The official 2026 Winter Olympic mascots have people a little confused. People are guessing that the mascots are foxes, or maybe cats, but they are stoats.
They are named Milo and Tina, after the 2026 olympic host cities of Milano and Cortina in Italy. Stoats are native to the Dolomites where the Nordic and Alpine events take place this year.
Here in the U.S., stoats are known as short-tailed weasels, or ermine in winter. In New Hampshire, we claim the winter ermine as the “White Mountain ermine.”
Mustela erminea are native to New Hampshire, the U.S., and Europe. They can be found across the state, and maybe even around your barn, stone wall, or chicken coop.
They’re rarely seen, however, because they’re extremely elusive and shy.
They can change the color of their coats depending on the season, a phenomenon called “mimetic,” the biology of mimicry. They have excellent camouflage no matter the season.
The Olympic mascot Tina represents the white winter coat of the ermine. Milo, with his brown coat, is what they look like the rest of the year. Milo is missing a leg and represents the Paralympic games.
They change color from brown to white in the late fall in a molting process. The decreased daylight, not temperature, triggers hormones to halt the production of melanin, the brown pigment.
The change takes about three weeks, and they can look blotchy or patchy as the white fur replaces the brown. The shift to white often begins on the belly and works its way up. When the days start to lengthen, the process reverses itself.
The black-tipped tail, which remains the same year-round, helps confuse predators who target that high-contrast, fast-moving, and highly-visible black tip, resulting in missed strikes.
They look adorable bouncing across the snow but they are actually fierce little assassins. They are basically built for hunting, and their agile little bodies and speed allow them to chase prey over rocks, through tunnels, and even in water, squeezing into spaces where larger predators can’t go.
They hunt during the day, and in the winter they use subnivean tunnels, under the snow. They also perch on their hind legs, surveying the landscape like furry little periscopes.
At less than a pound, they are one of the smallest carnivores in the world, eating mice, voles, insects and eggs. But they can take down animals up to five or even ten times larger, like snowshoe hares, cottontail rabbits, and woodchucks.
To stay warm and healthy, they need to consume about one-third of their own weight every day.
They use scent to identify their prey, and chase relentlessly, as much as five miles on a single hunt, reaching speeds of 20 miles per hour. They typically kill with a lightning-fast leap and a bite to the back of the neck. They are known for "surplus killing," killing more than they can eat and cacheing the excess for later in their den.
The winter fur of the ermine is extremely dense, soft and silky, which allows them to effectively retain heat in cold snowy climates. It is much denser than the summer coat, which is short and coarse.
Winter ermine fur has historically been highly valued and used for luxury garments, often associated with royalty. They are trapped as fur-bearing mammals, like beavers and mink.
Their main predators are foxes and raptors such as falcons, eagles, and owls, but landscape fragmentation from human development poses a far greater danger.
They play a huge role in our ecosystems controlling small mammals and keeping things in balance. When they were introduced to New Zealand from Europe in the late 19th century to solve a rabbit problem, they had a devastating effect on native birdlife due to a lack of natural predators. They ultimately failed to control the rabbits.
The two weasels native to New Hampshire are the short-tailed weasel and the long-tailed weasel, which also turns white, as well as other mustelids such as the pine marten, mink, fisher, and otter.
The two winter Olympic mascots, Milo and Tina, are “resilient in adapting to a challenging habitat such as the mountains," explain Olympic officials.
"The choice to propose these two different colors has a symbolic value. The mountain is an environment to be protected, experienced and enhanced not only in winter, but throughout the year: the two colours are there to remind us of this.”
Something Wild is a partnership of NH Audubon, the Forest Society and NHPR.
