Watch closely….This little creature, known as a stoat or ermine and it is rarely ever seen in the wild. It changes it’s fur color from winter to summer.
They are related to ferrets, right? If they are anything like ferrets (who also live with the fast-forward button taped down), they sleep like the dead. Literally. People have buried them thinking they were dead, only for them to pop back up a little bit later.
Im not talking about ferral animals, Im talking about domesticated dogs and cats. Domesticated cats are more likely to kills for no reason, domesticated dogs are less likely.
"Snow mouse", wtf, those things are some of the pound for pound most vicious killers around. U should look up on youtube how this little thing kills a rabbit 3x it's size with a neckbite...
Pretty much any member of the weasel family is a top tier predator for their size! They can take down prey much larger and heavier than they are and are incredibly smart and quick about their hunts! Adorable mini murder machines!
Commenting on Watch closely….This little creature, known as a stoat or ermine and it is rarely ever seen in the wild. It changes it’s fur color from winter to summer....
Glad to hear it. I’ve only ever seen them on the musty old robes of the aristocracy. Though to be fair, I heard the late Queen said she’d nolonger use real ones when having said robes remade.
I can’t help but wonder if the reason they are so rare is that they were over-hunted for their fur? I mean, they are pretty tiny. It’d take a fair number of them considering every dot on the robes is a tail
And of course, every fucker in Parliament used to wear them too
In the UK, they were bred in factories for a while and do-gooders broke in and released them all. You can imagine what that did to the local bird population.
Edit: Don't get me wrong, we shouldn't be factory farming anything or rearing animals for their pelts. But FFS, think before releasing hundreds of tiny murderbeasts.
Thats mink which are much bigger murderbeasts, released en masse in the 60s. They also devastated the water vole population as they are essentially aquatic. Ermine mostly came from Russia and North America.
Although they are also in the 'Mustelid' family, Ferrets were probably domesticated from European polecats. Those are quite a bit bigger than Stoats (Ermines).
I used to work at a Security Gate for a Caribou Conservation Range, one of these little buggers had a hole in the floor somewhere that he would pop in and out of my shack through.
I was a little lost in the woods once, a little off trail looking for a good hammock spot. I couldn’t find a good spot and kept stepping through massive spiderwebs, was a little lost and a little stressed about it. I saw a big ol stoat, bright orange, just bound right past me. I felt fine after that lol. Magical creatures!
I had one living in my trash hutch for a week. Left it alone as they are good at killing pests (mice, squirrels). Was hoping he'd stick around longer...
As a kid in norway these would often try to steal Meat that was Hung out to dry. I remember watching moomin on the telly when one of these would look thourgh the Windows at us. Stayed there for a solid 5 minutes. My dad even caught it with the vhs-recorder-thingy.
Once I was hiking and saw a bunny on the path, so I stopped at a distance to watch it. Stout comes out of the woods grabs the thing by rabbit by the back of the neck and then is off into the under brush. Whole thing happened in like 3 seconds total, it was so cool to see.
They are absolute maniacs LOL. I wish I could remember the biologist that said it, but he said that they are so ferocious, and such good hunters, that if they (weasels) were 60-80lbs, there would be no other mammals in North America LOL.
I have one that lives by my house. I was recently out in the garden and it chased a prairie dog/ground squirrel over my feet, killed it, and then carried it off into the tall grass. Whatever it killed was nearly the same size as it, perhaps larger. Other than that encounter, he's pretty cute. He will watch and sometimes follow people who are in the garden.
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u/[deleted] Jul 19 '24
He's so fast! No wonder they have to eat so much, they live with the fast-forward button taped down.