A picture shows spread regions of Weasel In the world.

Brief Information

Weasel is a carnivorous mammal, its length ranges from 15-35 cm, and the tip of the tail is black. It lives in Egypt, east Mediterranean and Europe, and its types include the house weasel, the weasel, the Egyptian weasel, and the water weasel.

General Features

Weasel belongs to the Mustelidae family, the “carnivores”. Weasel is characterized by its graceful, slender and flexible bodies. It is a very active animal, its steps are fast, and its length is 20 CM, the tail is 4 CM, and the body is rectangular, very slender, and its thickness hardly varies from head to back of the body, and the limbs are short and thin, and between the fingers is hair, and it is equipped with thin pointed claws, and the tail is relatively short, gradually thinning from the base to the tip, the nose is blunt in the middle, rectangularly slit, the ears are broad and round, the eyes are small but strong, the fur of medium length is smooth and covers the whole body, and there are in front of the eye and above it mustaches, the color of the hair is slightly reddish-brown and the color of the edge of the upper lip and the lower parts is white.
In most cases, Weasel has fur on its back and sides that are brownish, reddish brown, or yellowish brown. While it has fur on its lower parts, its color is white or yellowish or tan. As for the winter, the fur of the Weasel, living in the Asian atmosphere, turns white except for its tail, which is speckled with black, and the white color provides camouflage in the ice, and the tail dotted with black may draw the attention of predators such as birds of prey, and make the predator miss the target.

Nutrition and Behavior

Weasel usually goes out at night to search for its food and may also come out during the day, and although these animals are the smallest types of carnivores, they are very bold and fearless.

Where they attack small mammals boldly, and the weasel has sharp senses of smell and sight, and has a surprising strength for its size, as it preys on mice and squirrels, and it usually bites the prey in the neck or at the bottom of the skull and also eats earthworms, insects, frogs, lizards, rabbits, flies, snakes, and birds. As its slender body can easily be penetrated into rat holes, rock crevices, and squirrel nests. Weasel often invades farms and kill more chickens than they need to eat, and as a result, many farmers become hostile to the weasel even though it eliminates harmful pests on the farm. In the Egyptian countryside, it used to be called “the strangler of chicks” for its superior ability to get rid of large numbers of chicks, as one Weasel can absorb the blood of more than a hundred chicks per day, and therefore its presence in places near poultry farms or farmers’ homes causes heavy losses to its owners.

Reproduction

Weasel does not have a specific coupling period and the female gets pregnant for five weeks, and the female usually gives birth between four to eight littles at a time, and in the years when prey is abundant she has two sets of littles