Can You Help Identify This Long-Tailed Texas Mystery Animal?
I caught something really weird on my driveway camera.
This animal was caught crossing a driveway, traveling from underneath a car to underneath a truck in Lubbock, Texas. The area is on the outskirts of town and has been known to have possums, raccoons, foxes, skunks, and other small to midsized creatures. There are also quite a few feral cats and the odd pack of stray dogs. Let's just say that the area is just rural enough that some of these small varmints feel at home.
This collection of critters likes to sneak up and grab food and water from outdoor cat bowls. I personally don't mind that kind of thing. As long as the varmints don't stick around, I don't have a problem being a little bit of a rest stop for them. The least I can do to help a small animal is to give them a drink.
I feel like these animals mark friendly spots like this much in the way hobos did back in the day. I might not be wrong either, because something weird popped up on my camera. At first, my heart broke a bit because I thought this was a cat with a broken tail, but it is clearly not a cat.
So what is it? We Googled animals indigenous to the area and our best guess is that it's a "long-tailed weasel". I had no idea that weasels were even a thing around here. And again, it may not be a weasel. We saw it once on the cam and it never triggered it again. Have a look and take your best guess: