Stoat City

We know remarkably little about stoats in the wild, but a ve-year study in a Yorkshire garden is offering a privileged glimpse into their intimate world.

- Robert E Fuller

A stoat scampers up to the window of my studio and stands on her hind legs, pressing a delicate five-digit paw against the glass. She looks up and our eyes connect momentarily. I know this wild individual well. Her name is Bandita, and on my easel is a portrait of her in acrylics.

I turn to my right to follow Bandita’s movements via a bank of monitors relaying live footage from 20 locations in my threeacre garden. She dashes from camera to camera, through ‘Mirror Wall’, along ‘Hedge Path’ and down the valley into ‘Stone Trough Wall’. Finally she enters a nest I built for her and coils into a perfect circle. Within seconds she has fallen asleep in a soft bed of dry grass.

For the last five years, I have studied six generations of a remarkable stoat dynasty, including the beautiful Bandita. I have come to know each one individually. Yet it was a chance sighting of the stoat who would later become Bandita’s mother that cranked up my growing obsession with these marvellous mustelids.

One morning in 2015, I opened my bedroom curtains to see an unknown character bouncing on cabbage netting strung across my vegetable patch. I stood transfixed as she ran, jumped, twisted and span like a turbo-driven thunder ball in a series of seemingly impossible manoeuvres. Wondering if this was the fabled stoat ‘war dance,’ I rushed to grab a camera. But before I could take a shot, she was gone.

Stoat versus weasel

The next time I glimpsed this stoat was less savoury. I heard an earpiercing screech in the garden, and two forms emerged: the stoat was viciously biting a weasel. They broke apart and the weasel staggered away with a nasty gash under its jaw. I had read that stoats kill weasels to eliminate competition for food; now I’d seen it with my own eyes.