Long Island’s Smallest Most Vicious Carnivore
What is a weasel? Someone asked me that question recently....and I knew the answer. Though having seen one close up in the wild only once and many many years ago.
My experience was more than a half century old, but the memory remained so vivid I can clearly recall it today. So it is with our wildlife experiences. They are often just chance encounters, fleeting moments cherished in one’s memories and hardly ever recorded. So here I remedy that failing and recount a tale of long ago and perhaps, my earliest observation of an important Long Island mammal, and our smallest Long Island carnivore.
The Short Tailed Weasel ( Mustela erminiea) is a member of the Order Carnivora, and Family Mustelidae —which includes weasels, skunks, the wolverine and the otter. The short tailed weasel is is a smaller species (about 11 inches long) and more northern species than its closest relative the long tailed weasel M frenata (about 16 inches long). The short tailed is known to have been reported from Long Island (Babylon in 1949) but it is rare here. In fact in my many years of field work, I have never again seen this small weasel which turns all white in winter and is known also as an ermine!
This event occurred in the post war years of western Suffolk County, in the Town of Smithtown, just outside of the village of Kings Park, where as a young child I made my first animal observations.
It was a lovely early morning July day in 1948. My grandfather’s home in Smithtown, was our family refuge from the seasonal (summer long) plague of polio ravaging the boroughs of New York. In those days Long Island was still dominated by agriculture and barely changed from its late 19th century character. My grandpa’s house had no electricity and no town water. Grandpa trimmed the wicks and lit the kerosene lamps each night, and in the morning we hand-pumped ice cold water from a deep 120 foot well. We all had to use the outhouse and deal with bedroom potties we slid under our beds each night. The roads were surfaced with clean yellow sand, where youngsters of eight and ten years old, could walk barefoot all day, and did so happily! And where one day each week the ice man came to chop out a block of ice ( for grandpa’s ice box) and in the process create all those dark gray ice chips that fell to the sand and in kid’s hands melted into drippy ice and cold water for a kid to hold and slurp on a hot summer day.
On that summer day which was to become the “ weasel observation day” my cousins and I were on our way to the “Bluff” a half mile walk to the Nissequogue River where the older kids would swim and fish with hand lines and youngsters could splash in the river and loll on the warm sand.
Our path that day took us to the end of grandpa’s road, past land which had been cleared a few decades ago, and now grew thick with oak brush, staghorn sumac viburnum, elderberry, blackberry and sweet fern, and the ubiquitous dense growths of dark green, luxuriously growing, oily-leaved poison ivy. The newly cleared land and varied growth had created an environment which was rich in species of plants, and animals. It was a good place for weasels which have to consume a good part of their own body weight in meat each day just to survive.
Our barefoot threesome, one encumbered with a tomato can of rusting fishing gear ( a few rusty flounder hooks, some lead weights, and lengths of tarred cuttyhunk line), the other boy with a towel over his shoulder recently plucked off Aunti’s clothes line, and me, I was assigned to carry the sweating jug of cold pump-water lemonade. But no cups!.
A mere 200 feet along on our journey we walked along the sturdy white post and rail fence enclosing our neighbor—fastidiously neat— Mr Ferstakski’s property, I stopped. There right out in the open in the corner of recently cut lawn, sparkling with morning dew, a baby Eastern Cottontail Rabbit (Sylvilagus floridanus) sat happily nibbling the fine tender stems of Mr. Ferstakski’s well-tended lawn.
I shifted the jug from one hand to the other to point at the cute little critter.
“Look a bunny,” I called..
The others stopped too. The little furry fellow seemed oblivious of us.. He looked our way seemingly assured we posed no mortal danger. (though the two elder members of our threesome were known to carry “Tom Sawyer” style sling shots in their back pockets). The little cottontail twisted his ears around in our direction and looked up with big brown innocent eyes, while a green stem of Mr. Ferstakski’s grass slowly disappeared into his bewhiskered nibbling jaws.
But this bucolic calm and serenity was shattered in an instant when, when with a faint rustle of brush from the far side of the sandy road and a flash of brown, a “varmint” about the size of a very small squirrel, looking much like a brown tube on short legs, dashed out from the thicket of staghorn sumac and poison ivy. With several looping bounds, it crossed the road within a few yards of our bare feet, Ignoring our exposed flesh , it raced under the lower post of the rail fence—to streak toward the baby bunny.
The weasel was on its victim in an instant. It raised its long body onto its hind legs to attack the bunny’s head. Its lower body formed a rigid “L” with hind feet braced and its front paws tightly grasping the head of the rabbit. Then it arched its neck as it bit into the back of its now struggling prey.
The bunny let out a piercing scream. It struggled to escape from the grasp of its tiny attacker, smaller than it. The lithe, slim weasel was focused only on its prey and seemed oblivious of all except the object of its attack which it seemed so single mindedly determined to kill.
“ It’s a weasel, a blood suckin’ weasel” the boys yelled in unison.
I stood stock still, shocked by the violence of the attack as I watched the struggling bunny, twisting and staggering back in a vain attempt to throw off its attacker. My bare feet were cemented into the road sand. The two older boys yelled and dashed toward the fence and the site of bloody carnage. From where I was standing I could clearly see the weasel.. It was small, maybe only ten or twelve inches long, it had a coat of brown fur above and had a white belly and its tail was short and brown.
As I watched, one of the boys ducked under the fence and raced up close enough so that the predator, at first so focused on its prey turned from biting the bunny’s neck. It stared at the approaching boy for only a split second. Perhaps assessing the threat of this perhaps unseen element charging toward it with pounding feet. It released its grip on its now wobbly prey, to turn and dash off into the thick brush bordering the Ferstakski’s lawn. It disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.
The bunny, bleeding from the base of one of its long ears staggered around as if in a daze, seemingly unable to escape, and yet still standing. One of my cousins reached out and picked him up.
“His heart’s beating so fast,” he said.
“Yours would be too, if you got blood sucked by a weasel”, said the other.
“Robbie, come on over here and see this,” they called, as the older boy, gently put the bunny to the ground.
We all stood still to watch it. It remained motionless for a few seconds and then with one ear flopped over and dripping blood it bounded off toward the Ferstakski’s vegetable garden from where it must have come.
“Well, we saved that bunny from a blood sucking weasel¨ , they said.
Only many years later did I learn more about these tiny carnivores belonging to the group of mammals called mustelids to which the little short tailed weasel belongs. And learned too that they don’t “suck blood”—but are pure carnivores needing to kill regularly every day. And perhaps made a rare observation of a species now considered rare or extirpated from Long Island.
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