It's a winter of weasels, says Hope for Wildlife

One jumped to a table top and swiped a sandwich from a little girl’s hands. Another made a tea towel drawer its home and came out at night to steal cat food.

Weasels have a reputation as nasty, fearless little creatures, but until I talked recently with Hope Swinimer of the Hope for Wildlife Society, I’d never heard of this sort of behaviour. Until this winter, neither had Swinimer.

“Every winter, I get calls on squirrels in people’s houses. This year it’s really weird. It’s not squirrels. I’m getting dozens of calls about weasels in people’s homes,” she explains. “It appears that for some strange reason, they just want to live inside this year.”

Swinimer says that every weekend, calls come in about house weasels, and people’s reactions to them differ widely.

“Some are like ‘Get this thing out of here’. Others say ‘I’m really enjoying this. It’s truly amazing to watch this animal ‘. People either hate it or are kind of enjoying it”, says Swinimer.

This past weekend was the first time someone called wanting to kill a visiting weasel. Most people are only looking for information. Hope for Wildlife is a wildlife rescue and rehabilitation society, not a pest control service.

For the size of its reputation both in science and folklore, the weasel is really a very small animal. In Nova Scotia, we have the short-tailed weasel averaging 30cm in length and weighing some 70 grams. It is brown and yellow in the summer and white with a black-tipped tail in the winter. The white pelts are called ermine, and for many centuries they have been the fur used to decorate royal robes.

Legendary hunters, weasels kill prey several times their size. They are hugely effective mousers and can clean rats and mice out of a barn or house very quickly. Several years ago, Hope for Wildlife was taking care of a weasel litter when someone forgot to lock their cage and they escaped. They found a small hole in the barn floor and disappeared into the foundation space, and for the rest of that year, mice problems in the feed storage room disappeared.

Weasels have been used since ancient times as pest control and it’s believed their near-cousin, the ferret, was first domesticated for that reason. Still, choosing weasels over rats and mice is one thing. Coming into your kitchen to see a pizza crust being carried off, as one person reported, is another matter. Even worse, the lightning-speed theft of a pork chop from a frying pan.

Is there a shortage of rodents in the wild this year? Are older farm houses now the prime source of food? Have weasels suddenly lost their fear of humans?

“It isn’t even that hard of a winter,” says Swinimer. “It’s baffling.”