NO- 3584 EXTINCT SEA MINK — MANVILLE 5 



and correspondence on the sea mink. They include material from 

 Mrs. Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, the daughter of Manly Hardy, who 

 was custodian of her grandfather's and father's business records from 

 1835 to 1890. She was well acquainted with the large "seashore" 

 mink and recalled seeing it when she was a child in the 1870s. The 

 Abnaki Indians called it "mousebeysoo," meaning "wet thing." 

 Mink skins commanded their highest price — about $10.00 for the top 

 quality — at the close of the Civil War, and this, Mrs. Eckstorm 

 believed, led to the animal's extermination. 



Mrs. Eckstorm wrote further, in 1935, as follows: 



There is the question whether all mink that lived nloug the shore were the big 

 sea mink. Were there two kinds there? I do not remember it, if there were. . . . 

 I had a very practical acquaintance with birds for many years, while my father 

 was collecting his series, and I often observed the tendency of restricted island 

 forms, or those peculiar to the sea-coast, to run larger and darker than the inshore 

 sub-species. . . . Why should these mink all be redder and larger, if there were 

 two species on the same territory? The variation was constant. . . . My own 

 opinion is that there were not two species of mink on our coast, but an extra- 

 large sub-species most highly developed on Swan's and Marshall's Islands. . . . 

 My father laughed at the inferences drawn from a single skull. ... As to their 

 being styled "species ?Man-ofZon," "big-toothed, "of course an animal twice as largo 

 as another of the same sort would have a bigger skull and bigger teeth! This is 

 only an individual difference. I see no reason for making a species out of this 

 mink, though it was a stable variety. Father could tell some eight or ten different 

 local forms of mink and he thought several entitled to as good specific standing as 

 the seashore mink. 



Other material provided by Stupka relates to an interview in 1934 

 with Captain Kodney Sadler of Bar Harbor. He recalled seeing the 

 "bull mink" as late as perhaps 1920, swimming from one island to 

 another in the Sorrento region. It made its home on the ocean front, 

 among the rocks of the seawall piled up by the surf. Its den always 

 had two entrances. An adult and four young, which Sadler estimated 

 to be 3 or 4 weeks old (8-10 inches long), were seen along the beach 

 of Sister's Island in August. This was "40 odd years ago." The young 

 were very attractive, lighter in color than the dark brown adult. 

 The bull mink were said to feed almost entirely on fish; the most 

 common remains about their dens \\ere of toad sculpin (probably 

 Myoxocephalus ododecemspinosiis) and horned pout (probably Macro- 

 zoarces americanus). Mansueti (1954) stated they had been reported 

 in association with the banded snail, Cepaea (Helix) hortensis, on the 

 outer islands. Probably mussels and other shellfish also contributed to 

 their diet. 



Allen (1942, p. 181) subscribes to the view that, in earlier times, 

 only the large sea mink occurred in the eastern part of the Gulf of 

 Maine, probably ranging as far as southern Nova Scotia. Evidently 



22S-9C8— 66 2 



