(Unfortunately I do not have anon6789’s knack for titles.)
Eurasian pygmy owl (Glaucidium passerinum)
Picture by Philippe Vigneron. February 2024, in this forest.
This picture was nominated in a bird picture contest last year. I found it here with the other pictures, followed by this short text:
After several days spent looking for a fox, wildcat or stoat in Champfromier forest, my friend Jean-Luc and I decide, for lack of snow, to go explore higher up in the forest of this bit of Jura. No sooner have we arrived that a wing movement catches my eye. I recognise the [Eurasian] pigmy owl right away. It lands on top of the foliage just above my head. On the branch of a beech tree, it undertakes a methodical grooming session. The view angle not being to its advantage, I move away without letting the tiny ball of feathers out of my sight. More than a half hour of enraptured observation before it disappears as stealthily as it had arrived.
The translation is by me and probably filled with mistakes, sorry!
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He really captured this guy at full poof!
Some other nice photos at that link, too, including this owl and some charming sandpipers.
I was going to say we don’t have stoats over here, but Wikipedia is telling me I’m wrong, but I have never once heard of anyone refer to a stoat other than a British guy I met who told me he’d see them doing early morning delivery work back home and I had to ask what the heck a stoat was. It sounded made up.
I think we have a different species though, and I’d call it a weasel.
The picture of the owl in the window frame makes me think of a trompe-l’œil (I searched the translation for that expression, but apparently English says it in French too, funny).
I had to look in a dictionary for “stoat”, I remember hearing that word but I tend to mix up mustelids even in French so I would never trust my ability to name them correctly in English.
Here, two of our mustelids look very similar : the hermine (= stoat or ermine, Mustela erminea) and the slightly smaller belette (= weasel, Mustela nivalis). They’re easier to tell apart in winter, when the stoat gets a white coat of fur while the weasel keeps its brown back (in Western Europe, I think weasels can change colour in other places?). The fact that their American cousin Mustela richardsonii also gets a white coat in winter makes me want to call it a stoat too, but it’s not my place to tell Americans how to name their animals, ha ha.
I don’t remember ever seeing a stoat in the wild, but two times I’ve encountered a beech marten that was searching through the waste bins in my very urban street, at night. It was a good surprise even though I didn’t get to take a good look.
We supposedly have all these things, stoats, ermine, weasels, martins, fisher cats, but I’ve only ever encountered one once and had no clue what it was at the time since it was much larger than I had expected. I was out in the woods, and thought a larger, blacker squirrel was coming towards me. We both took an interest in each other, so I stopped, but this fuzzy noodle creature kept coming over. Finally, I thought it was going to climb up my leg to check me out, and since I didn’t know what it was, I let out a sound of surprise and it ran away. It reminds me of the minks we have at work now, but I couldn’t say for sure as I never learned these animals outside of cartoons as I thought they were all animals we didn’t have anymore.
