Weasel stowaway pops up in woman's SUV
Adorable but unwanted passenger becomes talking point on social media
March 5 started out like an ordinary day for Kingston resident Jaycee Walker.
After driving to and from Toronto for a Mortgage Professionals Canada symposium in Toronto, she returned to her midtown Kingston home before setting out to make a trip to Canadian Tire to pick up some stuff for her son.
That was when her ordinary day became extraordinary.
“I'm in the car, and I see (something move),” she recalled during an interview in her kitchen.
She caught a quick glimpse of what appeared to be a small, white animal, darting around the inside of her Honda CRV.
“I'm like, `What the hell is that? Get out of the car!' ” she said with a laugh. “Then I saw it again, going the other way.”
At first, she thought it might have been a mouse, and her thoughts went to how she was going to remove a mouse from her vehicle. But the more she thought, while her eyes scanned her surroundings for another glimpse of her guest, the more she convinced herself it couldn't be a mouse.
“It was white, so I was confused,” she said. “I've never seen a really white mouse unless it's in a cage.
After getting parked, Walker pulled out her cellphone to see if she could capture video footage of her hairy hitchhiker.
“I tried from the driver's side first, but nothing was happening,” she said. Then, after moving to the passenger side, she found her stowaway.
“Watch this,” she said as she produced the video that confirmed she indeed had an unwanted passenger.
The video shows a tiny, cute white head pop out from under the passenger side seat, survey the situation and quickly retreat.
“I was like, `What is that?' ” Walker recalled emphatically. “That was really the only video that I got because, from that point forward, I was like ... I closed the door when I saw it in the door.”
Initially, her fears of the critter being a mouse were calmed.
“It looked so cute, and sweet,” she said. “I thought, `Oh, my god, it's not a mouse, it must be a ferret,' because it was long. I closed the door and then I was like, `Oh, my god, somebody has lost their ferret.'”
Panic set in, Walker said, and she began texting her friends to ask for help and showing them the video, which she later posted to social media, garnering hundreds of views in a matter of hours.
“I send this to my friends saying, `Oh, my god, there's a ferret in my car.' I said to one of them, `Get over here and help me get this ferret out of here!'”
One of her friends wrote back advising Walker not to try catching the adorable passenger, adding that it wasn't a ferret.
“I was like, `What?' She sent me this picture that I posted with my Facebook post, showing me that it is an ermine.”
An ermine, more commonly known as a weasel. Specifically, a short-tailed weasel.
As she was finding out what she was dealing with, Walker said, her father texted her to also inform her that her road trip rodent was indeed a weasel.
“I'm like, `Oh, my god, I have a weasel in my car!” Walker said with a laugh.
Walker's Honda C-ermine-v, in this case, had somehow become an attractive and comfortable place to nest. Lauren Tonelli, general manager for the Ontario Fur Managers Federation, which promotes the conservation and sustainability of fur bearers and the ecosystem, says that, while a vehicle is an unusual spot for a weasel to take up residence, it's not entirely surprising.
“They'll live wherever they can find a covered-in spot, especially this time of year, (when) they're trying to nest up,” Tonelli said in a telephone interview. “It's possible that it decided that her car was a nice place to cosy during the winter.”
When she got home, Walker opened all of her vehicle's doors in hopes that the frightened freeloader would scurry off, but her daughter spotted it climbing up inside the front dash of the vehicle, and it hasn't been seen since.
“It never came out of there,” she said, adding that she searched her car high and low, even discovering the ermine had been burrowing inside some jackets she had in her trunk. “(It) could potentially still be in the car. I took jackets out of the trunk and I could feel the warm spot. I was like, `That little bugger's been sleeping in here.' He was making a house!”
The more Walker said she learned about her unwanted guest, which weighs less than a pound but ounce for ounce can pack some punch, the more she said she was glad she never tried to capture or touch it.
“Apparently they are aggressive,” she said, adding that, for days following the encounter, she brought her dog with her for protection in the car.
“I hadn't driven around without the dog in the car until today,” she said late last week. “I figured, if this thing comes out of the dash, at least it's not going to attack me because the dog would be after it, which maybe could have been its own problem, but I didn't want to get caught in the car with it again. People tell me it bites. But it's cute.”
Tonelli confirmed that weasels, like many other wildlife, can be aggressive when confronted or approached.
“Weasels are predatory animals,” she said. “They hunt mice and rats and all the way up to rabbits, so they can definitely be aggressive as any wildlife can be.”
Asked if it was common to find the critter who tried to, ahem, weasel its way into a home in Walker's vehicle in the city, Tonelli said weasels didn't tend to discriminate when it came to living quarters.
“They'll move in if there's available food and obviously shelter for them,” she said. “I haven't heard of a lot of people getting weasels in their cars, especially right in Kingston; usually that's reserved for squirrels. I wouldn't say it's necessarily surprising that a weasel found its way into the city in Kingston. They're pretty hearty little animals and, like any wildlife, if they have enough resources to be happy there, they'll thrive.”
Walker said she wasn't sure what she'd do going forward if her cute car mate made a return visit.
“I just hope it's not in the car. I hope it decided it didn't want to be there. I don't know why it was there in the first place.”
It had been several days since a sighting, which, she said, was giving her peace of mind.
“I've tricked myself into believing it's gone.”