Polecat - Mustela putorius

The Polecat is a solitary animal that can be very hard to spot as it is active at night, although may be seen hunting during the day.

Habitat

They can be seen in a variety of habitats, but their favoured habitats are woodlands and hedgerows. They make a den in any suitable hole such as rabbit burrows, a foxes earth, or a rock crevice.

Description

Polecats have a long cylindrical shaped body with short legs and tail. Their fur is dark brown in colour with yellowish under-fur that shows through. Its underparts, tail and paws have dark fur. Their most distinctive feature is the mask like appearance on its face; they have a white patch at the top of the face and black patches across the eyes that extend down onto the nose. The male is bigger then the female at 52cm including tail and weigh up to 1.5kg with the female being about half the size.

It is hard to identify true polecats in the field as they have bred with escaped domesticated ferrets, these are known as polecat-ferrets; they normally have paler foreheads and mask (or no mask). The only reliable way to tell apart Polecats from polecat-ferrets is a close examination of the fur and skulls of dead specimens; therefore a record of a Polecat cannot be confirmed without corresponding photographs or corpse.

Biology

Rodents, frogs, fish, worms, lizards, snakes and birds make up the Polecats diet, which they track down with their acute sense of smell. Rabbits are their favoured food probably comprising 80% of their diet.

Breeding takes place between March and May and a litter of kits is born six weeks later in a nest made of dry grass in woodland or amongst rocks. The young have a white silky fur that changes to the colour of an adult at about 3 months, not long after they have left the nest. The family may be seen in late summer, by winter the young polecats have gone their own ways.

Threats

In the early 1900’s the Polecat was extinct in Wiltshire, persecution by gamekeepers (it was considered a threat to game and poultry) and fur trappers pushed it back to isolated populations in the mountains of Wales; it was also hunted for sport. During the First World War hunting and trapping dropped dramatically and did not recover allowing the population to start recovering. Once the trapping declined the populations could expand and spread; this was helped by the Polecats ability to live in most rural habitats and its wide range of prey.

Conservation

The Polecat is protected under Schedule 6 of The Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981) making it illegal to kill and trap them.