The Golden Mole: and Other Living Treasure: 'A rare and magical book.' Bill Bryson

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Feeding ecology and foraging behaviour of the Namib Desert golden mole, Eremitalpa granti namibensis (Chrysochloridae). Annual deaths from bear attacks are far fewer than those from “falling televisions, faulty lawn mowers or toppling vending machines”. Considerations that influenced the debate might have included the view that the Chrysochloridae are very primitive placentals and the fact that they have many mole-like specializations similar to specializations in marsupial moles. Teaming up with the illustrator Talya Baldwin, she has created a paper menagerie of twenty-two exquisite, daunting and vulnerable creatures.

BBC Radio 4 - Open Book, Katherine Rundell and The Golden Mole

Most other species construct both foraging superficial burrows and deeper permanent burrows for residence.It lives almost entirely underground, in the cooler depths of earth and sand 50 cm below the surface, emerging only to hunt for insects. Fur colour varies from black to pale tawny-yellow; the colloquial name “golden mole”, and their family name “Chrysochloridae” (derived from Greek, meaning green-gold), refers to the iridescent sheen of coppery gold, green, purple or bronze on their fur. Residential burrows are relatively complex in form and may penetrate as far as 1 metre (3ft 3in) below ground and include deep chambers for use for refuge, and other chambers as latrines. They use upward thrust of their dorsally-flattened heads, together with powerful down thrusts of the foreclaws, to tunnel through the soil during subsurface foraging, creating raised ridges of soil that are visible aboveground.

Golden Mole by Katherine Rundell, Talya Baldwin - Waterstones The Golden Mole by Katherine Rundell, Talya Baldwin - Waterstones

A lavishly illustrated compendium of the staggering lives of some of the world's most endangered animals, The Golden Mole is a chance to be awestruck and lovestruck – to fall for the likes of the wondrous Pygmy Hippo, the seahorse, the narwhal and, as astonishing and endangered as them all, the human. There’s Grant’s golden mole (just 8 cm long, found only in the Namibian desert, known as the ‘dune shark’) and Marley’s golden mole (reddish-brown, found only on two small patches of land on the eastern slopes of the Lebombo Mountains), the robust golden mole (not robust at all: it’s dying out due to sweeping habitat loss in South Africa) and the largest species, the giant golden mole.

Once, drunk and on Valentine’s day, I tried to share a portion of fried chicken with a club-footed London pigeon – and saw in the streetlight for the first time the way the iridescent plumage on their necks, caught at the right angle, shifts between teal and magenta. Golden moles are endemic to subSaharan Africa, where the 21 known species inhabit a wide altitudinal, climatic and vegetational spectrum of subterrestrial habitats. Photograph: Radius Images/Alamy Giraffes ‘drop into existence a distance of five feet from the womb to the earth’. Like most other subterranean mammals, most golden mole species are restricted to a narrow range of habitats and environmental conditions, have very limited mobility and dispersal abilities, and specialized K-selected life history strategies.