Living Like Weasels

Keith Graham's Country View

Aug 12 2011 by Jean Pedder, Stirling Observer Friday

THE human tragedy that is once again effecting the Horn of Africa demonstrates in the most explicit yet horrific way, how fickle and unpredictable nature can be.

Throughout history, climatic changes have happened to cause droughts or alternatively floods and present human populations with challenges they are often unable to cope with.

In this airt, we seem somehow to be insulated from such extremes of weather yet the memory of last winter will linger long in our minds. Just as we may wonder how on earth the people of Somalia can possibly survive the current disaster, so too we might presume that such a winter would have nothing but a seriously deleterious impact upon our wild birds and animals. Yet, there is a gathering weight of evidence to show that some creatures actually reaped great benefit from the rigours of last winter.

In particular, those little furry creatures that we seldom see but which are perhaps the most important link in so many food chains, our voles, seem to have benefited greatly from conditions we might otherwise be inclined to consider to be entirely hostile. Some experts estimate that there could currently be literally hundreds of millions of voles abroad in the Scottish countryside, far in excess of the previous estimate of 60 million.

Last winter’s snows, which of course, stayed with us for an unusually long time, instead of being a handicap, apparently provided these denizens of grassland with ideal living conditions. That covering of deep snow acted on the one hand, as a protective, insulating blanket against the penetrating, freezing cold and on the other provided them with a cloak of invisibility against all of their many avian predators.

Ironically, it is thought that relatively high numbers of those avian predators may themselves have failed to survive the winter due to the lack of available food, creating another window of opportunity for the voles. But there are always two sides to every coin. As a result, voles, and in particular the most populous members of that substantial clan, field voles, have been able to go forth and multiply in vast numbers. This is by all accounts, a very good vole year indeed!

Whilst the birds that rely upon voles for the bulk of their food, undoubtedly suffered during the prolonged period of snow lying, small predatory mammals like weasels and stoats by contrast, probably prospered. I was for instance, during last winter, very much aware of the energetic activities of a weasel, like the voles spending much of its time beneath that blanket of snow just outside my kitchen window. Being so small, weasels are able to operate freely in the labyrinths of vole runs, which as the snow eventually melted, were plain to see. Indeed, a whole subterranean world was exposed when the thaw finally came.

MARTYTHURBER.COM: Living Like Weasels Annie Dillard

ANNIE DILLARD

LIVING LIKE WEASELS

The weasel was stunned into stillness as he was emerging from beneath an enormous shaggy wild rose bush four feet away. I was stunned into stillness twisted backward on the tree trunk. Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key.

Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes. If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don't. We keep our skulls. So.

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