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Minks
I think mink are the most fearless animals on the island. Like the fox, deer, and raccoon, they often get into your domain, even under the house, but when confronted they seldom seem to run, and sometimes walk right up to you. Since they are small, quiet animals, low to the ground, with expressionless faces, they engage your curiosity rather than raise fears. But your curiosity will not be easily requited.
Mink are credited with eating just about any fish or flesh, including chickens in a coop. While waiting for the school bus one morning, my wife and son once saw a mink carry a muskrat corpse into one of our woodpiles. More on mink and muskrats later. I've only once seen a mink with something in its mouth
I was out looking for otters. At first I thought I saw a small otter standing on the ice, but I soon noticed that the animal was much smaller than an otter, and displayed much less nervous energy. Then the mink ran with the fish all the way back to its den in the beaver dam.
A month earlier, November 1999 to be exact, I saw this mink hopping all around the beaver dam, which also served some beavers as a lodge. When beavers prepare for the winter, they sink sticks in the water in front of their lodge that they can eat later when the pond freezes over.
This propensity for mink to pose doesn't require the relative quiet of a beaver pond. I saw the mink below from my boat on the rocks at the old quarry on Picton Island in the St. Lawrence River.
Mink can be mistaken for the larger fisher. It too has a bushy tail, somewhat pug face, small ears, and low slung body. A major difference is that fisher are shy of being out in the open. Although I got a good video of one once:
A mink seems almost to enjoy posing in the open so all can see. And I suppose, especially after how much emphasis I put on the delicate qualities of a mink, a mink could be mistaken for the much smaller weasel. One winter before the snows came, I saw an ermine, a weasel with a white coat for winter, darting through a beaver dam. I kept my camcorder running and was rewarded with a video clip of an ermine about one second long. The photo below gives a hint of what I saw:
Like raccoons and fox, mink often forage for food by exploring the margins of rivers, streams and ponds. Unlike raccoons, they are usually quicker as they go about it, and they seem to me more matter of fact than the fox. They don't always stalk their prey and pounce. They just seem to rendezvous with it. There's something magical about a mink.
Click on the photo above to see one foraging along a snow covered creek. Judging from its demeanor, who would guess that it might be hungry. In the video clip, 7 MBs, above you will notice that the mink briefly slides in the snow. While they are not as easy to track in the winter as an otter, tracking them can be fun and rewarding. Here is what I saw one afternoon after a morning snow
The short stride and the tail marks suggested to me that the mink was hopping along with something in its mouth. I followed the mink's trail to the margin of the pond where it had dug out a small hole into the snow and under the pond ice
Look closely and just outside the hole you can see a blood stain.
One usually finds mink tracks skirting the edge of ponds and taking advantage of what little open water there might be
This mink was almost leaping as it went to an old dock at the end of South Bay, and it let its wet tail drag.
Because of its fast, bounding gate, the impression a mink makes when you see one, seldom matches the delicate print it sometimes leaves behind.
My rule is to not strain studying the prints and instead look for the pattern of two or three prints left with each leap, often accompanied with a flourish from the tail. Even a dead mink strikes me as having a light step.
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Not only do the mink have a light step in the snow -- quite inspiring when you are bogged down in it, they burrow through it and even slide in it like otters. Here is a small gallery of mink holes in snow banks
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When going up a snow covered hill, the small mink can make quite a choppy tread, but never that wide
Going downhill a mink can rival an otter for direct speed
Once I saw a mink rather annoy an otter. The bigger animal was out on the ice around the beaver lodge it was staying in, looking intently at the steep snow covered bank of the pond. I looked over there and saw a tiny mink darting up and sliding down the bank. The otter seemed unamused and kept watch until the mink disappeared into the snow where there were other places to den. My guess is that the mink coveted staying in the beaver lodge which was right next to the deepest channel of water running under the pond (deepest, but only about two feet deep,) and the otter wanted to make sure it didn't move in.
Mink are said to be the principal muskrat predators. But the one time I saw a mink attack a muskrat, the muskrat got away, and even came back to somewhat tentatively taunt the mink. My friend Jeff Hanna took the photo while I was handling the camcorder. If you have a high speed internet connection check out the video clip of the attack I put on Google Video. Remember, the muskrat survived and the mink left the pond.
Here is some more video, showing the mink hustling around the pond, digging into the beaver lodge, and then heading on its way.
Nice week of tracking. Here is a link to my journal for that week On Line Journal 2006 Here's a journal entry I made about another mink's encounter with some muskrats in a small pond I own:
at high noon on this muggy cloudy day, a mink swam out of a burrow the connects the two sections of the pond, right in front of me. It hopped out of the water, and even though it surely knew I was sitting right there. As minks do, it made a show of going about its business, nosing over a hickory shell. Then before crawling over my feet, it slipped back into the pond, and dove. I got my camcorder out and hoped the mink would surface. It soon did and swam across the pond in a coiling serpentine fashion seeming in a hurry to get over to the lodge,
and into a indentation or hole in the lodge half foot out of the water. Then I heard a noise just to my left and I saw two balls of fur up on some twigs that cover the entrance to one of the many burrows. They jumped into the water and two adult muskrats swam in tight circles and splashed the water.
Seemingly in reaction to that demonstration, the mink hopped up on the lodge, turned briefly,
then went up to the bare ground behind the lodge, seemed to roll in the dirt and then waved its tail in the air, as wildly as an otter. Then it disappear. The muskrats meanwhile dove into the water and one surfaced near the lodge and then another. One snapped its tail making a splash
as it dove and the other just floated,
no doubt prepared to drive the mink away if it came close to the pond. As far as I could tell the muskrats didn't dive into the lodge, but into burrows on either side of it. Then I saw a muskrat swimming over to the lodge from the far corner of the pond, as fast and as menacingly as a muskrat can, which is to say it left a deep wake for such a little animal. It dove into the burrows by the lodge, and then a baby muskrat swam out of the burrow where the original commotion had been, and swam over to a burrow a little further to my left. Then an adult surfaced in front of the lodge and swam around the far shore of the pond. In late winter I saw evidence of both muskrats and a mink in this pond. The mink seemed to have two dens, just above the inlet and up in the first rim of rocks. I do not doubt that mink kill muskrats, but what I just saw demonstrated that muskrats who work together and show the grit can make a mink move on.
You may be noticing that what is missing from this report is any sense of how mink make sense out of their lives. Once we saw a mink carrying pups in her mouth, but outside of that, and unlike beavers, otters, muskrats, and raccoons, mink usually go it alone. Even porcupines appear more companionable. Yet, mink are practiced at storing their food in their dens be it a woodpile or beaver dam, and I assume they can't always be eating alone. Then again, I wonder why an animal with such a reputation as a hunter, and known to providently store food in its den, is so often the very first animal to come out after a snowfall.
But why ask why? On countless cold days my hikes have been immeasurably warmed by the intrepid trail of the mink.
by Bob Arnebeck
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