Moles
You might find yourself walking out to inspect a freshly ruined patch of grass every morning, assuming some underground rodent is chewing through your garden roots, but moles belong to an entirely different biological group of small insect-eating mammals. Instead of gnawing on your prize hostas or invading your basement, they spend their lives underground chasing earthworms and grubs with heavy, spade-like front paws and cylindrical bodies built specifically for pushing dirt.
You can easily tell moles apart from their rodent neighbours like voles and pocket gophers by looking at what happens to your turf, because moles push up raised soil ridges and rounded conical dirt mounds from beneath without ever eating plant tissue or leaving open, clipped runways. Voles leave behind open paths in the grass and gnawed bark at ground level, while pocket gophers push up jagged crescent mounds and actually eat your plant roots. Shrews also have pointed snouts, but they stay above ground in leaf litter or use old tunnels instead of building massive dirt networks.
