Irish Stoat Part 1

I was incredibly lucky today to come across this fantastic little guy today at Renvyle Head. He hung around a small area for about 40 minutes and showed brilliantly all the time. It was a real pleasure to be in its presence. I often think for such a common mammal I can go a year or two between sightings. It was almost unfazed by my presence and spent most of the time running along and through a dry stone wall and bounding through tall grass. It also spent a fair amount of its time going slightly crazy running, jumping and rolling around on open ground also. It is an often reported behaviour which is supposed to mesmerise potential prey. In this instance it certainly had an attentive audience of Pied Wagtails, Meadow Pipits and Wrens. It was a real challenge to photographed it while it was doing all this whizzing around at incredible speed. I'll post more shots depicting these in another blog posting.  They are usually called "weasels" in the Irish countryside but Weasels are in fact completely absent from Ireland. We also have our own endemic race of Stoat here in Ireland - hibernica.