I've been ruminating on stoats since @GeorgeMonbiot gave his rallying cry in support of the "spear like mouse" & having tiptoed in their wake for nearly 30 years I have a couple of observations to share. The first being their predation methods.
Female stoats spend late winter & early spring marking out their territory prior to giving birth. An interesting behavior I've spotted quite a few times is a "stock check" whereby the female investigates every warren, birds nest, vole run in her patch. She doesn't predate..
.. she's working out what is breeding where. She then investigates a number of denning sites - this is great as you can keep tabs on her all summer - which are within a reasonable distance of her prey species. The most important aspect of this is revealed next..
... the female never over- predates an area. She'll take rabbits, in summer predominantly young rabbits. A clutch of bluetits. Perhaps some eggs. A young moorhen. Half a dozen voles. But as soon as she's impacting local population levels she will move to the next denning site...
..a different warren, different nesting birds etc. So the birds at the first location successfully rear a second clutch, the numbers recover in the first warren, the voles repopulate. Throughout the summer they rotate around their territory, leaving good population levels.
The kits are semi-independent by the end of July, but will be tolerated in the territory as late as November. Winter predation is all about rabbits, huge adult rabbits. Stoats will survive for days from one kill & rarely predate any other species.
..so over 30 years on a12 acre site did the stoats really impact any one species. The answer is no, but a good healthy population of rabbits is probably key. Many summer prey items are simply to show kits that there's alternatives if you hit a problem in the rabbit supply chain.
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