Our local fields has been blanketed with snow for almost a fortnight now, with outlines of trees and hedgerows etched into a blank white canvas.... and most of the bird and mammal life is confined to the hedges. We came across this weasel Mustela nivalis yesterday, scampering amongst the snow-covered brambles and willowherb stems along a hedgerow bottom, and I lured it within camera range using a ‘weasel-charming’ trick that a gamekeeper showed me when I was a kid. Stoats and weasels don’t have particularly good eyesight but their hearing is acute and they’ll investigate any noise that sounds like a distressed small mammal. So if you bite your bottom lip and suck air into your mouth through your teeth, they’re overcome with curiosity and will come to see where the squeaky noise is coming from. It works every time and I’ve had stoats come within a yard of me before they realised that the sound was coming from something too big to tackle. This weasel was a little more circumspect, but was only about three yards away when I pressed the shutter button.
Our local frozen landscape
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