The ermine of Central Oregon

"Jim, I have lived near Sisters for 10 years and just saw my first short-tailed weasel," Jolynn Lambert told me in an email. "I was sitting at my table looking out my sliding glass door when he stood on his hind legs and peeked in. I watched him scurry away. I hope he comes back."

Talk about luck! It isn't every day that someone comes face-to-face with this little sneak of the sagebrush and juniper country. Weasels in general are just not that friendly with anyone. They make a living by being stealthy and doing their deadly business as quickly as possible.

Way back in the '80s my family and I sighted the one pictured above hunting under that cattle guard and it kept bobbing up to see what all the noise was about coming from my old idling Chevy Suburban. That was my last sighting of a weasel - which shows how rare and wonderful it was for Jolynn to witness her visitor.

Headless mice, chickens, ducks, pheasant and other small animals are what weasels usually leave behind to let one know they have paid one a visit. I have heard of them even climbing into a pigeon loft and massacring a whole flock before they've satisfied their killing binge.

I had a government trapper tell me he saw a weasel riding on the back of a running black-tailed jackrabbit - three times the size of the weasel. The rabbit was frantically trying to dislodge it, but soon fell to earth as the weasel repeatedly bit the neck of the rabbit, finally severing the spinal chord.

When a weasel enters the burrow of Belding's ground- squirrels it's curtains for that unfortunate family. They are built to kill and devour small animals. They are very fast - one of the traits that saves them from being caught in the act. Their quickness also keeps them safe from predators such as great horned owls.

The discovery of a weasel was one of the events in my life that took me onto the trail of wanting to understand the wild things that would come into my life. I was a kid on the Rockefeller Farm in Connecticut when my Uncle Ben came into the house shouting, "Catsfur! You gotta' come and see what I found on top of Hubbard's stonewall fence!"

He pulled me away from the kitchen table where I was feasting on a big piece of my grandmother's apple pie with whipped cream piled on top - a very dangerous thing for him to have done - and dragged me off to Hubbard's Woods.

"Look!" He exclaimed as we approached a wide spot on the stonewall fence. At first, I didn't know what I was looking at, all I could make out was a pile of bones and feathers. But as we got closer I began to recognize the feathers of a great horned owl, then under them white bones; first body and wing bones and then the owl's talons. Gripped in the talons were other bones and one of them close by was a long skull with obvious carnivore's teeth.

A weasel.

"See," Uncle Ben said, pointing to the talons and the position of the weasel's skull, "The owl caught the weasel and stopped here to eat it. But the weasel got ahold the owl's throat and killed it."

Even though the weasel was held in the deadly grasp of the owl's never-to-open talons, because of it's long and limber body it was able to somehow stretch itself to the point where it grasped the owl's neck in its fierce jaws. They both perished on that old stonewall fence.

Short-tailed weasels, named Mustala ermina by the great scientist Linnaeus, are also known as stoat and ermine. Those that live in our area and higher up in the Cascades and Blue Mountains have a pure white pelage with a black tip on the tail in winter. Unfortunately, they are still on the list for killing by trappers for their beautiful winter fur.

Many head-dresses of plains and coastal Native American chiefs were decorated with the beautiful white pelage of ermine. In the heyday of women's fashion, the white fur was an expensive addition to fur

garments.

Because of their long, agile body and thick winter fur, ermine can work undetected under the snow, going from burrow to burrow killing and feeding on mice, gophers, ground-squirrels, insects, reptiles and amphibians. What a weasel bumps into while on the prowl becomes food.