A couple of weeks ago I wrote about polecats around East Dartmoor – see here. Since then my colleague Mick Jones, the Lead Ranger for North Dartmoor told me that he had seen a couple of dead polecats on the A38 near Ashburton and collected the corpse of one of them. He has subsequently skinned the animal and prepared the skull as a specimen.
Frontal view showing the teeth
I was surprised how solid and how heavy the skull actually was
Top view – apparently polecats have a great deal of muscle around the neck
It is of course sad to hear that polecats are being run over on our roads but it is an indication of how many of them there now are in the county. Lets hope they continue to flourish and expand in their range. I have also subsequently heard from an old friend of mine from SE Devon that polecats are frequent roadkills also in East Devon and West Dorset.
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