230 Practical Game Preserving. 



The nest, or rather store-house and lair combined, of 

 the ermine is often constructed, as far as safety and 

 concealment are concerned, in a most clever manner, and 

 to this suitably contrived larder it conveys that portion of 

 the number of birds and animals it destroys which are 

 considered fit and acceptable food for consumption. These 

 lairs are generally employed also as the nest in which the 

 young may be born and brought up. The stoat, during 

 this period, namely, while the breeding season continues, 

 seems rather to depart from its usual mode of diet, and 

 to obtain little delicacies to suit the fancy of the female, 

 or, perhaps, for the young, that they may consume flesh 

 at the earliest possible stage of their existence, and such 

 " delicacies " generally consist of field mice, small birds, 

 frogs, an occasional water-vole, shrews, young rabbits and 

 hares, in some cases a partridge, also but- rarely, a 

 woodcock. These are but some of the many delicacies 

 which the stoat provides for its mate and progeny, and is 

 always most careful to lay or store them in a neat 

 methodical manner. Indeed, there are few animals whose 

 lair is more a model of care and neatness than that of 

 the ermine, and we cannot help admiring the instinct of 

 such wonderful regulation unswervingly producing results 

 of evident comfort and satisfaction to the animal in which 

 it is generated. 



Much as the stoat resembles the fitch, so also does 

 it in many ways differ from it, and not more so than 

 in the haunts which it prefers and the habits it follows. 

 With regard to the former, while the polecat, as we have 

 remarked, has an undoubted tendency to become solitary, 



