Wild Things: Wild, wary, wily, white weasels in winter

By ED KANZE

Maybe you’ve seen one, and maybe you haven’t. But they’re out there, in quantity, perhaps right in your yard, or on the fringes of the nearest ballfield or public library, or, one way or another, just around the corner. I’m talking about weasels.

In winter, two members of the weasel family commonly share landscapes with us in the woodsy but largely civilized Northeast. They are the long-tailed and the short-tailed. Other members of the clan (not called weasels) that may prowl wild and semi-wild places near you include the American mink, the North American river otter, and the fisher. The striped skunk long occupied a niche in the weasel family, but in recent years scientists have decided that it and fellow skunks belong in a family all their own. It is the Mephitidae, loosely translated “the stinkers.”

If you’re lucky enough to spy a weasel on a winter day, it will likely be moving at a fast clip. Weasels tend to be frenetically active or sleeping. You won’t find a weasel, at least from my experience, looking thoughtful and watching the clouds go by. If you see one at all, it’ll likely be streaking through your field of view, chasing down a mouse or vole or some other creature, or it’ll be briefly stationary while its jaws rip into the flesh of a small animal it’s killed, or of a carcass it’s found.

The larger of the two, the long-tailed weasel, is somewhat ferret-sized. In winter, the long-tail, like its cousin the short-tailed, turns white. Since the short-tail, which is also called an ermine, similarly turns white, these two animals can be vexing to tell apart.

Here’s the trick. The long-tailed weasel looks powerful and is solidly built. Every time I see one after a string of short-tail sightings, I’m amazed at how robust the long-tailed weasel seems compared to the dainty ermine. Even more important than physique, though, is the length of the white tail, which, by the way, ends in a black tip. The tail of a long-tail typically extends about half the animal’s body length. The tail of a short-tail is about a third the body length. Occasionally I see a white weasel with a tail that seems more than a third but not quite half. Long-tail or short-tail? One can’t say for sure, but years of weaseling at our place have taught me, or so I think, to differentiate between the thick kielbasa-like torso of a long-tail and the more hot-dog-like trunk of its smaller cousin.

We tend to have winter weasel sightings on or within a few feet of our bird feeders. I find it interesting that in any given winter, we never have visits from both kinds of weasel. It’s one or the other. It also interests me that in a quarter century of bird feeding and weasel watching, we’ve never seen a weasel attempt to catch a bird even though they’re often in close proximity, and weasels are relentless predators. The weasels come to dine on leftovers, which is to say, on roasted chicken and turkey carcasses that we put out on a platform feeder. All the birds that come to our set up also enjoy a nibble of meat now and again, and the meat is mainly intended for them. But the flesh also attracts weasels. 

For our purposes, weasels pose a problem because they prefer to dine in private. This means they run up the post to the little wooden platform on which we’ve deposited a gently picked-over carcass, grab the prize, and then haul it off into the woods. We don’t begrudge the mammals a meal, but we want the carcass to bring us birds, too. The solution we’ve worked out is to chain the carcass to the platform. The weasels can’t chew through the links, the carcass remains in view, and birds and mammals alike entertain us.