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By Root 1240 0

near our house spend days on end running to the bird feeder, filling their cheek pouches to bulging capacity with sunflower seeds, running into their burrow and unloading, and returning for more. In years of plenty of oak, beechnut, and sugar maple mast, the chipmunks also haul in the seeds of those trees. The more food stored, the more time the chipmunk will remain warm-bodied, awake, and vigilant in winter. Indeed, chipmunks are not nearly as prone to spend the entire winter in torpor as other ground squirrels, which don’t lay up a larder. In 2000, a heavy mast year in northern Vermont, I saw the local chipmunks frequently emerge above the snow, making many trips to the bird feeder throughout the winter. The next year, when there was almost no beech or oak mast in northern Vermont (but a large crop in southern Vermont), they were already absent above ground in late September. It seems that like many a millionaire, a chipmunk in winter facing unlimited amounts of food can never quite get enough, yet when they have little they know how to get by.

I waited about ten minutes for the weasel to get out of view and settled with its prey before I started following its tracks. Why had it bothered to drag its heavy load? Why didn’t it feed on the chipmunk right where it caught it, presumably inside its snug warm den?

Weasels live throughout the Northern Hemisphere and even up into the Arctic. They are active all winter. They must contend with intense cold, yet they are small, skinny, and poorly insulated, all of which facilitate rapid rates of heat loss. To compensate, their resting metabolism is twice that of other animals their size. Yet they have small stomachs and unlike their cousins, the striped skunk, they put on little body fat. As a result, they have to eat more food per day than any other winter-adapted animals.

Yet for all their seeming design flaws for retaining heat, they are in fact superbly designed rodent predators. Weasels need to be small and skinny to enter the chipmunk’s tunnel, and balance their energy budget by behavior. Radiotracking studies show that most of their time in a typical twenty-four hours in winter is spent eating and resting. Weasels need no permanent den, nor do they need a large stomach, because after reaching the rodent’s nest they use their victim’s nest for their own and curl up into a ball to conserve energy supplies while feeding about five to ten times per day. Finally after finishing their meal and again in need of energy supplies, they sally forth on their next hunt.

After dragging its prey about thirty yards in a fairly straight line, the weasel I was watching had climbed with its freshly killed chipmunk up onto a small knoll. There the tracks suddenly circled and zigzagged back and forth in a small clearing. Clearly, the predator had been searching for something in that several-square-yard area; the tracks still showed the drag marks of the dead chipmunk. As I said, the crust was thick, and the fresh snow on top was soft, maybe an inch or two deep. I suspected that the weasel was searching for a very specific hole, possibly the entrance to a den now covered with crust.

I noticed the tracks leading off from the knoll to the base of a nearby small hop hornbeam tree. Along the trunk of that tree, where the ice crust was thinner, the weasel had finally descended into the snow. I next waited for about fifteen minutes, hoping for it to come back out. First I sat quietly; then I squeaked like a mouse in distress. Still no weasel. I then dug down through the nearly two feet of snow to the unfrozen leaf-covered ground by the hornbeam tree, continuing to dig and following a tunnel in the snow. The snow tunnel (much like tunnels I later learned were routinely made by chipmunks) led to the trampled area where the weasel had left its many circling tracks on top of the crust, and that was where I found the entrance hole of a tunnel leading into the ground itself.

I put some loose snow over this entrance and left. When I returned later in the day the hole was indeed opened and the fresh weasel