Polderboer, Kuhn and Hendrickson divide their data into two categories,
winter and spring. Items recorded in winter but not in spring are house
mouse, tree sparrow, and grasshopper. Items recorded only in spring
were pocket gopher and least weasel. The samples of cottontail and
least weasel all were from the scats of one large male weasel. Of a
total of 14 pheasants, 24 quail and 35 cottontails on the 160 acres
involved in the study only two cottontails appear to have been killed
by the weasels--really by one weasel of four which lived on the area.
Food items taken from the nests (3) and adjacent caches of food in the
dens, were as follows: meadow mouse, 30; short-tailed shrew, 4; pocket
gopher, 2; deer mouse, 2; least weasel, 1; tree sparrow, 1. The authors
remark that the abundance of several prey species does not cause the
weasels to ignore the shrews which are said to be distasteful to
carnivores.
Two horned larks, apparently killed by weasels, were found on the 160
acre area studied; the horned larks were not in caches of food, nor
were remains of horned larks found in scats.
Dearborn (1932:34, 37) for Michigan, on the basis of contents of (37?)
intestinal tracts and "feces collected partly in winter and partly in
summer" found that, by frequency of occurrence, mammals comprised 83
per cent of the food, birds 10 per cent and insects 7 per cent.
Frequency indices for the genera of mammals in percentages of food
items of all kinds were as follows: _Microtus_, 31 per cent;
_Peromyscus_, 24 per cent; _Sylvilagus_, 14 per cent; _Sorex_, 7 per
cent; _Blarina_, 5 per cent; _Scalopus_, 2 per cent.
Criddle and Criddle (1925:146), for the vicinity of Treesbank,
Manitoba, record that on October 3, 1913, a weasel was seen to take a
field mouse down a hole. They add (_op. cit._: 147) that "Once while
ploughing, we observed a Long-tailed Weasel carrying a field
mouse. . . ." Ingles (1939:253, 254), in June, 1938, near Mt. Shasta
City, California, found an adult and four young weasels which fed on
several _Microtus montanus montanus_. Green (1936) in May, in Gratiot
County, Michigan, in the vicinity of a nest in which there were four
young weasels, found "several" dead _Microtus_. Hamilton (1933:330)
records that in New York State a male weasel, on April 5, 1932, at
Ithaca, had eaten a _Microtus_ and that in May, 1927, a female weasel
was seen carrying a _Microtus_ in its mouth.
Hamilton's (1933:333) study of the contents of the digestive tracts of
bodies of weasels obtained from fur trappers and fur buyers enabled him
to publish the following "Frequency Indices of Mammal Genera in Fall
and Winter Food of 163 _Mustela noveboracensis_": _Microtus_, 33.6 per
cent; _Sylvilagus_, 17.3; mammals undetermined to genus but principally
mice, 17.1; _Peromyscus_, 11.3; _Rattus_, 9.1; _Blarina_, 5.9;
_Sciurus_, 2.7; _Tamias_, 1.0; _Condylura_, 0.8; _Ondatra_, 0.8.
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