Wisdom gleaned from a lifetime with ferrets

Another Life: Ginger Harris kept a ferret down his jumper but he wouldn't let me hold it. "She doesn't know you," he demurred. "She'll put up a pong." This scene from a Sussex childhood re-awoke upon learning that Ireland does, after all, have ferrets living in the wild.

Polecats (from which ferrets were domesticated), failed to make it to Ireland after the last ice age. But feral ferrets have established themselves in north Co Monaghan, near the border with Cavan, and on the island of Rathlin, off north Antrim.

A hint of this came in the late 1980s, when a Monaghan vet, Jim Murphy, hit and killed an animal on the road to Cootehill. Going back to it, he found it had been joined by two smaller, similar animals that ran away only when he was within feet of them. The Monaghan wildlife ranger identified the rather strong-smelling corpse - bigger than a stoat, smaller than a pine marten and not quite a mink - as that of a feral polecat-ferret, the first such record in Ireland.

Since then, Jim Murphy, with UCC zoologist Paddy Sleeman (author of a popular handbook, Stoats, Weasels, Polecats and Martens, have collected enough records of trapped or road-killed animals to indicate a self-sustaining feral population. And now a young Co Cork ecologist, Daniel Buckley, is launching a survey to see just how far the ferrets have spread from their Monaghan nucleus and how many others might be surviving elsewhere in the Irish countryside.

A contact with him (see below) will bring a survey form, a bright little poster headed "Fetch a Ferret!" and a brave plea for receipt of any road kills, needed for dietary and morphological research. He is inspired by a similar survey in Britain to explore the undoubted recovery of the original wild polecat, Mustela putorius. Brought near extinction in the mid-20th century by gamekeeper persecution, polecats have since spread through the midlands from rural Wales. There have also been introductions in several parts of Scotland, following the recovery of the rabbit population from myxomatosis.

At this point, an identity parade . . . The pure wild polecat has a coat of dark-brown hairs over a creamy under-fur, but its big difference from a mink in close-up lies in a black stripe across the face, like a bandit's mask, with white areas at either side. This facial pattern survives in the polecat-ferret, one of the two colour forms arising from domestic breeding.

The second form is the pink-eyed, pink-nosed albino, producing white or golden shades that are making the ferret an increasingly popular pet.

Albinos are also often favoured by those who go ferreting for rabbits and are anxious to see where the little bugger's gone now. In both forms, the male ferret (the hob) is far bigger than the female (the jill).

Rabbits (and rats) have been the ferret's raison d'etre for centuries, in Ireland as everywhere else in these islands. In the second World War, in particular, ferreting for rabbits came into its own, since the rabbits bolting out of their warrens into waiting nets could be delivered to the butcher without damage from shotgun pellets. This trade dwindled with changing times, and also the coming of myxomatosis, which could leave a question-mark over the fate of hundreds of redundant ferrets.

"Escaped ferrets can be encountered almost anywhere, wrote Paddy Sleeman in his 1989 book, "since they are often lost when working." It is also "common practice," he added, "for pig farmers . . . to release a ferret or two in rat-infested piggeries" - a fact that may have special significance in Monaghan. No bigger than a rat herself, the jill ferret is ferocious in pursuit.

Ferreting as a country sport is still going strong in Ireland, particularly in the North. Googling "ferrets Ireland" will bring up a range of websites, several of which lead to lead to a memoir, A Lifetime With Ferrets written by Tony Carinduff. "In Ireland," comes the assurance, "no Fair, field day or country sports event would be complete without Tony and his ferrets." One is left in no doubt that ferrets can be tame and affectionate (but not to cats). A few years ago an evening walker in a country park outside Belfast encountered a two-foot golden hob ferret that, rather than running away, approached, licked his hand and allowed itself to be picked up.

Yes, but don't ferrets smell? Putorius in the polecat's Latin name means "putrid" (and the skunk, it's worth remembering, is another of the mustelid family). Excited or frightened, the polecats ejects a scent from its anal glands. A happy ferret can still pong a bit, but an internet pet site warns against bathing it too often: "After a bath, a ferret smells worse than what he did."

Daniel Buckley is at Toames East, Macroom, Co Cork; contact ferretsurvey@gmail.com and 863-691982