Some amount of home range overlap is tolerated, and dominant moles sometimes take over neighbouring burrow systems to increase their home range. Like most other subterranean mammals, most golden mole species are restricted to a narrow range of habitats and environmental conditions, have very limited mobility and dispersal abilities, and specialized K-selected life history strategies. Their main prey are termites that live under isolated grass clumps, and they might travel for 6 kilometres (3.

Golden Mole by Richard Girling | Waterstones The Hunt for the Golden Mole by Richard Girling | Waterstones

Far from being “primitive” characteristics, as was originally proposed by Withers (1978), such physiological specializations allow these moles to survive in habitats where temperatures are extreme and food is scarce, either seasonally or perennially. Once, drunk and on Valentine’s day, I tried to share a portion of fried chicken with a club-footed London pigeon – and saw in the streetlight for the first time the way the iridescent plumage on their necks, caught at the right angle, shifts between teal and magenta. Rundell, who is John Donne’s award-winning biographer and a best-selling children’s author, explores misunderstandings that pervaded about certain creatures from ancient times onwards, and which may have done serious harm to the animals they celebrated.In presenting us with a world “populated with such strangenesses and imperilled astonishments”, The Golden Mole also wants us to be angry and committed to conservation. I googled the endangered Gooty tarantula, which is an otherworldly ultramarine, and immediately thought: want one. Katherine talks to Chris Power today about The Golden Mole and Other Living Treasures, a collection of impassioned essays on the world's endangered animals. Her bestselling books for children have been translated into more than thirty languages and have won multiple awards.

Katherine Rundell Books | Waterstones Katherine Rundell Books | Waterstones

Annual deaths from bear attacks are far fewer than those from “falling televisions, faulty lawn mowers or toppling vending machines”. Gary Bronner has kept individuals of several species ( Neamblysomus julianae, Amblysomus hottentotus, Chrysochloris asiatica) successfully in captivity for periods ranging from a few weeks to nearly 2 years. It’s currently thought that the fur evolved to be highly flattened, hard-wearing and low-friction to make burrowing easier; the iridescence is a by-product. Rundell’s chapters are never more than eight pages long, but all are full of similarly vivid details about the creatures themselves, the stories we tell about them, the ways we have interacted with them and why they are now endangered.Litter sizes are small (usually 2) and post-natal development is extended, reaching up to 45 days in the Cape golden mole. They have been like nothing but themselves for far longer than us: there are fossil specimens dating back to the Miocene period, which extends from about five million years ago to about 23 million years ago.