Wherever you are in North America, if you’re near water fresh, brackish, or salt, and if you’re not in the arid Southwest, you might see a mink out and about, pursuing its career as a lethal and highly effective carnivore. If you’re not listed on the mink’s menu of prey, an extensive selection that includes fish, crayfish, snakes, frogs, salamanders, mice, shrews, voles, muskrats, birds, and more, you might find the mink astonishingly handsome. I certainly do.
An Adirondack mink that has just caught a crayfish
A mink is a member of the weasel family, larger than an ermine or long-tailed weasel and smaller than a marten, fisher, or otter. An adult mink often measures about two feet from pink nose to tip of long, fluffy tail. The mink’s coat is chocolate brown, thick, glossy, and may look black when wet. A mink spends a good deal of its time in water hunting for prey, so it’s coat is wet a good deal of the time. Underneath the chin of nearly every American mink is a patch of white fur. Many mink also show white on the chest.
While a mink is often wet, it prefers to be dry. The following four photos show a mink in the water, a wet mink just out of the water, a mink drying off, and a mink fully dry and fluffy ready for its next round of hunting.
A longstanding mystery at our place along the Saranac River centered on who digs up and eats the eggs of snapping turtles. We love our snappers, agreeable creatures that virtually never snap unless you provoke them. Every year, we watch Mama Snappers haul themselves up on sand banks, dig vase shaped holes with their hind feet, and fill the holes with eggs. The eggs are white and leathery and look like ping pong balls. Almost immediately, at night in the dark, the nests are found by somebody or something. They’re dug up, and the embryos are devoured. But by whom? For years, we studied the plundered nests, seeking clues. Tracks were hard to come by. It seemed highly likely the raider was always, or almost always, the same animal. Time after time, the eggs were excavated and eaten in the same fashion.
Here’s what a plundered nest looks like.
And here’s a footprint in the sand, next to the scene of one of the crimes. The track, found and photographed in later summer 2019, cracked the case.
Here are tracks made by the same turtle-egg-plundering mastermind in snow. The track maker doesn’t eat turtles or their eggs in winter, as far as we can tell, but it does have a knack for finding frogs hibernating in submerged mud beneath the river ice and bringing them up for breakfast.
Alimentary, my dear Watson! Behold the Professor Moriarty of turtle nest raiders, flying high one January afternoon in the Adirondacks, setting out on its next adventure.
