Driving past a neighborhood patch of brush and wetlands, I watched as a critter, sleek and dark with a long tail, slid across the road. My brain tried to register similar animals I’ve seen on Cape Cod. But It was too small to be a fisher. And it was too far from significant water to be an otter.
I remembered a friend had mentioned seeing a mink in her yard. Could that be it? Then, a couple of weeks later, neighbors who keep chickens said a mink had come up on their deck. Not a fisher, I asked? Nope, positively a mink, they said.
If that weren’t confirmation enough, the hound weighed in. The other night he went crackers at 2 a.m. ready to defend the house at all costs. The reaction was even beyond his usual bluster when he sees the fox or raccoon, so I’m assuming it was something unfamiliar. A bear seems unlikely, so I’m thinking it was the mink.
Until my recent sighting the only mink I had ever seen was in captivity or around a woman’s neck. Little did I know minks were not only here, but the source of a Cape Cod legend.
Mink are part of the family known as Mustelids. And along with their cousins the fishers, American otters, and ermine and long-tailed weasels, they are native to Massachusetts, according to the state Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. Hold on to that fact, it will be important later. And another fun fact: Minks can release a foul-smelling spray, similar to their distant relative, skunks. So the hound was lucky to have dodged it.
Otters are the biggest Mustelid – up to 30 pounds or so, and hang out in water – like the one the hound spotted in the tidal rocks a couple of years ago. Fishers are the next size, reaching 2 to 3 feet and up to 16 pounds. They prefer uplands and are fearsome – imagine an animal designed by Quentin Tarantino. I watched one drag a full-size rabbit halfway across the road, then drop it briefly, stare at me as if daring me to snatch it, and then retrieve it and head into the undergrowth.
Minks are the next size down, about the weight of a housecat, with a long tail that can be a third the length of their bodies. And weasels – either ermines or the long tailed variety – are the smallest, 12 to 18 inches. But all eat similar diets, ranging from eggs to fish and crustaceans to frogs to small mammals and rodents, including rats. And that brings us to the legend.
After I mentioned the mink to a couple of people, both told me that minks had been brought to the Cape by the Army Corps of Engineers to eat the rats that feast on trash and fish parts discarded by fisherfolk in the riprap along the Cape Cod Canal.
Cool, eh? What a great story, so imagine my disappointment when a spokesperson for the Corps said that it isn’t true. “The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has never released mink along the Cape Cod Canal for rat control or any other purpose. Mink are native to Massachusetts and have long inhabited the region’s wetlands, shorelines and waterways,” spokesperson Troy Darr wrote in an email. I imagined him writing that with an exasperated sigh.
So how did this rumor start? Coincidence, Darr offered. It dates back several decades when two things happened: The Corps used to maintain bait boxes along the Canal’s riprap to help control rats and around the same time, people saw mink hunting rodents and scavenging. “It’s easy to see how those observations became linked and eventually grew into a persistent local legend,” he said.
In other words, rats and minks were here before the Canal, they just recognized good real estate when they saw it.
These days, Darr said, rat control at the Canal depends on practical measures like trash removal and “targeted pest control” as well as native predators such as hawks, owls, foxes and wait for it … minks.
Now you could take a conspiratorial attitude toward this and imagine a cover-up, but I’m inclined to believe the Corps. It makes sense to me that once the Canal riprap became available as a rat buffet that native minks and other predators would move in without any urging at all.
Hey, it’s always tough letting go of a legend. But I like the idea that we all – rats, minks and anglers – have a symbiotic relationship in this matter and an interest in keeping things in balance along the Canal. And no doubt it helps keep the rats out of the Cape Cod Tunnel.
