A male long-tailed weasel, from Colorado, which I kept captive was
often fed freshly killed mice. These I thrust through one of the small
openings in the wire mesh. The weasel quickly learned to seize any part
of a mouse thus introduced and his tugging aided in getting the mouse
into the cage. Occasionally a mouse too large to be got through the
mesh had to be withdrawn. In such an instance, if the weasel had
already had hold of the mouse, he would screech frightfully. I have
heard no other vocal sounds from a weasel except a kind of purring.
The sense of smell apparently is well developed; at any rate it is keen
enough to allow the weasel to follow the trail of an intended victim by
the scent left by the latter. Murie's (1935:321-322) account, for
example, of a weasel pursuing a snowshoe rabbit gives clear evidence
that the weasel relied on scent in following the rabbit.
A captive male weasel obtained at Gainesville, Florida, stamped his
hind feet when annoyed (Moore, 1945:259).
A male from Colorado that I kept for months in a cage at Lafayette,
California, was several times found in a sleep so deep that he was
awakened with difficulty. Seton (1929 (2):629-630) writes: "In my small
menagerie, I have had half-a-dozen Weasels of the New York species.
Their sleeping dens are arranged so as to be easily and silently
opened. Several times I have lifted the lid to find the weasel in a
deep sleep--a sleep so profound that I had to poke him vigorously with
a stick before he awoke, looked up, and rushed forth with a little puff
of wrath, and a little puff of smell."
Feces and urine were ordinarily deposited in one particular place by
each of the captive weasels that I have observed. Hamilton (1933:294)
records that a large male _M. f. noveboracensis_, in a week, averaged
10 evacuations every twenty-four hours, that urination immediately
precedes defecation, and describes the feces as black or brown, long
and narrow and often spiral-shaped owing "to the matted fur of some
rodent that had been eaten." Quick (1944:77) writes, concerning four
winter dens in Michigan, that "The latrines of weasels were in the
entries of used dens and scats could be collected there by the
handful." Polderboer, Kuhn and Hendrickson (1941:116) in the spring of
1939 at Ames, Iowa, gathered scats "from latrines found at the
entrances of burrows and from latrine chambers found within burrows."
Scats were found by them in the linings of some nests.
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