From foxes to another prey. The current stir in England about mink is, for press people, a good summer story. An item on page one of the Daily Tele- graph was headed "Mink Mug Angler For His Bait". This chap was sitting by the river Avon with an open can of dog food, his bait, between his feet when, at darkness, there came "a high-pitched squeaking" and out of the bushes about four shapes hurled themselves at him. "They were all over me . . . I was screaming." He tried to beat them off with his net, but they were fearless. He ran away but was brought back by a fellow angler. The report doesn't say if the mink ate all his dogfood.
These would have been among the 7,000 released from a mink farm by animal rights activists, no doubt. It is thought that about 1,000 may still be at liberty, the rest captured or killed. It's not so long since anglers and bird-lovers in Ireland expressed worries about the spread of the same animal, the American mink, from farms here. Fairley tells us in his Irish Beast Book that at one time in the 1950s and 1960s there were 40 mink farms here. Two of them contained over 10,000 and one was thought to be housing over 50,000. The number of farms were much reduced when Fairley's book came out, revised in 1984.
One river in the east had for some years a problem; it was a good spawning river, well stocked with trout and crayfish. Today there may not be one mink left. Some shot; many shot perhaps, but they may have moved westward or are just dying out, or even blending into the natural population and not much noted. Possibly the lack of waterhens on one stretch may be due to them. They like eggs, and will even climb a tree to get them, for ducks sometimes build in a handy fork of, say, a bankside willow.
In Britain there are plenty of people who get a kick out of hunting the mink, with 19 mink-hunting packs. A recent Country Life showed about 100 people with shaggy dogs, three mink-hunting packs combined. "Two brace of mink proved wily quarry, one of the animals was caught midstream, but the others escaped." The Kent and Sussex Mink Hounds met on a recent summer evening and according to a writer in The Field, three mink were despatched, in a pond, by one crossbred puppy. For the rest, the writer summed up "mink hunting really is a glorious way to spend a summer's day or evening. It is a wonderful opportunity to explore the country at leisure without that added bother of a horse that pulls or trying to avoid the one in front that kicks." Y