Birth control and bullets
A friend of mine had a mink in his farmyard last week. It was a bold little critter — after casually eating the eggs out of a wild pheasant nest, it posed for photos then slipped off into the nettles. Happily, his neighbour is a gamekeeper and the mink will not be around for much longer. In a strange way, the mink was a trip down memory lane for him. In the 1980s, when his grandparents had the farm, mink were abundant.
They rolled about in the river pool below the house and ate their way through the duck, oystercatcher and plover eggs. Huge efforts to control them, combined with the return of the more formidable otter, saw numbers tumble but, obviously, they were never eradicated.
Mink are
