of large animals and birds for those portions of their bodies – often a very small part of the whole – which had commercial value. The wild cattle of South America had been ‘slaughtered by the millions for their hides and horns’, the North American buffalo for its skin or tongue, the elephant, walrus and narwhal for their tusks; whales for their oil and whalebone; the ostrich and other large birds for their feathers. Already one big marine mammal, Steller’s sea cow, Hydrodamalis gigas, had been driven to extinction – ‘extirpated’, in Marsh’s language – for the sake of its oil, fat and fur.

  Marsh saw that where the sea cow had led, others were certain to follow. Seals, walruses and sea otters were also suffering, and the more valuable fish had been ‘immensely reduced in numbers’. Though in fact many mammals had already been forced out of existence by 1864, this was still only the thin end of the wedge. Not even Marsh could have imagined the mass extinction that would be under way by the early years of the twenty-first century, though he had a pretty shrewd idea of the way things were going.

  Five hundred years ago, whales abounded in every sea. They long since became so rare in the Mediterranean as not to afford encouragement for the fishery as a regular occupation; and the great demand for oil and whalebone for mechanical and manufacturing purposes, in the present century, has stimulated the pursuit of the ‘hugest of living creatures’ to such activity, that he has now almost wholly disappeared from many favourite fishing grounds, and in others is greatly diminished in numbers.

  The one piece of good news was the silk topper in Marsh’s photograph. Hitherto, the favoured material for gentlemen’s hats had been the fur of the beaver – a material of high economic value for which the species had been paying with its life. The irony is that what saved the beaver was not concern for its survival – no celebrities paraded their concern, as they would do in later years for leopard, fox and mink – but rather the ephemeral whim of fashion.
/>   When a Parisian manufacturer invented the silk hat, which soon came into almost universal use, the demand for beavers’ fur fell off, and this animal – whose habits, as we have seen, are an important agency in the formation of bogs and other modifications of forest nature – immediately began to increase, reappeared in haunts which he had long abandoned, and can no longer be regarded as rare enough to be in immediate danger of extirpation. Thus the convenience or the caprice of Parisian fashion has unconsciously exercised an influence which may sensibly affect the physical geography of a distant continent.

  So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim might have said. Today another leaflet drops out of my morning paper, courtesy of WWF. This time it asks me to adopt an Amur leopard – an animal, I confess, of which I know little. There is a good reason for this. According to WWF only thirty-five are left in the wild. Even the IUCN returns no results, though when I broaden the search with the single keyword ‘leopard’, the screen suddenly overflows. No fewer than fifty-four listed species include ‘leopard’ in their common name. A few are cats. Some are reptiles (leopard fringe-fingered lizard, leopard snake), amphibians (western leopard toad, Las Vegas leopard frog), marine mammals (leopard seal) and fish (leopard sharpnose puffer, leopard-spotted swellshark), so called presumably because they have spots. The swellshark, I learn, is known only from a single specimen caught off Taiwan. Many of the others are endangered. The sad fact is that all the examples in this book could be replaced by others of equal or greater importance. What I have written about mammals might just as well have been written about fish, amphibians, reptiles or plants. Human advance is indiscriminate, an assault on many fronts, and only in their last redoubts do threatened species – the lucky few – hear the bugle-call of the relieving cavalry.

  The Amur leopard, I discover eventually, is Panthera pardus orientalis, also known as the far-eastern leopard, a vanishingly rare subspecies, long-tailed and thickly coated, that clings to life along the Russian–Chinese border in extreme north-eastern Asia. There is a possibility that others may survive in North Korea, but this is not an area open to scientific inquiry, or sensitive to the fears of conservationists. The Amur leopard has been blitzed by a multiplicity of threats, not least the misfortune of occupying such a fraught political hotspot. Much of its habitat has been lost, and the rest fragmented by fires and logging. Its very rarity makes it a target for poachers, and its carnivorous habit provokes retaliation by deer-farmers. To complete the vicious cycle, its confinement to one small local population means it is being enfeebled by inbreeding.

  ‘The felling of the woods,’ wrote George Perkins Marsh, ‘has been attended with momentous consequences.’ It took a perceptive eye to see that in 1864. Anyone can see it now, but – as always with those called ‘doomsayers’ – being proved right is a poor sort of consolation. It is not quite too late to listen to those who now echo him. As we begin to feel the unpredicted feedbacks from a disrupted climate, his voice from 150 years ago comes over loud and clear. Our ‘limited faculties’, he says, are blinding us to the ultimate consequences of our deeds.

  But our inability to assign definite values to these causes . . . is not a reason for ignoring the existence of such causes in any general view of the relations between man and nature, and we are never justified in assuming a force to be insignificant because its measure is unknown, or even because no physical effect can now be traced to it as its origin. The collection of phenomena must precede the analysis of them, and every new fact, illustrative of the action and reaction between humanity and the material world around it, is another step towards the determination of the great question, whether man is of nature or above her.

  The language may be archaic, but the wisdom is timeless.

