Wyoming’s occurrence data holds just 79 American mink records, the sparsest total among the state’s common furbearers. Sixty-two of those come from iNaturalist, and four alone were logged inside Grand Teton National Park, the single most-documented spot for this species in the state.
Tied to the same water as the beaver
A mink never strays far from a shoreline, denning in a hollow log, root tangle, or muskrat burrow it’s taken over rather than dug itself. In Wyoming that means the same stretches of slow water the state’s beavers already shape: the Snake River bottomlands in Grand Teton, plus scattered stream and pond edges in the Shoshone and Bridger-Teton national forests. Wyoming’s vast dry sagebrush basins, the Red Desert and the Great Divide Basin among them, offer almost none of that permanent shoreline, which is likely the biggest reason mink records stay this thin statewide.
A hunter working two habitats at once
On the water a mink takes fish, crayfish, frogs, and aquatic insects; on the bank it turns to voles, muskrats, and ground-nesting birds. That flexibility lets it work a single stretch of shoreline year-round rather than ranging widely, which may also help explain why so few get recorded. Records rise slightly in summer, when Wyoming’s rivers run lowest and a mink working the shallows is easiest to spot.
Status in Wyoming
NatureServe ranks the American mink S5, Secure, statewide, and it’s native to Wyoming. Its low record count here reflects how hard a small, shoreline-bound hunter is to document, not how many actually live along the state’s rivers.
Full species profile
