North Dakota’s mink records cluster in the wetland refuges of the prairie pothole region: J. Clark Salyer, Chase Lake, and Des Lacs National Wildlife Refuges, where glacial-era depressions hold shallow water and dense shoreline cover year-round.
Mink need a shoreline to den along, and a muskrat burrow, root tangle, or hollow log works fine, so these wetland complexes supply the denning cover plus the fish, crayfish, and muskrats mink hunt in both water and on land.
Records here are occasional rather than dense, and reported sightings peak in March and July. That pattern probably says more about when people are out at these refuges than about when mink themselves are most active, since records this sparse don’t map cleanly onto real seasonal behavior.
Full species profile
