Welcome to the Vinalhaven Sightings Report – June 18, 2023

Brought to you by VLT and MCHT! Thanks!

Youngster edition part 1

 

Thank you Claudia Dengler for sharing the photos and info!

 Highlights – Young Weasel, adult weasel

 

Business – Contact us – vinalhavensightings@gmail.com

 

Tiit trick – Click on the photos and they get large, click again and they are back to ‘normal’. Sorry – there is no middle ground/medium sized.

 

Question – Have you ever seen or heard of anyone seeing Weasels on island? Not Mink, not River Otters, but Weasels - white in the winter, brown and white in the summer, tip of the tail black?  Please share if you have!

 

 

weasel kit!
photo by Claudia Dengler

Sightings – Yep, you heard it right – weasels on island, it is official. And it’s not weasel on island, since there are young involved. Yep – multiples. Let’s get right at it….

 

Here’s how we understand it - Claudia Dengler, up Crocketts Cove way, reported seeing an adult weasel with a brown back and white belly at her place in early May (?). That would make it a Short-tailed (Ermine) or Long-tailed Weasel, and telling the difference from a quick glance can be tricky. As far as nature sightings go – this was extremely exciting. I mean, anytime you see a member of the Mustelidae (Weasel family) it’s exciting. Be it a Mink, an Otter, a weasel, etc.

 

weasel kit in action!
photo by Claudia Dengler

For years I’ve nonchalantly tossed around the phrase ‘Vinalhaven – where weasels rule!’ when asked/talking about ‘large’ predators on island. And it is not a false statement – during my time on island (2004-2015) Mink and River Otter were the ‘big’ mammalian predators on island - toss in Great Horned Owls and you have all the ‘big’ predators on island. During those years of working and tracking all over the island with every snowstorm I never saw any sign of, much less an actual ‘weasel’ species. Beyond that -I never heard anyone talking of seeing weasels on Vinalhaven, where reports of mink or otter sightings were/are somewhat regular. It’s hard to imagine a healthy population of weasel being on island those years and never coming across any sign at all.  Stranger things have happened for sure….

 

So a new arrival to island life, this weasel? Newish for sure. Well, turns out Claudia’s weasel sighting may have been a clue to a larger population on island (like at least two individuals) since Claudia now reports a young weasel (properly known as a ‘kit’) was found stuck in her chicken coop. Well, not only reports – she sent in photos! Check that little kit out! and this fantastic video!

 

Hard to identify to species via young, but because of info below (there is more to this story – more at the end of this VSR) lets go with it/them being Short-tailed Weasels, also known as Ermine, also known as Stoat.

 

Here’s a little important/pertinent natural history for ya – Thank Wiki!

 

‘...territoriality has a generally mustelid spacing pattern, with male territories encompassing smaller female territories, which they defend from other males…

 

The stoat does not dig its own burrows, instead using the burrows and nest chambers of the rodents it kills. The skins and under fur of rodent prey are used to line the nest chamber. The nest chamber is sometimes located in seemingly unsuitable places, such as among logs piled against the walls of houses. The stoat also inhabits old and rotting stumps, under tree roots, in heaps of brushwood, haystacks, in bog hummocks, in the cracks of vacant mud buildings, in rock piles, rock clefts, and even in magpie nests.

 

Female stoats are usually only in heat for a brief period, which is triggered by changes in day length…

 

…Copulation can last as long as 1 hour…

 

Stoats are not monogamous, with litters often being of mixed paternity. Stoats undergo embryonic diapause, meaning that the embryo does not immediately implant in the uterus after fertilization, but rather lies dormant for a period of nine to ten months. The gestation period is therefore variable but typically around 300 days, and after mating in the summer, the offspring will not be born until the following spring – adult female stoats spend almost all their lives either pregnant or in heat.

 

Females can reabsorb embryos and in the event of a severe winter they may reabsorb their entire litter.

 

 Males play no part in rearing the young, which are born blind, deaf, toothless and covered in fine white or pinkish down. The milk teeth erupt after three weeks, and solid food is eaten after four weeks. The eyes open after five to six weeks, with the black tail-tip appearing a week later. Lactation ends after 12 weeks. Prior to the age of five to seven weeks, kits have poor thermoregulation, so they huddle for warmth when the mother is absent.

 

Males become sexually mature at 10–11 months, while females are sexually mature at the age of 2–3 weeks whilst still blind, deaf and hairless, and are usually mated with adult males before being weaned.’ – Wiki

 

Whoa – lots to process there/here. But since Claudia saw a youngster let’s think about this.

 

Delayed implantation is a favorite reproduction strategy – usually on everyone’s ‘top 5 reproductive strategy list’ for sure. Saying the female has a 300 day gestation period is not totally correct Wiki, since for 9-10 months there is no development – gestation means development! Semantics, but while the egg is fertilized for a long time, it’s only attached to the uterus for a month, month and a half. Anyway – we are big fans of delayed implantation or embryonic diapause.

 

Anyway, the fact of the matter is – there is a female weasel out on island that was pregnant, gave birth around March/April – April births are nice, especially on the Taurus sides of things…. – and now the youngsters are getting out on their own. Whoa.

 

And you may ask yourself – well, how did I get here?

