RDP Thursday – WEASEL
It was probably about a decade ago that Owen first noticed a big weasel-like critter running across the road around twilight. We were pretty well acquainted with weasels since we owned a couple of ferrets, which are tame animals. Very small. These have been pets for thousands of years and although once upon a time they may have been wild, it has been a very long time since any of these adorable little guys lived “a wildlife” in the great outdoors.
There’s a particular way that weasels run, almost doubling up on themselves. No other animal runs like that. I suppose it’s because they are so much longer than they are tall. Our two ferrets were Bonnie, a tiny brown girl, and Clyde, a big fat white boy.
Neutered, so their sexes weren’t important to them or us. Except that Clyde was much bigger than Bonnie — like maybe three times her size. She barely weighed a pound and Clyde was a solid three-pounder.
They were a lot of fun. Our cat, Big Guy, adopted them. You might say that they were the pets of our pet cat. He adored them. They don’t live very long … maybe five or six years … and after they were gone, I didn’t get any more of them. They had a knack for getting into absolutely everything, including the inside of the sofa, the walls, under the floor.
Retrieving them from wherever they’d decided to take a nap was getting difficult for me. But we were familiar with weasels. There was no mistaking that gait.
Not long thereafter, I saw one too, so I call the Massachusetts Wildlife Division and asked if, by any chance, some rather big weasel-like creature had come to live in the Blackstone Valley.
The woman I spoke to was pleased. She had heard they had reappeared in the valley after having been missing since the late 1800s.
Closely related to mink, they have beautiful pelts and were heavily hunted for their fur. And land clearance pretty much finished them off. Unlike our ferrets, which are pets and have never lived wild, Fishers are wild animals and weight in at between 3 and 7-pounds. Their favorite food is (sorry kids) squirrels.
Usually, they are very dark brown — almost black — and maybe the size of a small raccoon. And yes, they do like eating cats if one happens to be roaming around. If you know you have fishers, do not let your cat roam. Given the plethora of predators — coyote, fox, raccoon, bobcat, and fisher — do your family a favor and do not let your cat roam outside. Between the toothy predators and the cars on the roads, they don’t have a chance.
We got to meet one up close and personal not long thereafter when one of them decided to take a nap in the one sunny place in our backyard. He was a gorgeous color of russet-brown. I could see him making a stunning coat.
When we tried to enter the yard, he hissed at us with just a hint of growling at the end. We retreated. Quickly. Between the bobcat who’d moved into my tepee and the fisher who’d taken over the yard, I developed a strong desire to stay on the deck.
But the wild weasels have every right to be here. They used to live here before being nearly hunted to extinction.
It’s the two-legged ones that work in the Statehouse and our Capitol that I resent. The wild weasels may take over the backyard while the sun is shining, but unlike the two-legged variety, they aren’t going to try to take away our medical care.
Categories: Blackstone Valley, Daily Prompt, Nature, New England, Photography, Wildlife
Oh dear, I love your two legged ones more than the 4s.
Good one really.
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Why?
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I liked the way you pictured the two and four. Be cause, the two legged ones are more dangerous than the four legged ones.
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Love your ferrets, Marilyn. So cheeky looking. And that weasel is gorgeous. You must have been so thrilled to see it return to your neighbourhood.
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It was a surprise. But it is one more predator and we really do have an awful lot of hunters and not nearly enough things to be hunted. Nature will fix it, I’m sure, but I’m afraid it won’t be pretty.
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Just keep those little dogs out of its way, Marilyn.
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I have fences. Duke jumps them, but he’s also FAST and big enough to fend off most of the creatures.
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He probably scolds them too. 🙂
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Bonnie had such a cute face. As for the two-legged variety they give wild weasels a bad name.
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And they smell a lot worse.
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Bonnie was THE cutest little ferret in the world. She was so tiny and so funny.
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Don’t tell me a bobcat moved into your tepee.
Leslie
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Yes. That was what finished it off. After she moved in and had her litter in there, I figured the good days of the teepee were finished. It was, by then, almost 9 years old. It was never meant to last forever. It’s just fabric and pieces of wood. Not quite an eternal structure. But that bobcat really LOVED it.
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Wouldn’t that be interesting to watch. The bobcat with her young. Kind of scary too though..
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She was not hostile, but she did make it VERY clear that I was not to come any closer. I backed off. You don’t get between a mother with long teeth and her cubs. And while our local bobcats are pretty small — maybe the size of large house cats, they are VERY strong and extremely fast.
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and potentially very dangerous….
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VERY dangerous.
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I would imagine so…
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aww…I miss having a ferret. It adopted us when I was a kid, but my stepsibs complained about the smell so we had to get rid of it (or maybe they were jealous that it liked me best, dunno). That’s my favorite part of going to the local pet store–I’ll go and see them all the time. I wish like crazy I could get one again, but I’ve got two big dogs and they’d probably consider it a disguised squirrel and a snack.
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Then there are the weasel “suits”, hired to plague and annoy, workers. These weasels aren’t even cute.
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The two-leggeds are NEVER cute.
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No, never cute. Just plain nasty. How come I worked for so many of them? How come?
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Our cat adopted the ferrets. They were hilarious together. But it is hard to know how they will react until you try it and ferrets are so tiny. But what fun they were!
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Bonnie, Clyde & Big Guy. They really were funny. Can you imagine The Duke with a ferret?
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