Despite its short, stubby legs, a stoat can race along at 20mph, its distinctive chesnut and white body constantly thrown forward in a series of leaps and bounds. Few animals manage to outrun it in a straight sprint. Death is almost inevitable for any creature too slow to climb, fly away or scurry down a tinier hole than the slim stoat itself can squeeze into. Stoats are so savage they can easily overwhelm animals more than twice their own size. The male stoat is just 13 inches long from the tip of his inquisitive nose to the end of his black-tipped tail.
Females are smaller and thinner but equally feared as hunters and sporting the same colouring.
The two sexes come together briefly to breed, after which six or so fierce youngsters emerge. These can often only be told apart from weasels by their black tail-tips. The voraciousness of stoats was underlined recently by a desperate move to control them - not here, but in New Zealand. Stoats and weasels were introduced there from Europe in the 19th century to control burgeoning rabbit numbers. However, so successful have they become that they are now threatening the survival of many indigenous species.