January, 1922 
A ll the weasel family are not water 
lovers. The marten; and sable pre- 
fer rocks and trees and the marten’s fur 
is always sleeker when he has had ac- 
cess to an abundant supply of raspber- 
ries, blue berries, wild cranberries and 
haws; but all the weasel except otter 
are blood-suckers and blood-drunkards. 
Hornaday gives the annual crop of 
mink in America at 60,000, of pine mar- 
ten at 120,000, of fishers at about 10,- 
000. Brass estimates the world supply 
of mink as 600,000 from America; 20,- 
000 from Europe; 20,000 from Asia. 
The Canadian Conservation Report 
gives the Asiatic supply of sables at 
75,000 annually; of American marten at 
120,000. As a matter of financial rec- 
ord, 362,675 mink were exported from 
Canada in 1890. In 1918, 66,297 mink 
sold in New York and 110,000 in St. 
Louis. In the 1920 spring sales, 160,- 
000 mink sold at St. Louis and 7,800 
Russian sable, and 22,500 martens; 21,- 
941 mink sold in Montreal ; 3,400 mar- 
ten; 109 Russian sable; 275 stone mar- 
ten; in New York, almost 14,000 marten. 
I give these widely varying totals to 
illustrate the utter impossibility of keep- 
ing any census of rare furs under the 
present system. A high price such as 
ruled in 1920 for all the weasel family 
(except otter) brings out furs stored 
and waiting for a higher price for per- 
haps five years. A low price, or change 
in fashion, may relegate back to cold 
storage rooms minks and martens sorted 
and ready for sale ; but however you re- 
gard these figures, they don’t look like 
an exterminated weasel family. 
Take the mink first; he is small with 
a yellowish brown, or dark brown fur. 
He prefers the banks of streams but can 
live the life of a land lubber, too. Birds, 
fish, mice and eggs are his favorite diet, 
but he kills for the sheer deviltry of kill- 
ing. Hornaday gives the depredations 
of one mink that killed six wild geese in 
one night and of another that slaugh- 
tered ten gulls. The murderer could not 
have sucked the blood of all these sleep- 
ers without bursting. 
One morning I found on my lawn the 
little body of a beautiful red-breasted 
gross-beak. There was not a ruffle to 
the feathers. The little fellow had per- 
ished in his sleep and fallen to the 
ground. Then I looked closer. Right 
on the red of the breast was a puncture 
no larger than the lead of a lead pencil. 
He had been sucked to death as he slept. 
Another morning I found a fine Ply- 
mouth Rock pullet with the same mur- 
derous knitting needle stab. The weasel 
family had been up to their midnight 
deviltries. My sympathies don’t run out 
to the mink when he is transformed into 
fur. 
The mink is from 10 to 15 inches long. 
He is solitary. He is nocturnal. His 
hand is against all men, like Cain’s, or 
rather against all creatures smaller or 
more helpless than himself. I never look 
in his murderous, beady eyes without be- 
lieving a bit in the transmigration of 
souls ; for ultimately, he falls a victim to 
the stealthy ferocity by which he lives 
and he looks to me like an evil spirit put 
in a corporal form, in which he must 
FOREST AND STREAM 
pursue his glut for blood to the blood- 
thirsty, but never-quenched, end. He 
mates in March and the youfig are 
brought forth blind six weeks later. The 
blindness lasts for five weeks and if the 
mother dies and the little mink be placed 
to suckle with a foster mother, they will 
tear the milk ducts of a cat, and spit 
venum at a baby bottle or ink dropper 
extemporized into a feeder. At eight 
weeks they are weaned and go out on the 
quest of their own blood-thirsty trail. A 
male may have as many as five wives 
in his harem and the kittens number 4 
to 9. 
The best mink pelts to-day come from 
Labrador, the North Eastern States, the 
Maratine Provinces, Hudson Bay, Alaska 
and the Rocky Mountains. 
Best mink is brown rather than yel- 
low, and the pelage is thicker in colder 
countries and is one of the best wearing 
furs in the world. In all the weasel fam- 
ily the deep overhairs are the chief 
beauty and give a lustre and gloss to 
the fur which no dye can impart. 
