Adventures of a Stoat

Katherine Townsend
Mar 23, 2021
2 min read

Last week I was working at my desk, which by chance faces a window onto the farmer's fields beyond. As I set down my cup of tea, I saw a flash of white in the brown grass. I froze and stared into the field, and after a few seconds out popped a stoat, on a mission, sporting their brilliantly white winter coat. In a flurry of panic, excitement and disbelieve I rushed to get my camera to captures what I could of the stoat. As it turns out the stoat wasn't planning on leaving anytime soon and stayed for about an hour, hunting for mice and voles in the tunnels they had created in the grass. It was an incredible opportunity to see a stoat up close, and to practice my nature photography.

While we did have snow for around three weeks where I'm currently based, it did raise some concerns seeing this animal in its winter coat while there wasn't a piece of snow in sight. Recently I watched a David Attenborough documentary on colour in the animal world and it included artic foxes, mountain hares, ptarmigan, and stoats all in their winter coats standing out against the brown heather. It hits home hard and reminds us of the seemingly small implications climate change has on the natural world.

I did encounter some difficulties which were not apparent during the photographing process. When reviewing my photos and then editing them I noticed pink highlights had appeared on the green of the grass, along with some green and blueish tunes along the edge of the stoat's coat. I had never seen something like this on my photos before. After some looking around on the web for answers, I found that it could be due to a 'chromatic aberration'. Which, to my knowledge, is when light of different colours travels through the lens at different speeds, and the lens cannot put them into the same focal plane.

So with my favourite editing tool, clone, and a few others I fixed it as best I could. Here you can see the edited (left) and original (right) photo: