Book Review: Hunt for the Golden Mole

"All I have in common with [scientists] 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."

Science writer Richard Girling wrote a book ostensibly about the Somali golden mole, named, aptly enough, The Hunt for the Golden Mole.  That's kind of a tall order when you think about it, seeing as no one that we know of us ever actually seen one.  I mean, I'm sure some Somali tribesman at some point in history saw one poke its head above the surface and perhaps briefly wondered, "What the heck is that?", but if that happened, we have no proof.  In fact, the entire some of our knowledge of this species - including the only proof of its existence - is a small piece of bone that was found in an owl pellet nearly 70 years ago.

It's the fact that the Somali golden mole is so unknown - perhaps unknowable - to us that made it so fascinating to Girling.  It set him off on a quest to learn whatever he could about this enigmatic animal - but if that's what he limited himself to, this would probably be a one-page book.  It also led him to try and understand what wild animals mean to us and how we try to understand him.  What follows is a romp through the history of our species interactions with wild animals, from hunters and poachers to conservationists, zookeepers, taxidermists, and scientists.  Without much information on the subject animal itself to hold it steady, the text tends to wander, and at times it strikes me as a little stream-of-conscious, a collection of anecdotes and introductions to favorite mammals strung together in a loose narrative.  Reading it, I was never entirely sure where we were going to go next, except that somehow it would tangentially bring us back to that mole.

Normally, books like this kind of irritate me - I don't mind forays down interesting sidetracks, but I like the book to be a clear journey, helping me explore some greater idea (I'm recalling my dislike of Bernd Brunner's Birdmania, also more of a tangle of yarns than a cohesive book).  This book at least has more structure than that (and the author relies more of writing in this, whereas Birdmania was more of a picture book thinly strung together with spiderwebs of semi-relevant text).  The book ends not only with a visit to the only known physical evidence of the species existence, tucked away in an Italian museum, but with a meeting with the now-elderly biologist who found it.  That probably doesn't explain why I found it much more enjoyable, though.

I suppose that like Girling, I've had that experience of encountering a species - maybe in print, maybe in a museum, sometimes at a zoo or aquarium - and being fascinated by it - only to find, to my frustration, that there's so little that we know about it.  That's followed by a need to learn what I can about it, to try to fill in the gaps of knowledge.  Of course, the difference here, I suspect, is that the appeal of the Somali golden mole to the author is that we don't know it - and if we did, and it was just another of many very small, cryptic African mammals, I wonder if he would have much interest in it at all.  I think, for that reason, that one of my favorite parts of this book is the cover - we can see the shape of a golden mole, hinted at by its surroundings - but where the animal itself should be, there's only space.

The Hunt for the Golden Mole: All Creatures Great & Small and Why They Matter, on Amazon.com