Charles O. Handley has written me that on January 25, 1929, on the
Sinkola Plantation, Thomas County, Georgia, he investigated the living
quarters of a family of five weasels, four of which had been shot five
days before by a hunter. According to the hunter each of the four which
had been killed was approximately two-thirds the size of one which
escaped into a hole in the ground. Handley found that the weasels had
been using as headquarters a burrow in the trunk of an old uprooted oak
as well as a nearby gopher burrow. The burrow in the oak was
approximately ten feet long and had been excavated in the rotten wood.
In a distance of fifty feet along the gopher tunnel there were several
used openings with pathways leading away from each. On February 6,
Handley, with the help of a friend, trapped a large male weasel near
this place.
Criddle and Criddle (1925:143) describe a female which, one winter,
slept in a bag of feathers in a basement of a house occupied by one of
the authors; another weasel in winter made its headquarters in a
threshing machine. The nest of the latter "was somewhat roughly
constructed and consisted of a convenient bunch of straw and chaff
under the cylinder."
Harper (1927:303) in the Okefinokee Swamp of Georgia dislodged a weasel
from the house of a wood rat and was told of a den found in the swamp
"in the trunk of a hollow cypress tree" from which a mother weasel and
three young "about the size of mice" were obtained. "The bed contained,
I suppose, a bushel or more of rabbit hair, rat hair, and squirrel
hair. It looked like it must have been used as a den for several years,
although there was no stink that I could detect except the musk from
the old Weasel." Another female and three young approximately half
grown were found in a hollow pine log.
Between January 6 and April 12, 1940, on 640 acres of land, in
Washtenaw County, Michigan, four weasels were studied and each weasel
used only one den in this period (Quick, 1944:78). Criddle (1930:279)
remarks that _M. f. longicauda_ at Aweme, Manitoba, often makes its
temporary headquarters in the burrows of pocket gophers (_Thomomys_). A
female and three young weasels were found by Shaw (1921:167) using a
nest of a mountain beaver in the burrow of that animal. Green (1936),
in May, in Gratiot County, Michigan, saw a weasel enter a hole under a
decayed log and investigated finding four young weasels in a nest
mostly of _Microtus_ fur.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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