The ermine 
To the mink’s body measurement of 8 
to 12 inches should be added the tail of 
6 to 8 inches. His tail is pretty but not 
the bushy flag of honor that the sable 
and the fisher can boast. 
I have spoken of mink selling in the 
Rockies at 90c. ; in 1879 it sold in St. 
Louis at 40c. 
I N fur trade classifications there are 
10 varieties of mink in America, but 
these classifications are chiefly as to hab- 
itat, which determines the color and 
depth of the fur. 
The European, or marsh mink, is not 
valued so highly as the American mink. 
Perfect mink fur is so dense you can 
bury your hand in it, so soft if you shut 
your eyes you might mistake it for 
down, and the overhairs are so shiny 
they defy dye. It is the darker strip 
down the back that gives the mink gar- 
ment its striped effect.. The animal is 
not a striped coat fellow like the rac- 
coon. 
Can mink be farmed? It is said they 
can. There are hundreds of mink 
ranches in the United States and three- 
score in Canada alone and the mink are 
undoubtedly kept in perfect health in cap- 
tivity in parks and zoological gardens, 
but the fact remains up to the present 
that the commercial returns have not 
been such that they could be given to 
the public, or that they bulged the fur 
market, or that they bloated up a local 
bank account so that secret profits leaked 
9 
out as in the case of the silver fox 
ranches. 
Mink returns will probably be one of 
the steps forward in fur farming in the 
next ten years. Up to the present, mink 
farmers can make more money selling 
live stock than selling pelts, but with 
prices soaring as they have in 1920, live 
stock will have to turn itself into pelts, 
or the mink farming will not go on. It 
seems absurd that a mink kitten the size 
of your hand should sell at a higher price 
than a two-year old Holstein heifer and 
that is one of the things the fur trade 
will have to justif}' before mink farming 
goes on to success. 
From mink farmers who are at work 
to-day these facts have been gleaned : 
Minks must be given an extensive range. 
They must be near a creek. 
Each family must be kept in a segre- 
gated pen, or they will take to the happy 
diversion of disemboweling one another. 
The nests are about i6 inches by i6 
inehes and 6 inches high and are placed 
in a box hidden in a bank of earth. The 
males are given caves roofed with rock. 
Flesh and fish are ample diet. At the 
end of two months, mothers and young 
are put into separate pens. Six men can 
manage a mink ranch of 2,000 females. 
I do not know how these figures have 
been worked out for a mink ranch with 
2.000 females should be selling at least 
10.000 mink a year and clearing up nqt 
far short of $200,000 a year, and I do 
not know of any minkery for which such 
claims are even remotely made, though 
it is well to remember one silver fox 
farm had cleaned up $225,000 before 
nearest neighbors knew it was not a 
failure. 
Male mink are very vicious and some- 
times canine teeth have to be filed be- 
fore they are admitted to their mates. 
The warning is issued by all mink ranch- 
ers to wear mits, and to take the young 
away from the mothers at the 8th or 
loth week, or one may have the blood 
thirst awakened in him some night and 
slake it in the jugular vein of his mother 
or his brother. Oh, they are a nice do- 
mestic little bunch, the mink, and there 
is nothing so becoming in a mink to me 
as its apotheosis into a girl’s collar. It 
is an instance when the scalper’s scalp 
can be worn with beauty, satisfaction and 
a sense of righteousness. 
In summer, vary the diet with milk, 
bread and mush. I do not know the why 
of it, but feeders all warn not to give 
salt in any form to mink. Prices of 
breeders run from $30 to $200 a pair. 
"^HE Kolinsky in the last ten years 
has become a favorite fur in Amer- 
ica. It is not a false mink. It is simply 
a Siberian and Japanese mink, which has 
to be dyed because its native color is 
something between an orange and the 
.shade of the yolk of an egg. It is known 
as “the red sable,” “the Turkish sable" 
and “the .golden sable.” Its body is 
about 18 inches long and its tail is u.scd 
for paint brushes. About 80.000 a year 
are trapped in Siberia. The Japanese 
kolinsky is a lighter yellow than the 
Siberian; and the tail of the kolinsky is 
{Continued on page 37) 
