Small, fierce, and splendid

When I was a kid I owned several volumes of the Peterson’s Field Guide series—birds, reptiles and amphibians, butterflies, insects, and mammals—to identify any new species of animal I’d come across. Back then they were the gold standard for identifying animals in the field. I used them all, but I used the mammal book least. That’s because I’d only ever see a handful of mammalian species: the usual suspects—Whitetail Deer, Raccoons, Cottontail Rabbits, Gray Squirrels, Eastern Chipmunks, Striped Skunks, Opossums. Sometimes a Woodchuck, and on rare occasions maybe a Red Fox. No need for a book to ID any of those. The part of New Jersey where I grew up also had a large number of small, not so easy to identify mammals—rodents, shrews, moles, weasels—that, despite spending a lot of time in the woods, meadows, and wetlands, I never encountered. That’s the trouble with mammals: most of the smaller ones are secretive and/or nocturnal, while the big ones are wary and, in New Jersey, absent. Nonetheless, I’d sometimes pore over the mammals field guide and dream of one day seeing a shrew, or maybe even a weasel.

Up until the other day I’d never seen a weasel in the wild, nor did I expect I ever would. But on a recent afternoon Marla and I were taking one of our usual walks on Bluffs Trail in Montaná de Oro State Park when we heard a conspicuous rustling in the grass about thirty feet off the trail. We looked over and there was a weasel looking back at us. The gorgeous little animal spent about a minute regarding us with great curiosity before retreating into its burrow.

When we got home I went straight to the web to figure out what kind of weasel we’d seen (it’s the 21st century after all), and learned that it was a Long-tailed Weasel. (There are four species of weasel in the US—Long-tailed, Short-tailed, Least, and Blackfooted Ferret—but it turns out only the Long-tailed is found in this part of California.) Then I pulled my sixty year old copy of Peterson’s from the shelf. All of the series have checklists in the back where the reader can check off the species that they’ve observed. With satisfaction I checked Long-tailed Weasel, the first new mammal species I’d seen in years. The afterglow lasted for days.

What a splendid animal—look at those curious, intelligent eyes! Weasels are known for their fierceness and tenacity. Annie Dillard, in an essay admiring the weasel’s single-mindedness, recounts the story of a biologist who had to submerge a weasel in water to get it to release its bite on his hand. They regularly attack and kill prey substantially larger than themselves. They’ve even been know to take down full grown moose. (Okay, I made that up, but there are—perhaps apocryphal—accounts of the weasel’s larger cousin, the Wolverine, doing this.)

How cute can you get? Based on size and facial markings, this is a male.

As I’ve noted in previous posts, taxonomists have a way of confounding us old guys. I’ve always known the Long-tailed Weasel as Mustela frenata. But that’s apparently not good enough for those taxonomist busybodies. Now it’s Neogale frenata, which in this curmudgeon’s opinion doesn’t have as nice a ring. Oh well, gotta change with the times I guess..