How to Track a Mink

Video Transcript

"Hi we’re Nick and Valerie Wisniewski on behalf of Expert Village.com. We would like to show you some American mink tracks and how to identify them in the field and for more information, you can check our website at www.walnuthilltracking.com. We’ve got a plaster cast here of some mink tracks. These 2 foot prints are actually 4 feet landing in the same 2 places. The mink like other members of the weasel family has 5 toes on the front foot and 5 toes on the back foot. Its foot is very hairy which often times obscures the finer details of the tracks. Like other weasels the claws are well developed for catching and holding prey and those will often times register in their track as well. We would like to show you one of the most common patterns that the mink makes when it is moving around the landscape. The mink like other weasels can move in a variety of ways and it can walk around a landscape and it could bound in 3’s and 4’s but most commonly the mink likes to travel in what we call 2-2 bounds where all 4 of the feet actually land in almost exact same spot as 2 feet. So you will have a front hitting the ground and then a hind hind hitting the exact same place. The mink when traveling in 2’s is very very consistent and that is one of the features you look for to identify mink as opposed to some other weasel; a smaller or larger weasel. When it gets into a 2 bound it will travel a stride anywhere from about 11 inches to up to 38 but once it gets into that bound, it will be very consistent and that is what we’ve tried to show you here. It’s about 20 to 21 inches in between each of these groups. If it was a mink moving in a 2-2, it would continue in that pattern very consistent even bound for a long long distance. "