About the Weasel.

Otago Witness, Issue 2803, 4 December 1907, Page 76

About the Weasel.

(By the Rev. Theodore Wooc> As you walk along a country l&r.e jou may often tee a little animal with a very long body and very short legs running across the road a few yards in front of you. It is bright reddish brown in colour on its head and hack Mid sides, and pure

white underneath, and from the tip of its nose to the end of its stumpy littlo tail it is about lOin in length. This* animal is a weasel, and I -should like to tell you, first of all. why its body is so long and slender, while its legs are so short. The reason is that it . is a ircature of" pray, and that very ofreD it .has to follow its victims along narrow, winding 1 ' burrows. "NowJ if it had i" stout body .and"'.' lonpr legs it would not' be able X)'do thij.-'j And so the weasel, which has a "body hot j much -stouter than that of c -small snake, \ and short little legs, ' can " wind its " way ' a loner the burrow of a rat or a molfr, and spring upon the animal at the end. . Weasels destroy a great -many rats 3n this way, and mice too, although, of "course, they cannot follow the?e into their holes; ,so that, although they are the enemies of the gamekeeper because they are so fond of young hares and partridges, they are very good friends "to the farmer. But sometimes they do a great deal of mischief even in the farmyard, for if a weaselcan find his way into" the henhouses he will do bo, and will kill perhaps half , a^doaen fowls one after the .other. Tou mayT sometimes pee him trotting along- by the side of a hedgerow, too, and every now and then stopping, for a. moment or two abd peering eagerly, into the thick herbage that grows at the bottom. Then you may be quite sure that ho is looking for birds' nests. And if he finds one with J eggs in it, he will take them out and j suck them one after the other, while if < there are unfledged birds^ he will either '• eat them at once or carry them off to his hungry little ones at home. But a weasel does not always succeed in finding a nest, even when he is quite close ! to it; and I should like to tell you about a little spene which I once saw, and in j which a weasel was quite taken in by- the birds to whom the nest belonged. I was walking down Helvellyn one warm summer's day, and when I was about halfway down I heard a loud chattering and screaming -just above me. I looked up. and there I saw a pair of stone-chats and a weasel, which had evidently come too close to their nest. So the birds were trying to lead him away; and this is how they did it. First of all, the cock eat down on a stone about a yard in front of the weasel and began to flap his wings : and chatter and scream. The weasel at j onoa darted at him, but just as the bird wa6 on the point* of being seized he flew away. Then the hen sat down -on another stone about a yard farther on and began to flap her wings and chatter, and scream i in just ■ the same way. Then the weasel j darted at her, and she flew away The , cock, however, was watching, and almost at the same moment he came back and settled on a third stone, about a yard ; further on still, and began to flap his ' wings and chatter and scream once more. ! and again the weasel darted at him. And so the two clever little birds took turn and turn about, and led the ireasel for quite 200 yards up the steep mountain- I side, till they thought that he was a Jafo , distance f*om the nest. Then they left him- and flew away together. Wasn't it a splendid way of getting rid of him?— London Tribune. Squirrels Reared by a Oat. — Among ihe interesting things shown at a recent meeting of the Zoological Society were two young specimens of the English squirrel, which had almost entirely changed in colour from the usual chestnut-brown to a light drab, the ears and feet only showing traces of the original colour. It wa« -stated that the animals had been taken from, a nest when very young and put in charge of a cat, which acted as foster-mother, arid successfully reared them. It was suggested that this fact might have caused the ' colour change. — St. James's 3azette. Lobsters are Bight and Left-handed. — The president (Sir J. Crichton-Browne) told the sanitary inspectors at Llandudno there was one thing about lobsters which he had himself discovered quite lately. It was ' that lobsters, like human beings, were right-handed and left-banded The fight claw of the creature was its right hand. and iras armed with iharp teeth whereas the left olaw had teeth which were short and blunt. While that arrangement of ths ieeth was the case with about 96 per cent, of the lobsters, there -were about 2 or 5 per cent.- at an rate, in which the condition was reversed, and the sharp teeth were on the left side and the blunt teeth on the right- That was just exactly the- proportion of left-handed persons among human beings. Light Up Their Habitationt.— Among extraordinarily interesting birds there is one known as the lamplighter, who lives on C&pe Comorin. and who light* *dp lis habitation artificially every night. These sagacious little chaps fasten a pill af o!av to the tops of their nests, catch one of the big glow-worms with which 4he country abounds, and stick rt- on the clay, just as if they -were lighting up to rece : ve company. At times only one glow-worm is used, but frequoatly three or four are captured and pi«s«M>p into service. It is by this means that these birds outwit their enemy, the /bat, whose eyes are Jarziod by the light, and who are therefore prevented from coming to rob the nest of its young at night.— -New York Globe.