Leonardo's famous Some Silly Tart with a Limp-Wristed Weasel, 1480-ish. Folklore held that an ermine would die before allowing his beautiful white coat to be soiled, hence ermine were used as symbols of purity and chastity. This woman was daVinci's patron's mistress. Weasel-worthy? I think not.

Queen Baldy with an Allegorical Stoat, Sir William Segar, 1585. You can tell the weasel is allegorical, because he has a royal crown around his neck and he's spotty. Weasels are not spotty, but ermine robes look that way because they are made of many tiny white weasel tails with black tips. Ermine robes were only worn by crowned heads, so the ermine itself became a symbol of royalty in places such as Brittany and France. Hence, this famous painting may have been an allusion to...oh, who cares?

Taxomnomy

Weasels are members of the mustelid family. There are three weasels common in the US:
mustela frenata, the Longtailed Weasel
mustela erminea, the just plain weasel and
mustela nivalis, the charmingly named least weasel, tiniest of the carnivores. "Nivalis" means snowy, but all three will turn white in winter if far enough North. Poor little nivalis can only hold one one-hundredth of an ounce of food in his stomach, and so must eat ten times a day to survive his own metabolism.

The UK has erminea and nivalis, which they call stoat and weasel, respectively.

Other Mustelidae

Badgers, various
Polecats and ferrets, the latter a domestic version of the former
Otters
Wolverines
Fisher cats
Pine martens
Skunks

Mustelidae characteristically have small ears and smell bad. It has been said that a frightened weasel can out-stench a skunk.

A Word on Weasels

Weasel! It's a pleasure to say. A sly joy in the mouth. Weeeeeeeeezl. It's like needle and sneeze and weepy and feeble and sleazy. It's Thomas Neill Cream; flea-bitten and febrile and measels. It's eeeeevil. It teases. If you'd never heard of such a thing, you'd know right away that a weasel was something wicked and sneaky and delightful.

Weasels are tiny, fearless hunters that ripple through the grass like liquid predation, following mats and rice right down into their own burrows. Then killing them, eating them on the sofa, taking over the lease, and bedding down in the leftover fur. This is what naturalists call panache.

Weasels often kill prey many times their own size, then drag the carcasses home. They have been known to attack humans who get between them and dinner, and will sometimes fly at anyone releasing them from a trap. This is what foresters called audacity.

Behold, the elegant and exceptional weasel:

Born pregnant

No, that's tribbles. But stoats come close. Like many animals, female stoats become fertile again for a brief period shortly after giving birth. But, uniquely to erminea, the tiny infant female stoats, still blind and helpless, are fertile and receptive, too. As icky as that sounds, it's a splendid breeding strategy. Gestation is "on hold" for eight months while the young stoatlettes mature and move to new territories, when a normal gestation period of 21-28 days begins. Then, five to twelve kits are born and — hoorah! — everybody gets pregnant again. Stoats are reproductive cluster bombs.

The weasel dance

Weasels are mystical entities composed of energy in an almost pure state. This appalling dynamism must be vented somehow or a stoat's fragile physical envelope will go boom. That, at least, is my explanation for the famous weasel dance, less dance and more leaping and wriggling and wadding onesself up and flinging onesself against things. They call it a dance because "oh my god look at that weasel it's, like, totally flipping out" is too cumbersome for everyday use.

I saw the creature at right perform the weasel dance, shortly after Uncle Badger took this picture. It was terrifying. I don't know if cage boredom fueled the violence of it (or if he was showing off for us), but he grew so lunatic by the end he rolled himeself up into a furball and thumped off the walls. Hard.

The folk explanation for this behavior is that the weasel is attempting to mesmerize prey. I've read this in books, too. Ha! Ha! Only in an alternate universe, where "mesmerize" and "scare the bunny pellets out of" are madly inverted. Anyhow, rabbits aren't exactly known for their keen minds and penetrating curiosity. You won't hear a runnybabbit exclaim, "I say! That slinky chap with the rows of pointy teeth is behaving in a curious fashion! I believe I shall move closer to ascertain the reason for his madcap antics." Except maybe in that alternate universe we were talking about. Boy, that place has a lot to answer for.

Worms up their noses

Or it could be because they have nematodes in their sinuses. Weasels and stoats are frequently host to a parasitic worm, Skrjabingylus nasicola, which takes up residence in the sinus cavities of the skull. Really. I'm not making this up. Eighty-five to a hundred percent of weasels in some areas are thus afflicted. Infected stoats don't seem less healthy than uninfected ones, but you know it's got to hurt like nobody's business.

The nematodes live in the guts of snails. Weasels don't eat snails, but they eat mice and mice eat snails. So you've got larvae in a snail belly in a mouse belly in a weasel belly, from whence they migrate to the skull. I don't want to know how they "migrate" from the stomach to the eye socket. I read a book about parasites once and almost lost the will to live. At autopsy, the skulls of infected weasels (like those above) are often found pocked with damage. Dance? I'd do the tarantella.

Endangered? Not these superior beasts

Nobody much cares about weasels, because they're not in the least endangered. They're found in abundance everywhere but Australia, the poles, and that really horrible bit of Africa. In fact, poor New Zealand spends millions every year to eradicate them. Why? They're not native, but in 1886, the country's Chief Rabbit Inspector (yes, really) introduced shipments of stoats from Britain to keep runnybabbits down. Unfortunately, he didn't think to himself, "say, this is a land famous for a certain small, flightless bird. Flightless... flightless... flightlessssss... I wonder if weasels would find kiwis tasty?" This answer is: yes, of course they would.

Won't you join me?

Whenever I'm out hiking and I see a small, round hole — just as a stoat likes it — I always thump the ground gently with my stick three times, bend over and call, "weeeeeeeeasel?"

I'm convinced that if more people adopted this practice, sooner or later, some hiker is going to get the bunny pellets scared right out of her.

All the weaselpics above, with the exception of the photo of Socrates and Auntie exchanging the Weasel Secret Handshake, are borrowed from the Mammal Society's excellent pamphlet, "Stoats and weasels." I didn't ask for permission because, for one thing, I couldn't find copyright or credit information printed anywhere. And, for another, I'd feel silly: something like six people read this site, and three of them came here looking for recipes (hahaha! idiots!). You can find this and other pamphlets at their web site. I particularly recommend "No:17 The Identification of Arthropod Fragments in Bat Droppings" to anyone with a basic knowledge of natural history who wishes to identify many of the insects, spiders and other arthropods which occur in the faeces of British bats. —Psych! No, I don't!