Animals That Live Underground
More animals dig and live in the ground than you'd think.
Each builds a burrow of a different shape, for a different reason.
The mole is a master digger.
Pushing soil aside with broad, shovel-like forepaws, it carves dozens of meters of tunnel a day.
For a mole, a burrow is both home and hunting ground — it eats the earthworms and bugs that fall through the dirt walls as it travels its tunnels.
Those little mounds that bulge up above the surface are the leftovers of that excavation.
The prairie dog is a squirrel-family animal that lives on the North American plains, where hundreds of them gather to form a vast underground town.
Each burrow has separate rooms for keeping watch and for sleeping, and when a predator appears they send the alarm to one another with their distinctive call.
A badger's burrow is called a "sett," and it gets passed down across generations and used for decades, growing larger all the while.
Some setts have dozens of entrances all on their own.
So underground turns out to be a busier neighborhood than you'd expect.
For some it's a hunting ground, for some a town, and for others a home handed down generation after generation.
Somewhere along the burrow Mocha is digging, there might just be a neighbor who settled in first.