Pennsylvania Game News - August 2012 - 53

our property. They keep both their deep and surface tunnels and nests clean by depositing their scats outside their tunnel entrances. Hairy-tailed moles live in a variety of habitats from southeastern Canada inland through the Appalachians as far south as Tennessee and North Carolina. They prefer a sandy loamy, dry to moist soil in forests, open fields, old shrubby pas tures, cultivated fields and even along roadsides, and are not deterred by stones in their loam such as we have on our rocky mountaintop. Their constant digging and foraging not only tills the soil but rids it of injurious insects. For instance, one researcher in West Virginia reported that they destroyed the nests of groundnesting wasps and ate their larvae and pupae. Sometime in late February or early March, male hairy-tailed moles, which are somewhat larger than female hairy-tailed moles, leave their winter tunnel quarters in search of females’ tunnel systems. After mating, females build their spherical nests 12 inches below ground, which are six inches in diameter and are made up of layers of coarsely shredded dried leaves with a roof of dead leaves and humus. In four to six weeks after breeding they have one litter of four or five hairless, blind, toothless young. Back in 1949, though, N.D. Richmond and H.R. Roslund, while engaged in a mammal survey in northwestern Pennsylvania for the Game Commission and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, reported finding a female with eight embryos.
AUGUST 2012

Brewer’s Duck

The young remain in the nest for a month under the sole care of their nursing mother, until they are able to eat solid food. Then they, too, join in the burrowing life. At 10 months, females are able to have their own young. Cats, dogs, foxes, opossums, owls and snakes are known to prey on hairytailed moles. In Pennsylvania in 1949, Richmond and Roslund also reported that of the 2,484 small mammal remains taken from barn owl pellets, 31 of them were hairytailed moles. An adult hairy-tailed mole was once found in the belly of a bullfrog in New York State, and three northern copperhead snakes in Virginia and West Virginia contained hairy-tailed moles. There is also some evidence that the voracious short-tailed shrews prey on nestling hairy-tailed moles. But because of their usually secretive, mostly underground lives, not much is known about how they live and die. Their fossil record, though, is based on specimens from Pleistocene deposits in Frankstown Cave in my own Blair County, which proves that they’ve been around here for a very long time. To see the video our son Dave made of our hairy-tailed mole, consult our Plummer’s Hollow website at plummershollow. wordpress.com and put hairy-tailed mole in the search bar. Listen for a cardinal cheering, the calls of eastern wood-pewees and eastern towhees, train whistles, and a loud plane going over, as well as vehicles from the interstate as background sounds. You can also read Dave’s account of the mole. 
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Pennsylvania Game News - August 2012

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