They're 'elegant little killers' but what's a weasel's favourite food?
Irish Stoat (Mustela erminea Hibernica). What people call ‘weasels’ in Ireland are, in fact, ‘stoats’. We have no weasels here, although they are native to Britain. Much smaller than stoats, male weasels weigh up to 130 grams, whereas a stoat might reach 500 grams. Picture: Carl Morrow / Irish Stoat Survey
This jingle isn’t about the little furry mammal. The dress-maker’s ‘weasel’, a yarn-measuring device, made a popping sound. When short of money, you pawned, or 'popped’, valuables to buy rice or treacle.
But there may be a remote connection... Martin Garry, in , notes that Europe’s smallest mustelids ‘pop their heads up when disturbed’.
What people call ‘weasels’ in Ireland are, in fact, ‘stoats’. We have no weasels here, although they are native to Britain. Much smaller than stoats, male weasels weigh up to 130 grams, whereas a stoat might reach 500 grams.
The Irish stoat is said to be smaller than the British one and so it might exploit the ecological niche of the absent weasel. However, according to the late James Fairley, this is true only in the north of the country. "Size", he wrote, "increases as one goes south’ and ‘in the southernmost quarter of Ireland, males (stoats) are nearly as large as those in Britain".
Both animals have long thin bodies and short legs. The stoat’s tail has a black tip. The weasel’s tail hasn’t. Shy and unobtrusive, stoats are most often seen scampering across roads. However, they can be inquisitive. I once watched one as it ‘worked’ a loose stone wall. Like the seamstress’s device mentioned in the nursery rhyme, it 'popped' its head out every few minutes or so, to keep an eye on me.
These elegant little killers are not liked. Perhaps their sinuous bodies remind people of serpents; and their violent hair-trigger behaviour has got them ‘a bad press’. Able to kill creatures several times their own weight, they are, for their size, among the most lethal predators on the planet. A stoat, breaking into a hen-house, is likely to kill every chicken it finds.
‘Weasel words’ disguise what can’t be openly said. "Marge, don’t discourage the boy," said Homer Simpson, "weasling out of things is what separates us from the animals, except the weasel".
But the violent tendency can be excused; the smaller a creature, the higher its energy demands and the more frequently it must hunt.
Weasels, being very small, are so hard to spot that their behaviour in the wild has been almost impossible to study. Even determining a weasel’s presence or absence is challenging.
The camera trap is transforming wild animal research but, up to now, weasels have managed to evade even that. However, this may be about to change...
As a first step to overcoming the weasel’s media shyness, researchers from North Carolina University have resorted to an age-old methodology — bribery.
The American ‘least weasel’, the world’s smallest mammalian carnivore, is a member of the same species as our Eurasian one. Researchers placed 486 camera traps, baited with seven types of juicy morsel, in areas where they knew weasels were present...
...The mustelid Michelin Star dish proved to be red meat supplemented with ‘salmon oil’. It proved so tempting that the weasels were seduced into abandoning their principles.
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