The Hunt for the Golden Mole (3 page)

All I have in common with men like Alfred Russel Wallace is that I like to watch birds and animals. I do so very often without really knowing what I am looking at, or understanding the behaviour of the creatures I'm spying on. Sometimes I regret it, but more often I cherish my own naivety. It preserves my child's eye, a kind of pickled innocence that keeps nostalgia at bay. There are always questions to be asked.

Even in childhood I knew I wanted to write. Apart from running and jumping, it was the only thing I was any good at. But it was like having an instrument with no tune to play. What was I going to write about? People talk too glibly of Eureka moments, flashes of inspiration, epiphanies, and I hesitate to lay claim to one. But neither can I deny what happened. The occasion was the Easter holiday of 1961. I was fifteen-and-a-half, on a camping holiday with three friends in the county of Devon, halfway down the toe of the English south-west. Our plan, hatched over borrowed Ordnance Survey sheets, was to explore the great granite wilderness of Dartmoor. As I would discover in later life, its jagged tors – skeletal outbreaks of rock poking from the hilltops like springs through a worn-out mattress – were not much to set against, for example, the man-eating cols of the high Alps. But to a boy raised in the lawn-and-borders gentility of suburban Hertfordshire, the exposure to southern England's last untamed wilderness was life-changing. Dartmoor then had only recently been designated a National Park, and the untracked plateau was still a place of high drama and deep, unsettling mystery. My first sight of it, as I trekked up a lane
towards Hay Tor, was one I shall never forget. A trick of topography, coupled with an over-active imagination, made it appear that the huge rock itself was rising up out of the ground in front of me. Before this, I had never known any feeling for landscape, history or ‘the environment'. That all changed in an instant.

It was as if I had woken up in a different life. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I found myself transfixed by the authentic voices of the living and the dead. Sitting with illicit, under-age pints in village pubs, I listened to the stories of men who had worked the moor all their lives – shepherds, cowmen, horsemen, builders of stone walls, layers of hedges, makers of cider, men whose knowledge and craft linked them in a chain of ancestry that stretched back over millennia. High on the moor itself, the exposed relics of earlier civilisations raised questions about what those earlier centuries had been like. I bought a pair of binoculars and went nowhere without them. Into my rucksack went a back-breaking library of field guides – birds, mammals, insects, wild flowers, trees. And yet despite the best efforts of my mother, who was a devil for looking things up, I never quite caught the habit of naming things. Small brown bird. Tall yellow flower. They were tiny brushstrokes on a huge canvas, and it was the canvas that interested me.

Wherever I travelled, instinct always made me step back, viewing from a distance rather than homing in on the detail. The field guides went back on to the shelf and rarely came down again. Time moved on and the interest deepened into love, and love into a mounting anxiety – an anxiety shared, I quickly realised, by many others – that the canvas was becoming patched and stained. No matter where you looked in rural Britain, holes were appearing in a picture that was tending increasingly towards the monochrome. I might not remember what the tall yellow
flower was called, but I noticed quickly enough when it was no longer there. And so I began to write, and proceeded to a mostly enjoyable, though frequently frustrating, career as an environmental author and journalist. On my desk sits the same heavy pair of Russian-made binoculars that magnified the lost countryside of my youth.

I have switched sides now, to the extreme east of England in the county of Norfolk. Somewhere outside my window, in woodland, field and hedge, lurk all the grazers and small-fry of Britain's diminished fauna. There are deer – now becoming a national scourge because they have no predators beyond motor cars or men with guns. There are rabbits, hares, squirrels, hedgehogs, the occasional fox (heard more often than seen), and the grass is creased by moles. Sometimes there is a rat; sometimes the sudden dash of a stoat or weasel. Everything else – the scurrying tribes of mice, shrews and voles – remains invisible to all but cats, owls and kestrels. Less than 16 miles from here, at West Runton, twenty years ago in a sea-cliff, was found an 85 per cent complete skeleton of what in life, 600,000 years ago, had been a ten-tonne steppe mammoth,
Mammuthus trogontherii
, twice the weight of a modern African elephant. It makes me think about the endless churn of life; the comings and goings of species that live out their span and disappear. Somewhere in the future, the pestilential rabbit and grey squirrel will go the way of the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger, and some other opportunistic invaders, drawn north by a warming climate, will inherit their niche. But then came something more thought-provoking still. In the autumn of 2010, news arrived of a completely new, previously unheard-of fish-eating mammal found living in Madagascar. With an exquisite sense of timing, the announcement came just a few days after the Royal Society had published a paper from the University of Queensland,
proposing that a third of all supposedly ‘extinct' mammals were actually still alive.

