66. The Golden Mole | Katherine Rundell

and other vanishing treasure

with illustrations by Talya Baldwin

’A wondrous ode to nature’s astonishing beauty - and an elegy for all the life we are in the midst of destroying’ — Amia Srinivasan

Friends,

This is an absolute treasure of a book. She’s my favourite read so far in 2024.

Broken into 22 separate chapters, each one covering a different animal species or subspecies that is endangered or close to extinction. Born in Kent, Katherine moved with her family to Harare, Zimbabwe when she was 4 years old. She shares wonderful (mostly new to me) facts about each in a very tender and humorous style - her love of animals is evident in every chapter. There is an incredibly special story in the book about the first time she met a pangolin which I’ve shared below because it moved me so much.

Here’s three of my favourite animals.

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The Golden Mole is not, in fact, a mole. It’s more closely related to the elephant. There are 21 species, all from sub-Saharan Africa; as it is the way of these things, many of them are named after men. For example there’s Grant’s golden mole (found only in the Namibian desert) and Marley’s golden mole (found only on two small patches of land on the eastern slopes of the Lebombo Mountains). Of the twenty-one species, more than half are currently threatened with extinction due to pollution and loss of habitat. the twenty-first species, the Somali golden mole, has never been seen alive and is listed on the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species as ‘data deficient’.

We live in a world of such marvels. We should wake in the morning and as we put on our trousers we should scream with awe and not stop screaming until we fall asleep, and the same the next day, and the next.

The Pangolin derives its name from the Malay word penggulung, meaning ‘roller’; when threatened they curl into a near-impenetrable ball. Their defence mechanism has made them easy prey to humans - rather than offering protection, they render themselves neatly and readily portable. Pangolins are one of the most trafficked animals in the world, due to the demand in traditional medicine. Pangolin scales are believed to improve circulation, reduce inflammation, stimulate lactation, and relieve skin diseases, even though there is no scientific evidence that they provide any health benefits.

Here’s the story about the first time Katherine met a pangolin.

“There is a particular pangolin, in a wildlife conservation outside Harare, Zimbabwe. She has a keeper - a man who walks with her through the bush from anthill to termite mound for ten hours a day, keeping her always in sight. She needs to consume roughly seventy million insects a year in order to stay alive. If the distance is relatively short, she walks. If it’s longer, she is carried in her keeper’s arms, or in a specially designed backpack. (🥹) She moves on her hind legs only, her forelegs raised and her long claws clasped together in front of her, as if knitting her fingers together in anxious thought. Once she was finished walking, she returned to her handler, setting one hind foot on his shoe in order to allow herself to be more easily lifted on his shoulder. (🥹🥹)”

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The Giraffe (camelopardalis - camel / leopard) gestates for 15 months, then drops into existence a distance of five feet from the womb to the earth. As Katherine describes ‘it looks as brisk and simple as emptying out a handbag.’ Within minutes they can stand on their trembling legs and start suckling. Once fully grown they can gallop at 60 kms an hour on feet the size of dinner plates, but it remains safer not to: they self-entangle. Though tall (the tallest of the mammals), they are hospitable to the small. They have been photographed at night with clusters of sleeping birds tucked into their armpits, keeping them dry.

Giraffes are severely endangered. The Nubian giraffe population has fallen by 98% in the last four decades, and they will soon be extinct in the wild. I don’t even want to think about a world without giraffes.

a teenage giraffe in etosha national park, namibia

In the last fifty years, the world’s wildlife has declined by an average of almost seventy percent. We have lost more than half of all wild things that lived.

some other (animal) things:

the tiniest bunny makes a comeback the best thing i read in january

fupi the orphaned giraffe (fupi means ‘shorty’ in swahili)

de winton’s golden mole - thought to be extinct since 1936, found in south africa

the rewilding project at knepp castle estate

10 of the world’s most endangered animals

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