This clever mink has captured our hearts
Improved water quality in Lake Ontario has led to a population increase
Minks in the wild are said to be nocturnal and elusive. Someone, however, forgot to send a certain mink of my acquaintance that memo.
This winter, I’ve gone for a walk nearly every day at the Leslie Street Spit with my husband, Peter, and daughter, Em. On almost every occasion, we’ve seen a glossy, slinky mink, the colour of dark chocolate, along the same stretch of shoreline. We’ve observed Marty, as Peter named “our” mink, dashing about the rocks and rubble of the Spit’s shoreline at all hours, from sun-up to sundown. We don’t know what he does in the dark when we’re not there, but as for this wily weasel’s workday, there’s nothing elusive about it.
Marty’s a perpetual motion machine. We see him in the water fishing, on the land bounding from rock to rock, then back in the water again faster than I can say Neovison vison, the American mink’s scientific name.
On a few occasions, we’ve seen him pause his frenetic pace long enough to pose prettily, one front paw lifted, on a slab of flat concrete that juts out of the water about 10 metres offshore.
But it’s Marty’s swimming and aquatic hunting skills that have really impressed us. A carnivore, he fishes for a good portion of his diet. And what an accomplished fisher he is.
We estimate he successfully catches prey one out of every three dives he makes in the clear, shallow water near the shore.
Marty’s technique never varies: he swims straight out from the rough beach about 20 metres or so, then uses his sinuous, slender body to carve out tight, S-shaped turns in the water, the way a skier passing through the gates of a narrow slalom course would do. His underwater vision is poor, so he locates prey before diving under the water’s surface to catch it. When he surfaces with a small, silvery fish in his mouth — likely a smelt or an alewife — he swims directly to the shore and makes a dash for his den among the rocks or to some other protected spot to consume it or store it for later.
Once, in inclement weather, we watched Marty race along the shoreline with his fish into the dubious shelter of a tangled ball of rusted rebar. The pile of sharp, twisted metal, a permanent feature of this stretch of the peninsula, is as big as a backyard shed and attached at a curiously rakish angle to a nearby cliff.
Although we waited to see if Marty would re-emerge from this unusual hidey-hole, we didn’t see him. Not too surprising — with his extremely skinny body, he could slip through and under the rocks, escaping our view (and that of potential predators) undetected.
Marty and his kindred mink fellows are doing well at the Spit and elsewhere along Toronto’s waterfront. In the coffee table book Peter gave me for Christmas this year, “Accidental Wilderness — The Origins and Ecology of Toronto’s Tommy Thompson Park,” by Walter H. Kehm and Robert Burley.
Retired Toronto and Region Conservation Authority wildlife expert Gord MacPherson says that there are more minks around because the water quality of the lake has improved.
In the past, he explains, an insecticide called mirex got into Lake Ontario and entered the aquatic food chain. When minks consumed fish contaminated with this pollutant they stopped reproducing. Once the pollutant was prevented from entering the food chain, the mink population rebounded.
Despite the fact that there are more minks around, you are unlikely to see more than one at a time at the Spit or elsewhere. Minks are solitary, territorial creatures (except during breeding season) that use chemical signalling to demarcate their turf and broadcast their reproductive status.
They do this with a sulphurous musk secreted by anal glands. The mink’s musk is notably foul smelling, often described as “worse than skunk” and “aggressively malodorous.”
Marty and his kin are formidable hunters on land and in the water, taking whatever’s available: crustaceans, frogs, birds, and small mammals like voles, shrews, and rabbits.
They’re particularly adept at hunting muskrats, another semi-aquatic creature with which they share habitat. Using their partially webbed feet to power through the water, minks will chase muskrats underwater and dispatch them in the muskrats’ own burrows.
Over the months our family has been walking at the Spit, it’s become something of a game to see who can spot Marty first.
We’ve spent so much time observing this clever creature that he’s come to occupy a special place in our hearts, even becoming a frequent topic of dinner table conversation. “Did you see Marty today? How’s Marty?”
But life in the wild is brutal and short. Last week, we found the body of a mink on the footpath at the Spit. Oh, dear. Our spirits were lifted two days later when we saw a familiar sleek form scamper across the path in front of us.
We hope it was Marty.