Minnesota’s occurrence databases hold 647 records for the American mink, almost all of them logged through iNaturalist. Reports come from Superior National Forest, Chippewa National Forest, and Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge, three very different corners of the state that share one thing: reliable water.
A shoreline hunter that fits any Minnesota wetland
A mink needs a bank to den along and enough cover, root tangles, muskrat burrows, brush piles, to hide the entrance, and Minnesota supplies that in nearly every direction: the rocky lakeshores of the Arrowhead, the marshy prairie-pothole wetlands of the west, and the sloughs threading through Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge in the center of the state. Wherever there’s a muskrat marsh, a mink is a plausible neighbor, since a repurposed muskrat burrow is one of its favorite den sites.
Two peaks, one breeding calendar
Records peak twice in Minnesota, in March and again in July. The March rise lines up with the mink’s late-winter mating season, when males range farther along the bank looking for females and become easier to spot. Delayed implantation stretches the pregnancy that follows, so the July uptick likely tracks a litter of kits leaving the den and dispersing along the same shoreline where they were born.
Status in Minnesota
NatureServe hasn’t assigned Minnesota’s mink a numeric rank, but the species is native here and doesn’t appear on USGS NAS’s nonindigenous list. Its future in the state tracks the health of the marshes and muskrat colonies it depends on for both food and shelter.
Full species profile
