A wildlife group is aiming to eradicate invasive American mink from all of Britain after ridding them from part of England during a three-year trial. This involved a new approach that used the scents of mink’s anal glands as bait to lure them into smart traps, marking the first time the animal has been eradicated from a large area anywhere in the world.
“Until about a month ago, I thought mink had not been eradicated from anywhere,” says Tony Martin, chair of the Waterlife Recovery Trust, which organised the trial alongside volunteers. “Then I found a report of a little island off Estonia where they had got rid of them, but nothing on anything like this scale. This is the orders of magnitude bigger.”
Mink are small semiaquatic predators that are related to weasels and are often farmed for their fur. As a result of them escaping from farms or being released by animal activists over the past century, American mink (Neogale vison), which are native to North America, have spread to many parts of Europe and South America.