Morten wrote:Flintstone wrote:Those are great pictures Paul, love the one of the stoats.
Agree. Beautiful animals. Never seen them play like that. (I assume they were playing, not that this was caused by a nearby explosion...)
They were, indeed, playing, Morten. I had a pile of wood near where I took that photo, and there were three in and out of it all the time. I think they must have been young ones.
Bill, the black tip to the tail gives them away as stoats.
Of course, stoats, and even more so minks, are ruthless killers. I have an old tin shed near the house that had wagtails nesting in it one year. I hadn't actually noticed the nest until I saw some stoat poo building up on the ground in one place. The nest was directly above, and the stoat had been climbing up and taking the eggs until they were all gone.
Another time, I discovered a pheasant nest in some long grass on the river bank with a lot of eggs in it. I used to monitor it regularly and saw the eggs increasing and the mother coming and going. Unfortunately, one evening, I heard a noise in the grass and the mother flew off. A few minutes later, a mink ran down the bank at the same point, and swam across the river. That was the end of the pheasant eggs. There had been about a couple of dozen by then. The mink had the lot. In the photos I posted above, the mink was totally fearless. He let me come up close to photograph him, merely giving me a look that said get much closer and he'd bite me.
We have a pair of swans that nest in a pond area in an adjoining field, and every year they have babies that they take down to the river. Every year without fail the number of cygnets gradually reduces, probably to mink. Here is a photo of the adult swans with their babies, and another one of a duck with her babies. The mink almost certainly gets a lot of those as well. Or maybe the buzzards who regularly visit our garden. Nature is both wonderful and extremely cruel.
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