Through the wind-swept snow of a Canadian winter stalks a viscous predator. It comes in the night, silent as dark matter in the depths of space, and leaves carnage in its wake. The bloodied corpses pile higher. Captured only fleetingly by a motion-sensor night-vision camera, its eyes burn through the aperture with a demonic intensity, daring you to try to stop it. It invades your nightmares. You fight it both in the waking and the dream world, but all your efforts come to naught. You are helpless before it. Your soft domesticity is no match for its pure, wild, killing efficiency.
What is this creature of the cold and the night, you ask? What monster lurks just beyond the warm glow of our electric lights and the thin, brittle panes of our window’s glass?
I’ll give you some hints. It is covered in white fur, with a long tail, tipped in black, like it was a quill feather dipped in ink and ready to write your obituary. Its back is long and flexible, almost like a snake in a mammal’s clothing. Its neck is similarly long and serpentine. Its mouth is arrayed with fangs to make any vampire jealous, flanked with rows of smaller needle-sharp teeth. It can both climb into the treetops and burrow underground. It can apparently walk through walls. It can leap long distances. It is reputed to engage in a “war dance” to mesmerize its prey before killing, or in celebration after the act. And most fearsome of all, it is smart.
Have you guessed it yet? Here’s one final hint: it is tiny, topping out at about half a pound (250g). Imagine an Eastern Grey Squirrel, but with teeth made for piercing flesh rather than nuts. Not the size for this fearsome predator you were picturing? Underestimate it, not! Do not fall into the trap of King Arthur and his knights when they ran afoul of the Rabbit of Caerbannog.
It is, if you haven’t guess it yet, an ermine. It also goes by the name “stoat” in some parts of its circumboreal range, a name probably derived from the Dutch “stout”, meaning “bold”. It is an apt descriptor for this diminutive weasel, a smaller cousin of the wolverine and fisher. A male ermine is called a “jack” and a female a “jill”, although it’s hard to imagine such a lithe and agile animal ever falling down. More on the mark is the name for a grouping of them: a “gang”; I pray I never encounter them in plural. One was more than enough.
The ermine who haunted our farm first made his (I’m going to go with the male pronoun from now on, even though I have no evidence for their gender) presence known in the early months of 2023, when winter still gripped the land. We had taken the winter off keeping a larger commercial flock of laying hens, and were down to a skeleton crew of about a dozen hens and one rooster living in a smaller coop, supplying eggs for our family. The hens were the result of an annual tradition with our then 10-year-old son; every spring, we would buy a handful of day old chicks and he would care for them until they stopped being cute, which was usually about three weeks. While they remained nominally still his “pets” after that, care for them would then fall to me for the rest of their natural lives. These hens were the product of several rounds of this tradition.
The rooster dated further back, five years previously, to the spring when we got fertilized eggs and watched them hatch. He was a large Chinese breed, called a Cochin, and had impressively arrayed black and white feathers. His longevity had graced him with a name: Bumblebee.
2022 had been our worst year, by far, for predators with our chickens. Over the summer, we had lost dozens in our larger coop to an array of carnivores who lined up for our poultry buffet: foxes, raccoons, even a raven and hawk who may have been working in tandem. But, as most of these predators either hibernate or migrate away for the winter, we had never suffered any losses during the cold months.
That changed in the late winter of 2023, when, suddenly, one or two of our son’s “pets” would turn up dead each night in the small coop, their throats ripped out. There had been no sign of forced entry, no door accidentally left open overnight, so I surmised it must be some small weasel that could fit through minute holes in the coop. There is a weasel even tinier than the ermine, called the “least weasel”, but both are apparently capable of squeezing their rubbery bodies through a hole no larger than a quarter.
I did my best to block off every hole I could find, but both our coops are old and porous, and I couldn’t find every one. I didn’t have enough fingers to plug every hole in this dyke. Each night, our small flock would dwindle more.
Finally, five-year-old Bumblebee was slain (trying to defend his hens, I like to believe). No part of him had been eaten; just two barely perceptible bite marks could be seen on his neck. He still looked perfect and beautiful. I broke the news to our son, and we tearfully buried him in a shallow grave (due to the frozen ground) nearby. Soon after that, the last of the hens were taken, too.
The farm felt empty without our rooster’s crows, and we had to actually buy eggs for the first time in a decade.
Still, our son got seven new chicks that spring, and we got 100 ready-to-lay hens. I braced myself for more attacks, surrounding both coops in electric net fencing, but all was quiet on the weasel front.
We ended up having no predator problems that summer, save for one bad night, when a big raccoon got through the electric fence (the charge had been insufficient), and went on a rampage, killing 17 chickens in about two hours. Their bodies were scattered inside and outside the coop like the aftermath of a battle.
Winter rolled around again, this time with about 80 hens in our big coop, and our son’s seven chickens in the small coop. One of the “female” chicks we had bought turned out to be male, so we had a rooster again (though nameless this time, perhaps as a way to avoid getting too attached to a being who is seen as a tasty meal by so many wild animals around it). With the freezing ground and accumulating snow, I had to take down my electric fencing. I braced myself for trouble.
The first part of the winter was casualty-free. But sure enough, as the year changed over and winter really set in, the serial killer returned to the scene of the crime, about the same time as the year before, and left one victim, his telltale calling card of the throat ripped out gaping up at me like a thrown gauntlet. Game on.
I was ready for this with a plan. I moved the “pet” chickens to the big coop with the others, where, for some reason, I thought they would be safe. (My reasoning was that no chickens were lost to the weasel the winter before in the big coop; I seemed to have overlooked the fact that this was due to the fact that there were no chickens in that coop at that time.) Then I set up a live trap in the small coop, baited with the dead chicken’s head, as well as an intel-gathering motion-detecting camera, and waited for the night to pass.
The next morning, the trap was still untriggered, and, although the camera had taken a shot or two, I didn’t notice anything unusual in the pictures. Only later, looking back at the picture below, could I see the first glimpse of the enemy I would come to know all too well over the coming weeks. Only his distinctive white tail with black tip can be seen streaking out of one dark corner of the picture. Can you spot it?
This was just the beginning.
Read Part 2 here.