Weasel Mustela nivalis
The Weasel is Cheshire’s, and also Britain’s, smallest carnivore. Though it is undoubtedly the nemesis of many animals it is perhaps the most comical candidate of the native mammal fauna, darting here and there and popping up out of Rabbit warrens, Mole and Vole burrows or niches in drystone walls and natural stone features, sporting a quizzical look and mimicking a mini-meerkat in its curiosity to what’s going on around it. However, it is this curiosity which makes it vulnerable to the gamekeeper, who will know how to call the Weasel in by pursing lips and sucking, making a noise that sounds like a Rabbit in distress, bringing it easily into the sights of a rifle.
Though fit for purpose when travelling or hunting its prey down in Vole runs, collapsed root systems, Mole tunnels etc, the weasel can look a little out of place when viewed running over a flat surface such as tarmac, as it emphasises the disproportionate leg size that carries the sausage-like cylindrical body, making what is a ferocious predator look like a clockwork toy. The Weasel’s secretive habits mean it is rarely seen, but encounters can be had with it when it breaks cover to hunt, crossing human corridors such as paths and roads, or when it is ‘working’ a hedgerow bank or drystone wall. Weasels are trapped, purposefully by gamekeepers, and sometimes erroneously by conservationists in the likes of longworth traps, the former dispatching of its find in short order, the latter releasing on discovery. Cat kills, road casualties, and camera traps increase our encounters and also add to our record dataset, and to our our knowledge of current distribution, at least.
The white bib on a weasel is demonstrably more jagged at the edges
With regards to weight of prey items, the Weasel probably has not only the widest range of any animal in the county, but the largest disparity regarding prey/predator ratio. Prey items range from insects such as beetles that weigh in at 0.01 gram to adult rabbits that weigh in at 2 kilograms, the latter being a massive 200,000 times heavier than the beetle and 10 times that of the Weasel. It appears totally unfazed and sometimes unrealistic in its choice of prey
The Weasel’s distribution in the county appears to be roughly the same as stoat, which is hardly surprising with such an obvious overlap in habitat requirements and choice of prey, but showing an obvious paucity of records from the pan handle of VC58, Longdendale. Though distribution may be similar to Stoat, their abundance is widely regarded as less, and this seems to be based on historical data from gamekeeper trap records. Talking to the head gamekeeper of one of the largest estates in Cheshire recently, he mentioned that he had found that over the last decade that Weasel was the more common of the two.
AH
