Stoat teefs!
Will you please check out this stoat teef action. He's got his muzzlepowshe wrapped around this toast, and is all: "ADIOS!!!"
heee hee hee, Sender-Inner-Teef-Spotter Sunshine B. ;)
More at the DailyMail Photo Contest, photo by Ari Tervo.
I've never seen such perfectly triangular eyes before.
WANT!
A stoat! Whats do I has to vote for?
omg, i luff the triangular eyes!!! if he was orange he would look like a jack-o-lantern!!!! How halloweenish!!!!
PS that is a truly beautiful little animal, and those triangle eyes give it a Halloween-y look.
ok, i forgot to mention the vampire teef. he's a abominable, vampire jack-o-lantern!!!
we need to decide wich is more triangular, his little eyes, or those awsome, cute little ears. I can't possibly decide!
Yes, those little triangular eyes look just like two tiny semi-sweet chocolate morsels! I wonder if they taste like that, too ;)
hims got little hershey kiss eyes. (the dark, dark chocolate kind).
Toast is mine, all mine, mine. No sharinks
WANT! To wear him as a wristband! He can nibble my fingers during breaks from typing.
I love the fluffy tail with the black tip. So cute!
AWWWWWWWW! He's cute, but it's that EVILE type of cute. He's all: "RAWR, MY SANDWESCHE!
stoatalicious
My favourite thing about this is that Toast is an anagram of Stoat.
teef-hance made me lol, no lie.
Ok.. am I dumb, that's a stuffed stoat, right? Stuffed or no, very cute.. but stuffed nonetheless, right?
He's all "This toast is mine and you can't have it or I'll bite you with my ferocious teefs!" *Strugges to run off due to overwhelming size ratio of toast to stoat*
Wow, that is absolutely great! This is my new favorite Mustelidae picture ever! I love his nasty little teeth so much I can hardly stand it!
Me too, poor violet! I love that TOAST is STOAT with the letters in a different order!
HEE! I'm glad I'm not the only one who got all anagrammy! I just love the teefers closeup, I checked out the rest of the pictures on the link; they were great!
And by stuffed, I didn't mean like by a taxidermist, but like as in a stuffed animal. But now that I look up Stoats.. I see that they really do look like this! The triangle eyeballs threw me.
I'm glad you clarified that, Golden, I really did think you meant taxidermy stuffed, and I was kind of like, Ummm...I think little stoaty there is quite alive...
He looks ferocious.
like he is saying get any closer and the toast gets it.
HEhe I too love the anagram
If you look at the Daily Mail page, you can get a humongous enlargement of Stoaty-Pants. It is now my desktop wall-papier.
Tail up, legs braced, teef pierced.... toast is MINE!! GRRRR!!!!
Fierce critter, ain't he? Looking at that snow, I don't blame him. Winter is hard times for stoats. Never know where your next piece of toast is coming from.
Don't be fooled by the cuteness. Stoats are some bad-ass little critters!
But it could be a weasel.
Do you know the difference between a stoat and a weasel?
You can tell a weasel weasily...
but a stoat is stoatally different.
Wait, Hagrid eats sandwiches made out of those?!
"No! MINE!"
Isn't he an ermine? And whose natural habitat is rumpled white fake-fur?
Stoating, voting, toasting.
Do we get toast next time we vote?
Overly triangular too.
I think it's an Ermine !!! It is !!! I looked it up ....
Cool eyes and tail!! I wonder if he would get along with my three cats...hmm....Love the stoat!! Love him!
can we name it Ermione?
According to Wikipedia a stoat and an emine are the same thing. You can click my name if you want to look at the article.
Mummy...the evil weasel is taking me crumpet...
That's not rumpled fake-fur, that's very freshly fallen (perhaps still falling) snow, in extreme close-up. And the coloration - white except for the dark tail-tip - means it's definitely an ermine, 'Erman...
I have a vague remnant of a memory from college Mammalogy that ermines are the winter version of stoats? I think it's only ermine in its white winter phase (thus, 'ermine stole' etc) and a stoat the rest of the year. Of course that was just before I switched majors to Lit... so I'm not vouching for the veracity of this memory...
That's the first time I've seen a "live" ermine tail. Cool!
In depictions of royalty in the past, sometimes capes would have shawl-type collars with some little black things spaced ever so often around it. It was many years before I realized those were ermine tails. You can see them in old movies of the 40's and 50's in period pieces.
Here's a link to an example from the Civil War era:
http://www.corsetsandcrinolines.com/timelineitem.php?index=186022
I thought it had (thankfully) gone out of fashion. Unfortunately, one of the pics I found online was from 2003, of a woman at a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit opening in an ermine cape she'd designed for herself. I was aghast when I saw it was trimmed in an estimated 60 - 80 ermine tails or so. I have never been particulary anti-fur, but the sight of that made me queasy.
Oh, and stoat = weasel = ermine.
They are brown in summer and white with a black tipped tail in winter. They are extremely fast and viscious. No way is anyone getting that toast back! Good for you, toofy little creature!
SoCalSis,
I believe you are correct, "stoat" or "weasel" when brown, and the white fur only is called "ermine".
A lovely ermine is the star of Friends of Animals' anti fur trim campaign.
Another ermine is the co-star of this famous painting:
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/L/leonardo/ermine.jpg.html
OMG!!!!!!11!!!!!!!1
CUUUUUUUUUUUUUEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWTTTTEEEE!!!!!
I've never seen one before this very minute. It's like Cute-O-Ween!
Yknow what makes it extra funny? If you rearrange the letters in the word stoat, you get TOAST! Ahahahaha!! Hahahah! hehe!
*blink* What?
According to the article, the photo was taken in Finland (it was an int'l wildlife photography competition). That would account for the mounds of snow.
Also, I learned today that stoats only gain their white ermine coat if they live in a place that has 40+ days of snow--again, Finland :).
Creamy snow sundae with fluffy stoat and toast topping. Yum! Or, perhaps I'll just scoop up the stoat and snow with two slices of gingerbread for a de-lischey ice cream stoat sandwische. The stoat will get to keep his own slice of toast, of course--as long as he keeps his pointy teefs to his toast. Or else, I shall EAT his slice of toast! And in that case, I won't even share the ice cream and gingerbread with him. (What? Did you think I was going to eat the stoat? :P) (oh, and, Hello!)
Yeppers, he's an ermine. Sadly, that was actually my first thought on seeing this picture... "That's not a stoat!!!" Semantics actually overrode cute for once. :/ (Although this in no way diminishes the awesome truthiness of the stoat/toast anagram. :))
Ermines and stoats are both weasels, but one is the winter coloring and one is the summer coloring. The black at the tip of the tail is to distract predators.
I just came in here to comment that this is an ermine, but I see it's been covered.
Such a cutie though. In that evil mischievous way they have.
..... zomg. That's, like... Oh god. That's way too cute to exist. Like. Wow. *really should not be up late looking at cute fluffies, for her brain will short-circuit like this* That needs to be my new background....... o_o