Though our feeders have been busy with a frenzy of bird activity during and following the recent storm, I have lately been absorbed with a little seen or noticed mammal—the long-tailed weasel.
Our first introduction to this secretive animal was one summer while playing a game of bocce when our son Ian noticed a family of weasels emerging from a stone wall. Small, fast, with sleek brown bodies, they scampered across the lawn with upturned tails and disappeared into another stone wall.
Several years later we had a very different kind of encounter. As usual, in the spring I purchased 15-day-old chicks from Erickson Grain Mill. I put them in a wire cage on sawhorses in the barn. I set up the heat lamp, put water and chick starter in the cage, and shut the barn door. Early the next morning I went out to check on the chicks. There was no sign of any of the chicks—not even a few downy feathers. I replaced the chicks a week later and put them in the same cage in the enclosed, secure entry to the barn/office/workshop.
About a week later, the chicks were starting to develop feathers, and I was feeling fairly confident that I had foiled the culprit. One day I left the office in a hurry to retrieve something from the house and inadvertently left the door open. In the short time it took me to get up to the house and back to the office, a weasel had climbed up to the cage and was in the process of killing the chicks. It had stashed about six bodies in one corner of the cage. I managed to scare the weasel, and it ran out of the cage and hid in an old wood stove we were storing in the entry. I removed the cage with the chicks from the entry and quickly closed all the doors. I knew there was no way the weasel could get out.
Tom French, the retired assistant director of MassWildlife’s Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program, identified the long-tailed weasel.(Photo by David Durrant)
I did some research and learned that weasels are carnivores, adept at killing mice, rats, chipmunks, and obviously birds. The killing of mammals I could live with, but birds gave me pause. A few days later I decided to check on the weasel and discovered it had chewed through the baseboard, sheetrock, plywood sheathing, and wood shingles, and had escaped.
After those encounters and 30 chicks later, I resolved to build a weasel-proof cage. I constructed a large cage referred to as the “chick palace” or “chick mobile,” using half-inch hardware cloth that I had learned weasels could not sneak through. Weasels can get through a hole as small as a quarter. I scavenged wheels from the dump, used up some old two-by-fours, and constructed a 4-by-4-by-8-foot cage that I could pull around the farm using my lawn tractor. We have since successfully raised countless chicks and have lent the cage to our neighbors to rear their meat birds.
Fast forward to this year. I set up a trap in the chicken feed storage area to catch what I thought were rats that had gnawed through the siding, gone up through the plywood carpeted floor, and chewed through a couple of grain bags. I soon caught an enormous brown rat. Knowing that where there was one, there were probably more, I continued to set the trap. The day before our last big snowstorm, I checked the trap, as I do daily, and positioned it right by the hole in the floor. I did not go out to check the trap the next day due to the snowstorm, and when I did, I found a weasel curled up in the trap, seemingly asleep. Alas, the weasel must have succumbed to the cold. The presence of the weasel may explain why I had not trapped any more rats—maybe the weasel was doing the job for me. Being carnivorous, it had not been going after the grain in the chicken house. I removed the weasel and photographed it.
To verify identification, I posted the photo on iNaturalist, (www.inaturalist.org) and received several replies confirming that what we had was a long-tailed weasel. One respondent was Tom French, retired assistant director of MassWildlife’s Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program.
Tom explained that although he had retired from MassWildlife, he was still active in the agency and often helped to funnel bird, mammal, and amphibian and reptile specimens to various museums. He offered to pick up the weasel, which had a white belly, and deliver it to Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology on his next trip there. French has an interest in the long-tailed weasel, he said, because with another retired MassWildlife biologist, he is writing a scholarly book on the mammals of Massachusetts, and they are particularly interested in knowing the proportion of long-tailed weasels that turn white in the winter. He added: “We don’t find many midwinter specimens, so yours is great to have preserved.”
Two days later, Tom came and picked up the specimen to take to the museum. Having heard and read about Tom over the years and his insatiable appetite for the study of native wildlife, it was fun to spend a few minutes talking to him about his varied career in the environmental field. We think it is only fitting that a long-tailed weasel from Harvard ends up as a study specimen at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology.
David Durrant and his wife Pam live and work at Micheldever Farm on East Bare Hill Road.
