Mink and You’ll Bliss It
After going my entire life without seeing a single mink, in the first few months of 2007 I’ve seen them twice. The first time I was parked in the trees of the auto tour, watching for mergansers, when two mink came running up right beside the car, the one behind biting the tail of the one in front. The one in front was making quite a racket before they hit the water and swam across the channel.
The second time was less dramatic but much more brief. I saw this mink swimming towards the shore of Sora Marsh and had just a moment to grab a camera and take a picture. I had two with me, the Canon 10D mounted to my 100-400mm lens and the Canon 20D mounted to a 500mm lens with a 1.4X teleconverter. The big lens would be too much for the long slender mink, and there was no time to remove the teleconverter. The 10D had powered down, however, and there was no time to wait for it to power up. So I grabbed the big lens and did the best I could. I would have preferred the entire bushy tail to be in the picture, but not bad given the situation.