Winter World_ The Ingenuity of Animal Survival - Bernd Heinrich [20]
For about a year my father had a pet weasel that, when still young, used to ride around in his coat pocket. The weasel came from Bulgaria. Papa had been hiking in the country one spring when he heard a rustle in the dry fallen leaves. He thought he had encountered a brown snake. Instead, it turned out to be a mother weasel followed closely by a train of her seven young, one right behind the other. He picked up all of the cute weaselets and put them into a cloth bag, tied it shut at the top, and put the bag into his knapsack. I presume he’d been trapping small mammals and catching fleas; the cloth bag was standard equipment for retrieving the fleas that jumped off the animals, which he sold to the Rothschilds in London for their famous flea collection.
Papa continued his hike and eventually sat down and opened the knapsack to get his lunch. The mother weasel followed him in pursuit of her stolen offspring. She entered the open knapsack. Papa opened the cloth bag. The mother weasel went into the bag, pulled out one of her young, and ran off with it in her mouth. Even more curious now, he waited. The weasel mother returned, entered the knapsack again, and rescued her baby number two. And so it went, until baby number six. But for number seven she never came back, and it became my father’s favorite pet. For a long time after it grew up, it amused and amazed houseguests with the speed with which it could catch a dozen mice simultaneously released into the bedroom. That weasel got even those mice that climbed the curtains. Ultimately the weasel was killed in an accident, the victim of the very features that give these mustelids their edge in hunting success with mice. The weasel, being small and eager to explore hidden spaces, had crawled under a blanket on the bed, and someone had inadvertently crushed it.
Unlike my father, I prefer not to keep weasels free in the house, but opportunities to see them in the woods are rare, and usually fleeting. I recorded a few encounters, including the following. The woods had just been blanketed by a fresh snow on top of a recent crust, and the boughs of the balsam firs were bent low. The oaks and maple twigs formed horizontal lattices on which thick, white pillows of snow had accumulated in hours of windless silence. On this Christmas Day 1995, the forest floor was still clean of tracks and the immaculate snow surface sparkled with pinpoints of sunlight glinting off mirrors made of millions of individual snow crystals.
Weasel in its winter coat.
A movement caught my eye as I scanned the scene. It was a weasel. Against this glistening background, the white weasel, with its black-tipped tail, looked almost lemon-yellow, especially toward its hindquarters. I froze as the animal came closer, dragging something. Within ten or fifteen feet of me, the weasel dropped its prey, raised itself tall on hind legs, and eyeballed me for a few seconds. Apparently satisfied that I wouldn’t interfere with its operations, it then dropped down, grabbed the still-limp chipmunk in its mouth, and continued on its way over a rise among the trees.
The local chipmunks had been denned for two months already. Like other ground squirrels, they would be immobile and in torpor, at least some of the time. In such a state they would be unable to escape any predator that could reach them.
The eastern chipmunk builds a twelve-foot burrow system that includes a nest chamber some three feet underground, food-storage chambers, escape tunnels, and one main work hole. The weasel, however, has a long skinny body and very short legs that allow it, like a dachshund (a German name that translated means badger-hound) bred to capture badgers (dachs) in their dens, to enter rodent tunnel systems, such as those of chipmunks.
Chipmunks lay up winter food stores, allowing them to avoid or reduce the amount of time they spend in torpor, which is when they are most vulnerable to predators. Every fall the chipmunks