HOLDEN – Last week volunteer Pat Snyder was working in the wildlife garden at the Fields Pond Audubon Center. The garden and nearby fields were a study in different shades of brown. Suddenly she saw something white – a furry little white face with little white rounded ears. It came out from behind a big rock and she saw that it was a weasel. She alerted everybody inside and we all ran to the windows.

“Look!” she said. “It’s coming out from behind the rock again.”

It was easy to see. It was in winter pelage, all in white except the black tip of its tail. It bound around through the tall grass and leapt from one rock to another, showing how agile and quick it was – and how long and sinuous, almost serpentine, its body was. Then it disappeared behind the original rock it had come from.

Everybody was thrilled to see a weasel. They are so quick, and usually so well-camouflaged, brown in summer and white in winter, that they are hard to see. This weasel’s winter camouflage wasn’t working!

This weasel was an ermine, or short-tailed weasel, which averages 11 inches long from nose to tip of tail. Males are longer and larger than females. Their usual food consists of voles – mice with small ears and eyes, and short tails – and deer mice with large ears and eyes, and long tails.

There is another species of weasel in Maine – the long-tailed weasel. It is larger and longer than the ermine. The long-tailed weasel averages 20 inches long. I saw one in November for the first time in my life. It was in my wooded back yard, bounding among fallen logs and going into and out of piles of brush.

It was significantly longer and larger than an ermine, with a relatively longer tail tipped with black. It also was mostly white. But from between its ears, down its neck and back to the base of its tail it was gray. It was fast and sinuous, too.

A small flock of juncos were feeding nearby on my lawn. All the relevant books and Web sites mention that weasels occasionally take birds. I wondered if the weasel would try to stalk or pounce on a junco right before my eyes. From inside, I watched the weasel’s behavior carefully with binoculars, but it didn’t pay the slightest attention to the juncos 10 feet away. It bounded away and disappeared.

For information on Fields Pond Audubon Center, call 989-2591.