  My search for the Somali golden mole takes one step forward and half a step back. Learning my way around the laconic, abbreviated intricacies of zoological literature, I discover that the world expert on golden moles is Gary Bronner at the University of Cape Town, who declares his principal areas of interest to be ‘phylogenetic systematics, functional morphology and conservation biology of Africa’s endemic golden moles; and the structure and ecology of terrestrial small mammal communities’. He it was who wrote the entry for Calcochloris tytonis in my new desktop bible, Mammal Species of the World. From Bronner I learn that the discoverer of the Somali golden mole was Professor Alberto M. Simonetta, of the Institute of Zoology, University of Florence, and that his description of it was published in the journal Monitore zoologico italiano. Nervously, only half understanding the reference and ashamed of my ignorance, I call the library at the Natural History Museum. Can they help? They can indeed. A day later, all twenty-nine pages of Simonetta’s paper, ‘A New Golden Mole from Somalia with an Appendix on the Taxonomy of the family Chrysochloridae’, dated 30 January 1968, are spread out on my desk.

  The story is even better than I had hoped. During the summer of 1964, in a Somali town called Giohar, Simonetta discovered a disused oven in which a family of barn owls – two adults and two fully grown young – had been nesting. ‘The floor of the oven,’ he writes, ‘was covered by a layer of dust, feathers, loose bones and owl pellets about three inches thick.’ Some people to whom I’ve recounted this story have not properly understood what an owl pellet is – not faecal matter, but a regurgitated plug containing the undigested parts of what the bird has swallowed (typically fur, feather, bone, beak and claw). If you want to know what an owl has eaten, then the pellets will tell you. The contents of the Giohar oven, however, looked somewhat less than promising. Trampling by the owls, and the destructive attentions of beetles, meant that most of the material was smashed to pieces and only a small number of pellets were still intact. Nevertheless, with grand scientific impartiality, the debris was all swept up and taken back for analysis in Florence.

  Then came the essential stroke of luck. ‘While sorting the material,’ Simonetta writes, ‘I found a right ramus of the lower jaw of a Golden Mole, still articulated with the almost complete temporal part of the basioccipital, of the hyoid and the first two cervical vertebrae.’

  In layman’s language, this translates as the right-hand side of the animal’s lower jaw, with temple and bones of the middle ear still attached. It sounds a lot, but it’s tiny. The jawbone was not much more than a centimetre long, a scrap that most people would not even have noticed. Simonetta, however, wanted to know what species it was. Theoretically the identification of a mole from such small remains is easier than it sounds – the crucial distinctions are in the size and proportion of the jaws and teeth, exactly what Simonetta had found. It was a golden moment. Comparison showed similarities but no precise match with any other mole. Simonetta had a new species on his hands.

  And new it has forever remained. No other sign of Calcochloris tytonis has ever been recorded, alive or dead. As a sample of modern mammalian life, Simonetta’s specimen MF4181 was, as I had supposed, the ultimate rarity. But I read and digested all this with mixed feelings. Whereas I was pleased that the specimen had been located, and a trip to Florence would be a pleasure, I was disappointed that it had not given me the satisfaction of a harder chase. The disappointment did not last long. As far as I knew, only one other man in the world – Gary Bronner – had any interest in tracking down Calcochloris tytonis, and I emailed him for advice. He was the leading specialist in the field, a scientist of international repute, and years ahead of me in the quest. His reply astonished me. Like me, he had expected to find the mole at the University of Florence, or at the Florence Natural History Museum or Institute of Zoology. As I intended to, he had asked after Simonetta’s specimen at each of these venerable institutions, and at each one he had drawn a blank.

  The hunt was still on.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Penitent Butchers

  Brumas was born on 27 November 1949, thirteen days after my own fourth birthday. Son of Mischa and Ivy, and named after his keepers Bruce and Sam, he was the first polar bear to be born and raised in Britain
. He was an immediate and lasting sensation. In 1950 he boosted attendances at London Zoo to an all-time record of three million, and inspired a profitable trade in Brumas-themed books, postcards and souvenirs. There was something very odd about it, though. For reasons never properly explained, my use here of the words ‘son’, ‘he’ and ‘his’ perpetuate a bizarre error made in the newspapers and allowed to pass uncorrected by the zoo. Brumas was a girl, but for as long as she lived (she died in May 1958) the public went on believing her to be a male.

  I suspect that my memory of her/him is more imaginative reconstruction than genuine recollection (I conjure a vague picture of mother and infant on a rock, and a faint smell of fish) but it is indelible. It is one of many cherished memories of the 1950s. This was not just the decade of the ‘family values’ (board games, side partings and Bisto) that still drive the politics of nostalgia. More importantly, it was the decade in which television sets first began to appear in ordinary homes such as my own. Two genres dominated my early viewing: the heroic adventures of cowboy avengers such as Hopalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger, and wildlife shows. From the middle years of the decade, the much-parodied husband-and-wife team of Armand and Michaela Denis were a regular favourite with their On Safari series. Armand was a burly, bristly moustached, bespectacled and thickly accented Belgian film-maker; Michaela a glamorous blonde English ex-fashion designer. Clamped to their binoculars, they trekked by Land Rover in a never-ending African safari, filming as they went. An early, flickering fragment shows Michaela cuddling a jackal. I discovered only recently that Armand’s earlier credits as a director included Frank Buck’s 1934 film, Wild Cargo. (‘Although it may seem as though several incidents in the screen work were prearranged,’ said The New York Times, ‘they are nevertheless quite thrilling, especially when the hunter depicts the ingenious methods by which he traps wild beasts and reptiles.’)