Have you ever seen meerkats, the southern Africa plains mammals famous for their posture? They often stand upright on their hind legs and look around.
While Bob and Kay Clark of Snohomish don’t have meerkats on their Circle KB Ranch near Monroe, they were first entertained this year by long-tailed weasels with similar behavior. The relationship began earlier this year when the Clarks were in their home one night near sunset.
“I happened to look outside and said, ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ ” Bob said of the animals with reddish-brown backs and creamy undersides.
“We had a den of them under what used to be a hen house. … Four young and two adults were doing this display where they’d pop their heads up, sit up real straight, go back down, then pop up again, sit up real straight, then go down. I never dreamed they’d do the meerkat routine.”
Or the weasels would pop up and look around, then run to another opening, whether a hole in the ground or a crevice in a pile of lumber, providing Bob and Kay with 45 minutes of entertainment.
The long-tailed weasel, the most widespread carnivore in the Western Hemisphere, is a solitary roaming animal except during the mating season. If a male finds a female with pups, it will mate with the female and sometimes mate with female pups, which are sexually mature at three months.
Delayed implantation allows females to wait on egg development until March with pups not arriving until April or early May. The pups, usually four to eight, are born nearly blind in an underground nest lined with rodent or rabbit fur. The tunnel branches, some used for food storage, others as a latrine.
Usually only the mother brings food to the pups, then takes them hunting in about six weeks. They disperse several weeks later. Since the Clarks saw the group as two larger weasels and four smaller ones, it’s possible the larger ones were males (who when they leave are larger than their mother), and that everyone would soon disperse.
Although the Clarks were having mole problems, they opted to let the weasels deal with it because mole traps and poison might have killed the weasels.
“They’re nice animals to have around. We have no rats or mice problems at all,” Bob said.
The slim long-bodied and short-legged long-tail weasels can chase prey (mice, rats, voles, chipmunks, shrews, rabbits) into their tunnels, often lining the tunnel with the dead animals’ fur for future use.
After using sound and scent to track its prey, a weasel kills by crushing the skull with its long canine teeth. Weasels have even gone after squirrels in trees.
A long-tailed weasel has a high rate of metabolism and in the winter might need to eat about 40 percent of its body weight each day. (Adult weasels weigh up to 12 ounces.) But it’s not at the top of the food chain, so weasels become crunchies for foxes, coyotes, hawks and owls.
Although a sinuous 11 to 18 inches in length plus another 3 to 6 inches for the black-tipped tail, they can enter a small rodent tunnel measuring just 1½ inches across.
While the Clarks benefit from weasel behavior, poultry owners’ spin on long-tailed weasels might be different because weasels can go on killing sprees. It’s not a rogue weasel that’s the problem. Instinct tells them to kill when the opportunity arises and then stash what they don’t eat.
On the book shelf: Bill Thorness’ “Biking Puget Sound: 50 Rides from Olympia to the San Juans” ($17, Mountaineers Books) will give bikers plenty of options for what’s left of the season.
“Biking” includes good maps, mileage logs, useful elevation graphs, photographs and five rides in Snohomish County.
Columnist Sharon Wootton can be reached at 360-468-3964 or www.songandword.com.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
