A Short-tailed Weasel with snowy white fur peers out from behind stacked stone slabs. iNat user @cgbb2004
Congratulations to iNaturalist user @cgbb2004 for winning the February 2025 Photo-observation of the Month for the Vermont Atlas of Life on iNaturalist! Their photo of a Short-tailed Weasel with snowy-white fur peering out at them from behind stacked stone slabs received the most faves of any iNaturalist observation in Vermont during the past month.
The Short-tailed Weasel (also known as the American Ermine or American Stoat) is the smaller of two types of weasels found in Vermont. The Short-tailed Weasel (Mustela richardsonii) and Long-tailed Weasel (Neogale frenata) are quite similar, but the Short-tailed Weasel has a short, black-tipped tail about a third of the length of its body, while the Long-tailed Weasel has a black-tipped tail about half the length of its body.
Weasels will burrow, or build, a nest in rock or wood piles, in a hollow tree, or under a building. They will often steal the nests of their prey, and store, or cache, extra food for later use. The Short-tailed Weasel are predators, hunting voles, shrews, cottontail rabbits, rats, mice, chipmunks and nesting birds. In summer, they also eat fruit and berries.
It is the changing day length, not the drop in temperatures, which initiates the color shift from brown to white in the fur in the winter. The waning hours of daylight trigger a response in the hypothalamus, commonly referred to as the “master gland,” and cause animals to undergo many changes that help them survive the winter, including changes in coat color and thickness.
Speaking of species identification, one of our goals for 2025 is to reach 1 million Research Grade observations on the Vermont Atlas of Life project on iNaturalist. Currently, the project has 1.4 million records on iNaturalist, but fewer than 890,000 of those observations are “Research Grade,” like this one!
Once observations have been uploaded, they need to be independently identified and verified by other users. It’s called crowd-sourced identification; as more people identify a photograph or sound, the identification’s accuracy typically increases. Only these verified data can be used for research and conservation. That’s where community scientists like you come in! You can make a difference in conservation just by verifying iNaturalist observations. Add your identifications to observations that are labeled as “Needs ID” now!
With 2,962 observations submitted by 646 observers in February, it was a great month. Click on the image above to see and explore all of the amazing observations.
Visit the Vermont Atlas of Life on iNaturalist where you can vote for the winner this month by clicking the ‘fave’ star on your favorite photo-observation. Make sure you get outdoors and record the biodiversity around you, then submit your discoveries and you could be a winner!
