It was Saturday just gone.  The sun had been shining all week – absolutely brilliant weather unless you really wanted to ski in perfect conditions all day.  We were in Haus im Ennstal, near Schladming in Austria and we saw 18C at the base of the Hoffi Express 1 lift at 9.30.  We’d already been skiing for an hour, and while most of the runs were still hard-packed from the colder temperatures Friday night, the snow was already softening on the lower slopes.

I hate snow when it turns to porridge – I find it much much harder to ski in any kind of rhythm and much much easier to completely loose it.  And that’s when accidents can happen and at my grand age, even though I’m trying not to let the old man in, I am happy to forgo the extra hour or so on the ski hills if the trade off is that I walk away in one piece happy with what I’ve been able to do.  Which that day was an ok 18km of skiing in two and a half hours, non-stop.

So what to do in the afternoon?  Well, we’d had a 9km hike in the afternoon of the previous day but had missed out the path along the River Enns that in previous years had yielded a dipper and a mistle thrush.  So I was wondering if we might do the path and wind up at the Dorf Café in Weissenbach we’d visited on the hike the day before.  We thought we could then catch the ski-bus back if we didn’t fancy the walk back (a false hope as we’d mis-read the timetable).

I like it when I’m with Sabine because she notices sounds and movements better than I do and in any case it’s always better to have two pairs of eyes than one, no matter.  So she heard the dipper first; it was on a rock on the opposite side of the river, its white front showing well against the darker rocks it was standing on. It flew down the river a short distance and we followed.  We saw it again and then quickly it flew back the way it had come. I didn’t have my camera but it was too quick for a photo anyway. Here’s one I took on an Aigas field trip in the Highlands.

We were still looking at the opposite bank when another movement caught our attention.  Not a bird this time but an animal of a very different sort running along the riverbank towards us.  It was extraordinary looking – a thin, relatively long body and tail, dirty white in colour with sharp facial features that were accentuated by its pointed nose, and the very distinct black tip to its tail.  It was a stoat in its winter ermine coat.

Photo courtesy of the British Wildlife Centre

Sabine, who knows about these things, said they were hunted in their hundreds of thousands to satisfy ladies and gents (kings even) fashion demand in the good old days when this sort of thing attracted no approbation whatsoever. 

Louis XIV

And the days aren’t so old either – I read on the British Wildlife Centre site that in 1937, 50,000 ermine pelts were imported into the UK from Canada for the coronation of George VI, whose preserved robes were worn by his grandson, Charles III, at his coronation in 2023. Presumably the black flecks are the ends of the tails.

Back at the river, we watched this descendent of a stoat the hunters missed run in between and behind the rocks at the edge of the river until it was directly opposite us. It then disappeared into a tangle of rocks that probably hid the entrance to its den.  I hoped that its dirty white coat had looked a lot more pristine at the start of the winter when fresh snow would have been very white too.  As it was, it looked quite incongruous given that there was no snow anywhere on the valley floor through which the river flowed – the camouflage was having the opposite effect by making the animal stand out quite dramatically rather than blend into its surroundings.

Come spring (and that can’t be too far away in the Enns valley if the temperatures we saw are anything to go by), the stoat will moult out of its white coat into one with a brown back but still be white underneath.  Apparently not all stoats will change into an ermine coat at the start of winter but they are more likely to do that the colder the climate they live in (which makes perfect sense to me).  Of those that do go ermine, some will not be pure white but have some patchiness like the head of the one on the photo.  More information can be found on: https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/trees-woods-and-wildlife/animals/mammals/stoat/