The Slim, Grim Reaper
A killing machine
If you designed a killing machine from scratch, it would probably still end up looking just like a stoat.
Eyes adapted for both day and night vision. Sharp claws, sharper teeth. Acute hearing and smell. Small enough to get into tiny burrows, and nimble enough to turn around and come back out.
If you designed a killing machine from scratch, it would probably still end up looking just like a stoat.
Eyes adapted for both day and night vision. Sharp claws, sharper teeth. Acute hearing and smell. Small enough to get into tiny burrows, and nimble enough to turn around and come back out.
Light enough to climb into the forest canopy and scamper from tree to tree across small connecting branches. And run back down headfirst.
There aren't too many places safe from stoats - they can survive anywhere with sufficient prey. In New Zealand they can be found anywhere from sea level to beyond the tree line in native or exotic forest, scrub, dune land, tussock grass land and farm pastures.
They routinely swim out to nearshore islands, and one was seen swimming in Lake Taupo over a kilometre from shore.
Stoats are another lethal legacy of the European colonists' passion for exotic introductions, in this case to control a previous folly.
By the early part of last century, it was becoming obvious that rabbits had not been an inspired import. Runholders complained that their numbers had exploded to plague proportions, and many were forced off their farms as rabbits devoured the pastures.
So farmers began pressuring the Government to import "natural enemies" of the rabbit, and in 1883 - despite the warnings of ornithologists - the Chief Rabbit Inspector recommended that stoats and weasels should be liberated, in addition to the ferrets which had already been let loose in huge numbers.
If rabbits were a silly question, stoats were an even more stupid answer. We know today that they played a part in a number of past extinctions, and continue to wreak havoc among our native birds.
Whio (blue duck), pateke (brown teal), mohua (yellowhead), kiwi and kaki (black stilt) are just some of those birds facing oblivion at the teeth and claws of stoats. Studies have shown they will hunt birds even when there is other prey, such as mice, rats and rabbits.
back to top