Stoatally different

Since first seeing a weasel in my camera box last month I have had four cameras watching, one in the box and three outside.  The other day one of them saw a stoat investigating the pipe leading into the box.  Unfortunately the stoat thought better of it and turned round and came back out.

You can see in the photos above, and in the video below, the straight border between the stoat's brown and white fur (in the weasel it is wiggly) and its long black-tipped tail.

When I first made this camera box I used old Victorian land drain pipes as entrances and in retrospect they were too small.  There was one very brief visit from a weasel but otherwise the camera has seen only shrews, mice and voles.  As soon as I used larger pipes last month the weasels were in.  Although a weasel can fit in a very small hole I suspect it is more comfortable exploring a hole in which it can easily turn round.  The same is probably true for the larger stoat, so when it saw the smaller entrance at the far end of the pipe it gave up and left.

As soon as I saw the video I spent the rest of the afternoon making a new camera box.  This one is again made from a plastic under-bed storage box but now the larger pipes fit inside the box and there is nothing smaller inside.  There is a still larger pipe on one side.

I have lined the box with slates so it looks OK inside.  And the next day a weasel came to check it out.  The weasel moves so quickly that it was already behind the camera by the time recording started - there is a 400ms (0.4s) trigger delay.

I have been hoping that the stoat would return and enter the new box but so far that hasn't happened.  A weasel has been back, and again it was in so quickly that it caught out the camera. It is difficult to see in the video because of the speed of movement but the weasel has a quick wee on the floor to leave its scent mark - that accounts for its hunched spread-legged posture. It is probably done as a message to other weasels and stoats and doesn't seem to have deterred nocturnal visits from the small mammals, although they now don't appear in daylight.  This time we get a good view of the wiggly border between the brown and white fur of the weasel.

Stoats are part of the natural world here but on the other side of the world, in New Zealand, where there are no native land mammals, they are a non-native invasive species.  Early European settlers took rabbits to New Zealand and when the rabbits got out of control they brought in stoats to control the rabbits.  It probably seemed like a good idea at the time but in retrospect it was a predictable disaster.  The stoats devastated the native ground-nesting birds and there is now a stoat eradication plan.  (There is a similar problem, and similar plan, on Orkney.)

I read on a New Zealand website that stoats are partial to mayonnaise so I thought I would give it a try.  For good measure I added a bit of peanut butter.  And look who turned up to take the peanut butter - our own non-native invasive species, an American grey squirrel.

The mayonnaise was eaten by bank voles and wood mice overnight so that plan didn't work either.  Next morning I put in a few sunflower seeds for the voles but of course, now that it knows there might be food in the box, the squirrel turned up to eat them.

So I think the plan at the moment is to put in no food and hope that the weasels' and stoats' curiosity will attract them to the camera box.