 

Beyond the thought of someone purposefully bringing and releasing Weasels on Vinalhaven…

 

Island hopping? – A weasel swimming across Penobscot Bay from Rockland seems unlikely (though understandable) – these are animals with high metabolism that aren’t necessarily built for swimming (these ain’t otters or mink).  So then we toss out maybe coming down from Isleboro or Stonington or Merchant Row from the north. Still seems like a long way for a Weasel – but you know – survival in nature gets beyond the scope of simple human minds like mine.   

 

The Weasel island hopping idea would likely have taken any of them through North Haven, so I reached out to some North Haven sources and asked – albeit to only a few folks - about the presence of Weasels on that island and the word I got back was – no. Or at least they are not reported/talked about. Weasels only on Vinalhaven? Understandable.

 

Ferry ride? –

So the next logical way a wild weasel would get to Vinalhaven would get to Vinalhaven would be by the ferry/boat. John Drury and I actually talked about this in the winter (more below on this), about a weasel being on a truck and brought out to the island but we couldn’t wrap our heads around why a weasel on a lumber truck wouldn’t get off the truck when it started moving. Maybe a weasel stuck in a transfer station container? Could be – something that it couldn’t get out of until it was opened from the outside and let’s just say - I wouldn’t want to be the guy opening that container! Freaked out weasel anyone?

 

weasel bounding trail

Well, it has now been reported that years ago – like years ago – a weasel was observed on a bait truck that was sitting in the ferry line in Rockland. Ahhhhh, a container truck with food on it! Now that makes sense, or at least more/some sense. Go for a ride, eat some fish.

 

In no way are we saying this observation from back in the day is how this particular weasel got out to Vinalhaven, but it does add a visual to the options. A weasel visible on a bait truck in Rockland might be more likely to bail before the truck gets onto the ferry, but still – it’s a route to the island. A weasel in a bait container, blissed out on fish, could get out undetected. Speculator going full throttle and clearly I don’t know how bait containers work. There are lots of bigger boats – island transporter, etc. - that come and go as well.

 

Probably not by plane

 

Seal Bay –

 

tiny mustelid tracks

Now here’s the interesting stuff to me. Unless folks have been seeing weasels and keeping that info to themselves (come on! Share!) This is likely a recent arrival. I am out on island a lot in winter, but not after every snow and my zones are pretty limited – there could be a gagillion weasels at Perry Creek and I would never see ‘em or their sign since I never track there!  This winter however, I was scouting for potential trail options on Seal Bay when I came across a small bounding trail in the snow. This was back in February and it totally blew me away. I mean – tracking on Vinalhaven is nice and fairly simple with few choices. From all those years of tracking on island recognizing Mink or Otter tracks/trails is easy, and these tracks were clearly small. I toyed with maybe a bounding short-tailed shrew – which would have been a new species for me on Vinalhaven – but eventually decided on ‘pygmy mink’, maybe a case of ‘island biogeography shrinkage’. I am joking of course, I figured it was a weasel but wasn’t about to let a weasel out of the bag without more proof.

 

At the same time I had forgotten about a game camera I had placed nearby in the hopes of getting otter footage. Turns out I got lots of raccoon and mink clips, and this brief crappy video clip of a weasel in its winter coat! Its a 15 second clip- but really its the first three seconds that count. The weasel triggered the camera mid run and then continued on. pause the video and go in slow motion

 

here's a zoomed in version

weasel track on left
mink bounding trail down the middle
for comparison

It was a quick cameo, but comparing it with another clip of a red squirrel (nemesis!) showed that the weasel was roughly the same size – maybe a little bigger. I continued to track in the area, and put up cameras in hopes of getting more/better clips of the weasel but poof – it was gone like Keyser Soze. Maybe made a run to Crockett Cove?

 

Back to the wiki stuff –

 

So the whole delayed implantation thing comes into play here potentially. Is there a population of weasel in island? Or did a ‘pregnant’ female get onto the island with floating fertilized eggs and has now given birth? And the whole ‘litters often being of mixed paternity’ thing – could a pregnant female with 5-12 unattached eggs that were fertilized by multiple males start a population? I mean, sure the kits would share half their genes (or all of them) so the inbreeding potential is high, but is there a chance? I don’t know – it’s still a bottleneck. Speculator going full throttle.

 

Trying not to anthropomorphosize –

 

weasel trail on log

 So – if you read the info in bold way towards the beginning of this you may have noted that female weasels become ‘sexually mature at 2-3 weeks … and are usually mated with adult males before being weaned’. Wow. Sounds young, almost a little too young – but who are we to judge. Weasels live a fast paced lifestyle – one that averages about 2 years in length in the wild. Meaning a female may only have one shot at reproducing if she waits a year until mating. So as a species, weasels have apparently evolved a reproductive strategy that includes adult males mating with females younger than 12 weeks, at which point kits are weaned. Still sounds shocking, but that is probably human nature on my part.

 

It’s fun to learn about animal strategies, but like the Girl Scout leader said to me after I led her group to see Elephant Seals, which just happened to be very active when we saw them. She said ‘I’m just glad I’m not a female Elephant Seal’. I’m glad I am not a weasel, but I have been called worse!

 

turns out this kid is fast

Anyway – so we’ll wait and see what pans out with the weasel scene on Vinalhaven. There sure are plenty of rodents around, and reports and sightings to be had and shared. If you have any info that can help fill in the blanks of our island weasel understanding please do share.

And the biggest thanks possible to Claudia for sharing the photos and video of the kit she found.

 

track mom

Until then – I’ll see you out there!