WeaselPecker

About

WeaselPecker, a portmanteau of “weasel” and “woodpecker,” is a photoshop meme based on a well-timed photograph of a weasel riding on the back of a flying woodpecker bird. Since entering online circulation through Twitter in early March 2015, the photograph has given way to a series of photoshopped parodies in which other subjects and fictional characters are shown riding alongside or in lieu of the weasel.

Origin

On March 2nd, 2015, East London photographer Martin Le-May took a photo of a juvenile weasel riding on the back of a woodpecker in Essex, England (shown below). On the same day, wildlife photographer Jason Ward posted the photograph on Twitter,^[1] where it gained over 9,900 reweets and 7,400 favorites in the first 24 hours.

Spread

Later that evening, BuzzFeed^[2] published an interview with Le-May, in which he described the events surrounding the photograph. Also on March 2nd, Twitter user @darth^[3] tweeted a photoshopped version of the image with a red panda dressed as the antagonist Darth Vader from the Star Wars franchise riding the weasel and bird (shown below).

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On March 3rd, Twitter user Rebecca Lewis^[4] tweeted a photoshopped image of Vladimir Putin riding on the back of the weasel, gathering more than 140 retweets and 90 favorites that day (shown below). Meanwhile, many other photoshopped versions of the image were posted on Twitter under the hashtag “#WeaselPecker”^[5] (shown below, right).

In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the online reaction to the photograph, including The Daily What,^[6] Mashable,^[7] The Huffington Post^[8] and The Telegraph.^[9]

Various Examples

Search Interest

Not available.

External References