The Graun piece about that included some very scathing comments about how it was "photoshopped". It looked pretty genuine to me, and it's entirely plausible. The green woodpecker is a ground-feeding bird a lot of the time, hacking into ants' nests for food. Weasels are sneaky little gits who attack their prey from behind. The are also quite happy taking on something much bigger than themselves and their method of killing their prey is to bike it in the neck.
Many moons ago our old dog, George Doodlebugs by name, killed a weasel. The unfortunate mustelid had hidden inside an old farmyard pump which my dad had acquired with a view to attaching it to the well that was in our garden. The pump was lying innocently in a corner, but the dog was well aware that the weasel was in there, making a huge amount of effort and a lot of noise as he tried to get the weasel out. In the end my dad got so fed up with the racket the dog was making that he tipped the pump up and out slid the weasel. I'm sorry the dog killed it because I like mustelids as a group of animals, and this weasel got a few good bites in on the dog's nose before he died.
Actually, something has just crossed my mind: some years ago, on the way home after one of the Foulness Bike Rides, we came across an injured weasel by the side of the road. I thought at first that its back was broken and another cyclist who had stopped to look was thinking about putting it out of its misery. However, it seemed to recover as we watched, even though there was a lesion on its back, and eventually it disappeared into the grass. I mentioned this to my brother, who was a scientific officer with English Nature before he retired, and his suggestion was that a predatory bird may well have caught it and dropped it. That, of course, may well have happened, but it's equally possible that the weasel could have attacked a bird on the ground and hitched a lift, as in the woodpecker case.
