Bog Myrtle & Peat

Much is made in gamekeeping literature about the damage caused by stoats and weasels. Weasels are so small that they are only really a problem around extremely young grouse chicks, but stoats are more than capable of wreaking serious damage on groundnesting bird populations, and learning how to tackle these slippery customers is now a high priority.

My first reaction to hearing that stoats can cause problems was that I had nothing to worry about. I have been visiting the Chayne on and off for the past twenty four years and have never seen a single stoat. I asked the shepherd and the tenant if either of them have ever seen stoats and they both replied that they had never seen either on the land. I was becoming quite lax about the subject until I spoke to an old gamekeeper who laughed when I told him that we had no stoats on the farm at all. “They’re there alright”, he said.

Tackling an invisible enemy seems like a difficult task, particularly since I have never seen any evidence of these fascinating and deadly little creatures within ten miles of the Chayne. That was until today.

Climbing over the broken down dyke into the new triangle wood this afternoon, I spotted a tiny bundle of feathers lying in the dead grass. It was the body of a meadow pipit, and judging by how desiccated and stiff it was, I would think that it had been there for four or five days. The skin behind its head had been entirely removed, displaying fragments of bloody skull and bone. Only a stoat or a weasel would grab prey behind the neck, but why it left the bird uneaten is anyone’s guess.

Now the problem has been well and truly brought home to me, I had better look into buying some traps.