At almost exactly the same time, a UN biodiversity conference in Nagoya, Japan, was earning some very different headlines. A fifth of all the world's vertebrates – mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish – were facing extinction. In forty years, world populations of vertebrates had shrunk by 30 per cent. Land mammals were down by a quarter, sea fish by a fifth, freshwater fish by two thirds. On average, fifty species of mammal, bird and amphibian were edging closer to the brink every year. The big picture no longer made sense. New species? Reborn species? Extinct species? All swimming in the same ecological broth, but in different directions? The headlines came and went, but the questions stuck in my mind. How could creatures returning from the dead be reconciled with the threat of mass extinction? Why do estimates of the total number of species vary so widely? How could we be certain that any of them have died out? I remembered the words of Alfred Russel Wallace.
Animals rarely play any important part in scenery, and their entire absence may pass quite unnoticed
. Soon an even trickier question presented itself. How could we be sure that an extinct species had existed in the first place? Where did Nagoya get its numbers from? Who calculated them? Were they accurate? Did it matter?

Well, of course it matters. Whether it's Genesis or genetics that underpins our thinking, whether it comes with a capital N or a small one, nature is scorched into our subconscious, an ineradicable component of our genetic inheritance. It's how we, and the societies we've created, have evolved. Through the ‘dominion' we have either accepted as a gift from God or claimed through right of arms, we have negotiated our own survival. We have made mistakes, hunted to near extinction the very species
– North American bison, the great whales – that we have depended upon. But it pains us. Even without understanding how ecosystems work, we know it's wrong –
absolutely
wrong, in a sense deeper even than the moral codes of law and religion. It's why we swerve to avoid a pigeon in the road. Yes, for all kinds of reasons, it matters. Time and again I return to the figures. Nothing adds up, and I realise that the big picture is no longer enough. Suddenly I have an appetite for detail.

My early attempts to satisfy it provoke good-natured complaint from the postman, bent under the weight of books. The standard taxonomic and geographical reference,
Mammal Species of the World
, comes in a hefty two-volume box-set from Johns Hopkins University. Nervously I flick the pages of Volume One, wondering how and where to begin. Turning to the very first entry on page one, I find:

ORDER MONOTREMATA
Bonaparte, 1837

COMMENTS: Reviewed by Griffiths (1978). The order is the sole extant representative of the Subclass Prototheria (all other living mammals belong to the subclass Theria). McKenna and Bell (1979) divided the order into two (Platypoda and Tachyglossa); the date of divergence of the two living families is unknown, and conservatively they are retained here in a single order.

Reading on, I realise we're talking about echidnas and platypuses, but I realise also, from the profound depths of my ignorance, that scientific detail is going to be hard on the digestion. Then – glory! – I remember Alfred Russel Wallace, for whom much of the world truly was a blank canvas, and I return to him as to a kind of intellectual comfort blanket. Let me begin where he began, and be led from there through zoological history.
What were the ‘very peculiar forms of mammalia' that struck him so forcefully in tropical and southern Africa? ‘Such are the golden moles, the Potamogale, and the elephant-shrews . . .'

