A word meaning to dig land with your nails or fingers

Scrabble

Scratch or grope around with one's fingers to find, collect, or hold onto something. "She scrabbled at the grassy slope, desperate for a firm grip."

Google definition

Now, she was famished, and had a fantasy of reaching down to scrabble for roots, like Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind. For more than an hour, she and ...

The Perennial Killer: A Gardening Mystery by Ann Ripley

You could use one of the following verbs:

• paw
• claw
• burrow

You could look for narrower synonyms also called hyponyms for a word. I used dig to find narrower synonyms which are avaliable for most of the words on www.aamboli.com