If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. At sea, dolphins whistle to their young in the womb; for months before birth, and for two weeks afterwards, the mother sings the same signature whistle over and over. The other dolphins are quieter than usual for those weeks, in a bid not to confuse the unborn calf as it learns its mother’s call. Did you know that a tuna is usually the size of a grizzly bear? The average is 1.8m but the bluefin usually is twice that and weighs around 600kg. A book as rare and precious as a golden mole. A joyous catalogue of curiosities that builds into a timely reminder that life on planet is worth our wonder." It can run at speeds of more than 40km/h for up to 90s which means it can easily outrun us humans and it can crush skulls with its bum.

The trunks are a mix of the upper lip and nose that contains 40k muscles - human bodies in their entirety only have about 650. By title alone The Golden Mole sounds as though it would be a charming book, a cross between a treasury and a bestiary. The subtitle is indeed “And Other Living Treasure”. At first glance its structure, short essays each prefaced with a beautiful, grey-on-gold illustration by Talya Baldwin, might suggest a children’s wildlife encyclopaedia or a coffee-table Christmas gift book. Rundell is indeed a children’s author and has been shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal; the book is indeed charming. She has mastered a sprightly, enthused tone for her essays, which come at their subjects from unexpected angles. She is good with the arresting opening line: “It was, perhaps, a hermit crab that ate Amelia Earhart.” “Hares have always been thought magic.” There is much lore and plenty of what the Americans call “fun facts”. Take hermit crabs, for example. Coconut hermit crabs are land crabs, so called because they can prise open a coconut. They can live to be 100 and grow to a metre across, “too large to fit in a bathtub, exactly the right size for a nightmare”. Fun facts, perhaps, but her purpose is serious. Each time I read a new chapter, I felt that this was going to be my favourite. Some of the animals we know full well are in trouble such as the pangolin, the hedgehog and the elephant, but others can be surprising; the spider and the crow. Here she is not talking about them as a whole, but specific species. The alala, a member of the crow family, has been declared extinct in the wild, though efforts are being made to reintroduce them. Make no mistake, my comments above in no way summon up the quirky and wonderful details the author offers about the animals she presented here. My comments are in no way a summary or breakdown but just … well, commentary. *lol*

I could have done without this chapter because while we are quite remarkable on a biological level, what we choose to do is so abominable that I‘m not a fan of the species per se. Rundell’s selection is rangy and personalised. There’s bound to be animals one feels to have been unfairly overlooked, and I would have liked to see her on at least one bird of prey, or declining beetle, or endangered cat. The Bengal tiger would have been too much to ask: a whole book would be required to explore the references and resonances that accompany it. The lynx, though, is secretive and mysterious enough not to have already exhausted our cultural imaginations, and could fit snugly into one of these short entries. Some animals that would have most brilliantly galvanised Rundell in the telling and fit well into her format, rich as they are in folklore, misunderstanding and wild factoids, are doing just fine. The spotted hyena, much maligned and endlessly fascinating in terms of legend and science, by and large doesn’t need the help of a book like this. Rundell’s latest LRB piece has been published this month, and is on hummingbirds. As it’s not included here, maybe there’s a second edition of this golden treasury being planned. Each creature, or treasure, is first described to us in full and then Rundell hits you with its current status over against its earlier, larger populations and tells you what dreadful things humans have done to them over so very many years.

The titular Golden Mole section was the shortest one but seemed to focus on the moles rather than loads of forays into fictional asides. The sections did get less filler-y towards the end, but that wasn’t enough to save it for me. When it comes to what we should do, however, things get a bit woolly. After a typically vivid account of seahorse courtship and reproduction, Rundell urges us to “remember the seahorse” every morning and “scream with awe and not stop screaming until we fall asleep” or, a bit more practically, to “refuse to eat anything that is taken from the ocean by overexploitative nonselective fishing”. Elsewhere, she makes the rather vague suggestion that we “urgently seek out ways to aid child nutrition” in impoverished countries, so that people there are not forced to hunt endangered creatures. It is a pity that this element of the book is so thin and impractical. Yet Rundell is incapable of writing a dull sentence and it could hardly be bettered as an exuberant celebration of everything from bats, crows and hedgehogs to narwhals and wombats The earth is so glorious and so unlikely: the giraffe, stranger than the griffin, taller than a great high house, offers us the incomparable gift of being proof of it." Not only are they adorably playful, they have a surprising language-learning capacity - one was taught „Twinkle, twinkle, little star“!Events of recent weeks may have encouraged some to think about longevity and constancy. But when we value “living memory” we seem able only to measure it in human terms. To be truly long-memoried on this Earth, you would probably have to be a Greenland shark. As Katherine Rundell reports, a Greenland shark presently cruising the dark depths of the Arctic Ocean might have been doing so even as the plague swept London. Its great-great-grandparents may have known Julius Caesar, so to speak. It takes 150 years for a female to reach sexual maturity. “For thousands of years Greenland sharks have swum in silence, as above ground the world has burned, rebuilt, burned again.” They also smell strongly of pee. Iridescence turns up in many insects, some birds, the odd squid: but in only one mammal, the golden mole. […] The golden mole is not, in fact, a mole. It’s more closely related to the elephant.“ The anatomical facts of this little guy are ASTONISHING and I had no idea it even existed. It takes 150 years for a female to be ready to mate and one animal the scientists know about that is still alive today was around in 1606! The author, with this book, is trying to woo the reader to be amazed enough to do whatever is necessary to protect the natural world. The problem (in my opinion)? The ones reading books such as this one already know and love the natural world and can do little to change the current status quo. *sighs*