Frosty Morning

Everything looks much more vibrant, compared to the usual drab winter colours.

It is especially beautiful when a low sun is just peeping over the horizon, making the frost sparkle with an almost orange tinge through the morning mist, which is still lying thinly across the landscape creating a rather mystical atmosphere.

Molehilss always seems to stand out on a frosty landscape.

Moles are one of our commonest wild mammals and can be found in nearly every environment from woodland, fields and gardens to the tops of some of our highest mountains.

Moles can live anywhere where there is sufficient soil that's not regularly waterlogged for them to build their burrows. A mole burrow is more than just its safe refuge - it is also a functional trap with which the mole catches its preferred food, worms. (Moles will also eat carrion and bird's eggs if the opportunity presents itself and some can even turn cannibal).

The mole's tunnel system can be over 200 metres long and can vary in depth from runs just beneath the surface to deep tunnels down to around a metre in depth.

Earthworms and beetle grubs inadvertently blunder into these tunnels as they burrow through the earth. In doing so, they make a disturbance that is picked up by the mole's highly developed sense of hearing and smell. They then scuttle at quite a surprising speed down their tunnels to dispatch and devour the luckless invertebrate.

Moles do not hibernate, but as you can imagine finding food in the winter is going to be much more difficult.

As moles normally require half their own body weight in food each day, they get around this problem by gathering a cache of food in times of plenty. They do this by creating a blind-ended tunnel, which they partially fill with the decapitated bodies of worms they have collected.

This cache will see moles through a particularly short-lived lean time, but it's not enough to sustain them through the long winter months. To do this they still need to search out their food.

Even in frosty conditions earthworms can still be active, but they are usually deep within soil so to try get at these the moles have to dig deep burrows.

These deep levels produce a lot more soil than the shallower summer tunnels, so the moles have to labour hard in a snowplough-like fashion to push all this excavated soil up to the surface.

Hence, on cold and frosty days we tend to find a lot more newly heaped up molehills than during the summer months.