The Golden Mole and Other Living Treasure by Kathleen Rundell, Illustrated by Talya Baldwin

 

This is a beautiful book full of stunning illustrations and fascinating essays about twenty-two astonishing and endangered animals, including the wombat, the swift, the hermit crab, the narwhal and of course the golden mole.

In the introduction, Rundell exhorts us to "look, only look at what is here, and would you agree to astonishment and to love? For love, allied to attention, will be urgently needed in the years to come."

 The details shared for each species (or closely allied group of species) certainly inspire curiosity, wonder and affection for each animal. There are Greenland Sharks in the ocean that have probably been alive for over six centuries, a female may take 150 years to reach breeding age. 

Swifts are the only birds to mate in mid-air, they also fly through rain showers with wings outstretched to get themselves clean. Swifts need to catch as many as a hundred thousand airborne insects a day, which means they are acutely sensitive to the current reduction in insect numbers that is happening across the world. 

Elephants may 'bury dead members of their herd, covering them in earth and brightly coloured leaves, working together, surrounding the corpse with fruit and flowers'.

There are intriguing stories here about how species interact with humans, including the crows that brought gifts to a girl who had been feeding them since she was five and one day returned her camera lens cap to her after she had lost it on a walk. Meanwhile, Rooks (also in the Corvid family) have been trained in some places to pick up litter in return for food.

Storks inspired the early aviators and in 1822, an individual with an African spear through its neck arrived in Germany, proving that birds actually migrated (rather than spending the winter at the bottom of a lake or on the moon, as had earlier been thought).

Folklore features here too, such as the Hawai'ian belief that the ʻalalā (another species of Corvid) is a guardian of the soul. A soul needs to meet a guardian ʻalalā so they can jump into the afterlife together. The bird is now extinct in the wild and attempts to reintroduce it have been beset with problems. If this bird cannot be saved, then 'one of the ways in which humans have painstakingly and generously explained death to each other will be dead and there will be no guides awaiting the souls'

Rundell also shares the many ways in which humans are driving these creatures to extinction, including overfishing of tuna, hunting elephants and pangolins, while "noise pollution risks rendering [narwhals] inaudible and effectively mute, thereby unable to protect and teach their young - we have taken their silence and replaced it with a nightclub roar." 

The golden mole, which isn't actually a mole, is the only iridescent mammal: "under different lights and from different angles, their fur shifts through turquoise, navy, purple, gold....... but the golden mole is blind... unaware of [its] beauty, unknowingly glowing."

This is a book to treasure, along with all the wonderful unique lifeforms described in its pages.

I have a copy of the hardback which was published in 2022, but it is now also available in paperback. 

The Golden Mole by Katherine Rundell, illustrated by Talya Baldwin, published (2022 in hardback) by Faber.