Lovely, unique, quiet book. Being with nature and beyond. ( )

Fast so gut wie das nachfolgende Buch. Thematisch gleich, trotzdem sehr lesenswert ( )

Marc Hamer had a long career as a mole catcher in England, until one day when he abruptly gave up this form of livelihood. In How to Catch a Mole he writes about the craft of mole catching, interspersed with accounts of an earlier time when, as a young man, he left home with no job or permanent address and had to survive on his own. This period of vagrancy made him value solitude and being close to nature, both of which informed subsequent life choices. After all, mole-catching is solitary work, typically carried out in fields while hunting for the moles’ underground tunnels

This memoir will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about moles, both how they live and the many ways humans have tried to rid themselves of moles, generally for aesthetic reasons. While a large mole population can be damaging for those who earn their living by farming, this book might make you question the need to kill them simply to have a prettier lawn. After all, every species plays a role in our ecosystems.

Alongside the discussion of moles and mole-catching, Hamer also reflects on the aging process and the importance of love and family to a man who experienced little of either during his youth. This personal dimension coupled with his insights on the natural world really worked for me. ( )

This is a lovely, quiet little book. A wonderful meditation on life and aging. ( )

This book was just lovely, far more than I had anticipated. It’s a blend of memoir, natural history writing and poetry. The author was for many years a molecatcher, using traditional methods. He states at the beginning of the book that he’s going to tell you what he knows about moles and how to catch them (if you need to), but he goes about it in a very meandering fashion. There will be one little tidbit of information that starts off a chapter, then gently diverges into a story about how he wandered fields and hedgerows as a homeless young man, or how he feels about the current state of his family, or just observations on the weather and scenery about him as he does his work. You get one piece of the picture about moles every ten pages it seems, with a lot of musings and quiet observations on other nature things in between. Which I didn’t at all mind. For once I also didn’t mind the back-and-forth of the narrative- sometimes about his past, sometimes present tense, sometimes thinking on the future, and not at all in order. There are thoughts on gardening, on why he prefers solitude, on how the landscape has changed as the years pass, as housing and industry slowly replace the fields. There’s a lot about how nature recycles everything back into something new to grow again. I really liked that. In the end, he finally tells about placing the traps and how his knowledge of mole behavior enables him to catch them without fail- and then why he no longer wants to do so. I liked everything about this book. The voice and sentiments immediately resonated with me, the black and white woodcut-style illustrations by Joel McLaren are so nice, I even liked the parts expressed in poetry (which usually isn’t my thing). This is right up there with H is for Hawk, Braiding Sweetgrass and Bringing Nature Home. ( )