Animal · Russia, Canada, United States
Stoat
Mustela erminea — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The stoat is a small hunter with a very long body, slim enough to follow a mouse into its tunnel and bold enough to kill a rabbit. In the far north its brown coat turns white in winter.
Picture credit: Alpsdake (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Steve Hillebrand, USFWS (Public domain) · Marton Berntsen (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the stoat live?
Home: Forests, farmland and tundra across the cool north.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Russia, Canada, the United States, Finland, Sweden, Norway, the United Kingdom.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: 17-33 cm long, plus a tail of 7-12 cm. It weighs about 0.22 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
A stoat is shaped like a furry tube: long body, short legs, a head hardly wider than its neck. That shape lets it hunt mice and voles inside their own tunnels, but a thin body also loses heat quickly, so a stoat has to eat close to a quarter of its own weight every day and is almost always on the move. In snowy country the brown summer coat is swapped in autumn for a pure white one, called ermine, while the tip of the tail stays black all year. That white fur was once sewn onto the robes of kings. Stoats were shipped to New Zealand in the 1880s to control rabbits, and there they became a serious danger to birds that nest on the ground.
Find it on the globe
Stoat is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Why does a stoat turn white in winter?
Where winters are long and snowy the stoat moults into a white coat, which hides it both from owls and foxes and from the mice it is hunting. The tip of the tail stays black all year.
What is the difference between a stoat and a weasel?
The stoat is the bigger of the two and has a clear black tip on its tail. The weasel is smaller, with a short tail and no black tip at all.
How big an animal can a stoat kill?
A stoat regularly kills rabbits, which can weigh five times as much as it does. It attacks from behind and bites the neck, and it hunts almost without pause because its thin body burns energy so fast.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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