Muskrat attacks a Mink!

It always seemed like a no brainer to me. Minks are sneaky little predators with a reputation for killing everything up to twice their size. They like to cache what they kill in their dens, and once, according to a book I read, somebody found 13 dead muskrats there. Muskrats are big rats that spend most of their nibbling grasses in and around ponds and rivers. They can swim, but so can minks. They are bigger than minks but not that much bigger.

My friend Jeff Hanna took the photo below:



while I was handling the camcorder:

Now that's the way it is suppose to be, although as long as I was watching the mink around that pond, he didn't catch that muskrat and went off to another pond. The muskrat soon went about its business of nibbling grasses, but it wasn't foolhardy enough to chase the mink.

Then a few years later I was sitting beside a pond once and saw a mink making its rounds along the opposite shore. It poked it nose in the wrong muskrat burrow. Go, rat, Go!

I am not sure what to make of this contest between these animals except to suggest that we humans have crowned the King of the Beasts and then a descending rank of predators of which the mink is the one, who by our version of natural law, reigns over muskrats. Somebody forgot to tell the muskrats.