Mole and Thrush and Pretty Polly
A hermit thrush flies off with a holly berry. Quintin Ellison photo
A mole tunneled out of the woods early this winter and started digging back and forth behind the house in a never-ending search for food. In two months it has turned our yard into a scale model of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Walk across the grass and your feet sink into newly pushed up earth.
We could trap and kill the mole, but it’s been fun to watch instead as it burrows below the surface, making the ground heave and crack. Our binoculars bring it close.
Besides, we’re not the only ones watching; a hermit thrush does too. It watches so avidly that wherever the mole goes, the bird is close behind. The two have been together so much we’ve named the pair Mole and Thrush.
But Thrush does more than follow. As Mole burrows along, humping the ground up into mini-ridges, the bird rides on top, because he’s hungry too. He’s like an egret that perches on the back of a grazing cow to see what insects its hooves stir up.
Thrush differs from an egret in one intriguing way. When he rides on Mole, his legs, first one then the other, twitch and tremble. They go as fast as a sewing machine needle or a person with a nervous foot. Thrush can’t seem to contain his excitement, waiting to see what Mole turns up, so he sends it into his feet.
What Mole turns up are earthworms. I’ve read that a mole can eat its body weight in worms in a day. We see a juicy one, slick and pink, wiggle up out of a crack, trying to escape Mole’s ravenous jaws, only to fall prey to Thrush. Thrush sees pink, then — Snap! — he plucks the worm and — Gulp! — down his throat it goes. The two parts of his beak work together like a knife and fork in the hands of a hungry boy. Thrush wipes his beak on a blade of grass then goes back for more.
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It’s when Thrush jumps in front of Mole and watches him approach that his bird legs twitch the fastest. And when his legs twitch, his tail twitches too. As goes the tail, so goes the rest of the body, until Thrush is all in a jerk.
Can this be the same bird that’s over-wintered here in the past? That thrush really was a “hermit.” He’d fly out of the woods and land under our hollies to eat fallen berries, then dart back as if he couldn’t wait to be alone again. He was so socially averse that no more than a glance from us out the window would send him off.
But this year, Thrush is a party animal. He sees Mole humping along, thinks about worms, and out he comes to quiver and dance. Out come our binoculars too.
That is, until this morning. This morning Mole moved into virgin ground, Becky’s flowerbed — the one right below a window. Mole was so close we didn’t need binoculars to see him push up dirt. And perched on top of the moving earth was Thrush, waiting for a pink wiggler to show, his skinny legs going to town.
To make sure we weren’t just seeing things, Becky opened her bird Bible, John Terres’ “Encyclopedia of North American Birds.” Terres does not mention thrushes under “SOME ODD METHODS OF FOOD-GETTING,” but he does name other birds that engage in “a peculiar kind of foraging called foot-stirring.” He says, to give chapter and verse, “Lapwings bring earthworms to the surface by quick trembling motions of one foot.” Next Becky went to an online source, Cornell’s “All About Birds,” and read, “Hermit Thrushes sometimes forage by ‘foot quivering,’ where they shake bits of grass with their feet.”
But it’s not foot-stirring or foot-quivering that’s going on in the flowerbed this morning. Thrush and Mole are hunting in concert, and foot-strumming is what I see.
Now Thrush jumps in front of Mole, his thin legs pumping, his clawed toes picking away. Mole senses the twanging vibes and thinks, “There’s a wiggler just ahead!”
I can’t see Mole, of course, but I can picture him under the rhythmic surface, his big hands plucking at dirt and roots. Like a bluegrass boy slapping the strings of a big-bellied bass, Mole anchors the music with pounding thumps in a Foggy Mountain Breakdown, in a Deliverance duel, while Thrush claws and hammers at banjo earth.
We tap our feet too, in front-row seats. It’s a Moses Creek hoedown with Mole and Thrush. Now, suddenly, between the two — flashing pink to their clogging beat — here comes Pretty Polly!
Burt Kornegay is the author of “A Guide’s Guide to Panthertown Valley.” He and his wife, Becky, live in Jackson County.
