Encounters with Mink!
Every encounter with an American Mink is unexpected, special, and frustratingly brief. Often, there’s only time to glimpse, or I just watch in utter surprise and fascination. Photos are thus even fewer and farther between. These shy predators are found across much of North America and, via introduction, several other continents. Energetic and semi-aquatic, mink do not hibernate and need to hunt year-round to maintain their high caloric intake.
All of my US sightings have been at my favorite local spot, the Five Rivers Environmental Education Center near Albany, New York. Sometimes, ripples in the water give a clue to one’s presence; other times a mink simply crosses a trail near one of the many ponds.
One late winter morning, a mink was out on the ice on one of the ponds!
But it was not until we were in Iceland last month that Denise and I had that dreamed-of encounter with cuteness. Near our hotel on the long Snaefellsnes Peninsula in western Iceland, we were walking down to the water when Denise spied a mink popping up from among the rocks! It quickly disappeared, only to re-emerge soon after with a large flatfish in its mouth! Most likely a European plaice, this bottom-dwelling marine inhabitant was not having a good day, but the mink had its dinner!
However, cute as they are, mink in the wild are both destructive and wholly unwelcome in the wild in Iceland. Brought there in the early 1930s for captive fur farms, they promptly escaped and joined the Arctic Fox as the country’s sole mammalian predators. Mink prey on puffins, taking them right from their burrows, and build dens in the lava rocks along the shore (as we saw), feeding on fish. A single mink can even wipe out an entire eider colony. A country-wide bounty was established in 1939 and still exists, as, clearly, do mink in the wild…
Sources and resources:
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A tale of conquest and crisis: invasion history and status of the American mink (Neovison vison) in Iceland Robert A. Stefansson,1 Menja von Schmalensee,1,2 Jakub Skorupski3. Acta Biologica 23/2016 | www.wnus.edu.pl/ab | DOI: 10.18276/ab.2016.23-08 | strony 87–100