Mink gives Matt a ‘smile’ for camera
A “smiley” mink has been spotted on the River Avon near Bath, lingering just long enough for a local photographer to grab a picture.
The species often divides opinion with its attractive looks and ferocious appetite for water vole.
American mink first arrived in Britain in 1929, when they lived on commercial fur farms.
By the 1950s, so many had escaped or been released that they were breeding in the wild, with numbers booming over the last 40 years. These days, they are classed as an invasive species due to the risk they pose to the native water vole population.
Calne local Matt Cooper is an amateur photographer with a love of wildlife. He often visits Bradford-on-avon and on August 25 he spotted a mink on the riverbank.
It posed just long enough to give him a smile – or bare its teeth, you decide – before slinking back into the water. Matt said that, when he saw it near Westbury Gardens, the mink had just popped out of a hole in a nearby building.
He added that it appeared to be “rooting around in the weeds, looking for prey”, then it headed off in the direction of Town Bridge, “probably looking for juvenile rats”. Mink are opportunistic predators who will happily eat a variety of fish, small mammals, birds and invertebrates.
Feral members of the species are naturally a chocolate-brown colour but farm-bred animals can vary in colour from white or grey through to black. Their limbs are short and their tails are about one-third of their body length. They can live for up to eight years, but few survive beyond their second year in the wild.
While it may seem rare to spot a mink in the UK, they have actually become common and widespread over the last half-century.
No one knows exactly how many there are, but as semiaquatic creatures, they are often spotted near canals and rivers. You can find out more about why mink are an invasive species on the Canal and Rivers Trust (CRT) website at https://bit.ly/3rkjcby
American mink resemble something between a small cat and a ferret. They have a dense coat of deep brown fur, which often leads to misidentification with the native otter. There is also a European mink, but they are only found in continental Europe.
However, otters are shy and unlikely to be seen during the day, while their confident American cousins will wander the waterways at all hours. Mink are also smaller and slimmer, which makes it easier for them to hunt burrow-dwelling prey like water voles.
This is obviously bad news for the voles, whose numbers have been declining rapidly since the 1960s, which incidentally was around the time the mink population boomed. If things continue this way, the water vole will be wiped out.
The CRT said: “Unless some areas are kept free or relatively free of mink, it’s thought that the water vole will become extinct in much of Britain within a few years.
“The urgency of the situation is highlighted by the water vole’s inclusion as a priority species in the UK Biodiversity Action Plan and the promotion of humane mink control as an essential tool in water vole conservation, within the National Species Action Plan.
“We support targeted control of American mink, in order to protect our waterways, as well as for the conservation of water vole populations. Mink control will protect our considerable investment, in recent years, in habitat improvement for water voles across the network.”
1929
The year that American mink arrived in Britain being kept on commercial fur farms