Golden moles
. I turn back to
Mammal Species of the World
, and claw my way to page 77:

SUBORDER CHRYSOCHLORIDEA
Broom, 1915

COMMENTS: MacPhee and Novacek (1993) erected the suborder Chrysochloromorpha for golden moles, but following Simpson's (1945: 32–33) nomenclatural principles for categories above superfamilies, Chrysochloridea is the senior synonym.

Chrysochloridea
it is, then. There are a good few of them – many more, I suspect, than even Wallace would have imagined. Most, but not all, have common as well as Latin names, usually in honour of their discoverers, territories or physical peculiarities. First up is Arend's golden mole, then Duthie's, Sclater's, Cape, Stuhlmann's, Visagie's, Giant, Rough-haired, De Winton's, Van Zyl's, Grant's, Fynbos, Hottentot, Marley's, Robust, Highveld, Congo, Yellow, Somali, Gunning's and Juliana's. Their territories range all the way down from the Gulf of Guinea, scene of Hanno's first brush with the
Gorillae
, through equatorial and sub-equatorial Africa to the Cape. But there are two exceptions, which, weirdly, appear to have no ranges at all.

Visagie's golden mole (
Chrysochloris visagiei
) – ‘known only from the holotype'.

Somali golden mole (
Calcochloris tytonis
) – ‘known only from the type specimen'.

By now I know that ‘holotype' and ‘type specimen' are the same thing. In each case they mean the original collected example from which the species was first described and introduced to
science. What we are being told is that, throughout the whole of the scientific age, Visagie's and the Somali golden moles have each been seen only once.
One animal
constitutes the entire species. Conservatively, their status is recorded as ‘critically endangered'. I will discover later that, though this degree of rarity is not a common phenomenon, it is not a rare one either. An astonishing number of species are accorded their identity on astonishingly sparse scraps of evidence. I turn next to the world authority on extinction and survival, the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature)
Red List of Threatened Species
.

It confirms that Visagie's golden mole is known from a single specimen collected from the Northern Cape and described in 1950. We do not learn whether the animal was alive or dead, or even complete in all its parts, but a few drops of scepticism leak through the author's dry academic prose. ‘Several field trips to ground-truth the occurrence of this species have yielded no specimens, or even signs of golden moles, suggesting either an error in recording provenance, or that the original specimen was transported there by anthropogenic means or even perhaps floodwaters of the Renoster River . . .'

If that is peculiar enough, then it's nothing to compare with its Somali cousin. Again the
Red List
confirms the uniqueness of the specimen, found at Giohar, Somalia, in 1964. But this time it adds an intriguing – not long ago I would have said
unbelievable
– detail. Under ‘taxonomic notes', it remarks that the Somali golden mole,
Calcochloris tytonis
, is ‘known only from a partially complete specimen in an owl-pellet'.

And that's it. Not only has no one ever seen a live example, no one has even seen a whole dead one. All that exists is some crumpled fragments coughed up by an owl. But exists where? It comes back to me in sleepless nights. First I am interested,
then fascinated, then obsessed. Somewhere in a drawer, in a museum somewhere in the world, the owl pellet must be kept.
And I want to see it.
My naivety at that stage was still intact, so I thought it would be easy. I called the IUCN to ask where the specimen might be found. They didn't know. Was there not some compendious work of reference that listed all holotypes and their locations? There was not. Next I tried the Natural History Museum, then the Zoological Society of London. No one knew.

So here began both a mystery and a quest. There were several reasons why I resolved to try to find the Somali golden mole. There was the sheer exhilaration of the chase, the unravelling of a mystery, the bizarre improbability of a species catalogued from such minimal remains. But there was something deeper, something not quite thought through but naggingly insistent. At a time when one species, my own, was being forced to reconsider its relationship with every other, what was the moral of the story? How could I answer the question, put to me with some belligerence by a neighbour at a dinner party:
Why should I care about a species so obscure that no one has ever seen one?
Why do we need spiny mice, bearded pigs, groove-toothed trumpet-eared bats, glacier rats, or any of the dozens of other mammals that the IUCN tells us are on the downward slope?