So cute …
text and photo : Norma A. Hubbard (February 2015)
Life in the country is filled with animals, but living in an old house with a stone foundation provides a whole other level of animal stories. We are constantly in battle against mice since we don’t want to use poison and I am allergic to cats. We use live-traps and release the mice in an old stone wall away from our house. However, this winter there was something in our house making more noise than a mouse. We thought it could be a chipmunk, a squirrel, or heaven forbid, a rat! Since we don’t like poison, we set a trap and waited. We did not have to wait too long because within a few days we caught our noisy house guest, and it wasn’t anything we had expected – it was an ermine!
Ermines (Mustela erminea) are basically weasels in their winter coats. Our weasel was definitely wearing its win- ter white fur with just a tip of black on its tail. We aren’t sure if it was male or female since there is little difference between the two. Males measure between 25-33cm (10- 13in) and females are about 21-26 cm (8-10.5 in). Male ermines weigh on average 80g and females about 54g. And quite frankly, we did not weigh it nor measure it as it was indeed a wild animal who let us know that it did not appreciate being in a cage. By the summer, our ermine will turn brown on top, but will keep its white belly and the black tip on its tail.
These little animals are cute, yet deadly. Many other animals avoid weasels. Ermines are carnivores and their diet includes small rodents, fish, birds, eggs and insects, but they will attack animals larger than themselves, such as rabbits. They need to eat often, so they will catch food and cache it for leaner times. Ermine line their nests with the skins of their prey, which is ironic since ermine are hunted for their fur. It was believed that only royalty were permitted to wear ermine; however old paintings show that wealthy individuals had ermine cloaks. While no longer hunted extensively by humans, ermine are preyed upon by snakes, owls, and hawks.
When not living in my basement, ermine live in wooded areas. They live in burrows and will take over chipmunks’ dens. Females produce litters of 4 to 9 kits and raise the young on their own. By two months old, the offspring will start to hunt. Ermine have delayed implantation, which simply means that their bodies can delay embryo growth after fertilization, if conditions are not favorable, like when the food supply is low.
Since it was so cute, many people asked if we were going to keep it. Cute or not, it is a wild animal so after taking a few pictures of our ermine, we released it near where we put the mice. It went down a hole within a second, hence the reason I only have pictures of it in the cage! I am not sure if it will remain in our area, but we hope so, as a few less mice wouldn’t be a bad thing.
Source: Ermine. (2013, October 3)
New World Encyclopedia. Retrieved, January 2, 2015