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Minkenry

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Everything posted by Minkenry

  1. Minkenry
    So I took Thioⁿba hunting again tonight. This time I took her to my neighbor's house where he has a chicken coop. I was a little worried Thioⁿba might have forgotten her training on chickens, but much to my pleasant surprise she remembered perfectly. She practically ran through the legs of roosting chickens as she searched for rats, TOTALLY ignoring the birds! Literally SECONDS after releasing her, she nailed a rat under a chicken's nest box. The rat somehow escaped and ran straight up the trunk of a large old tree that was in the middle of the chicken coop. Thioⁿba followed it right up the tr
  2. Minkenry
    Yes my bond with a bottle raised mink is more like a dog than most people and their ferret, or a falconer and their bird, however the mink I get as adults don't have near as strong a bond with me. Some mink I tame as adults seem to like my company, and other mink make it clear that they just put up with me. The best hunting mink I've had, actually had the weakest bond with me when compared to all my other mink. So I don't think the bond is necessary to hunt with a mink, though it does make hunting and working with a mink much more pleasant. If I want a mink to imprint on me, I take a baby
  3. Minkenry
    This morning we had a fun little hunt. Yesterday morning was more of a scouting trip than a hunting trip. This morning I took Thioⁿba to a park where I KNEW there would be plenty of game. This park has a stream that flows through it that is always full of muskrats. When the weather is nice, people come an throw bread to the ducks which also attracts lots of brown rats during the spring, summer and fall months. I turned Thioⁿba loose and she went to work. We spent the first hour searching for, but not finding any rats. Then, Thioⁿba found a big albino tout hiding under the bank in the entra
  4. Minkenry
    On October 9th, I took Thioⁿba on her first ever muskrat hunt. She worked BEAUTIFULLY! She worked with a PERFECT combination of independently searching for game with her nose, and yet still watching me for clues to see if I had found game. She traveled out ahead of me, searching for game on her own, but also kept an eye out for me to make sure we weren't separated. I was absolutely AMAZED at how well she both searched for game, yet also tried to make sure we were together. At one point she disappeared into some muskrat tunnels through some thick grass along the bank of the canal. I didn't kn
  5. Minkenry
    Ok, so here's the story of Thioⁿba's first hunt on October 2. This was my now 5 month old baby mink Thioⁿbasabe's first real squirrel hunt. Up until this point we have just done caching training, and a couple of unsuccessful rat hunts. I've given her a couple squirrels to catch in artificial situations, but this was her fist time going after completely wild squirrels. I took her to a really good spot were my mink Missy also caught her first two squirrels. It's two old barns that boarder a duck pond on one side, and a river on the other. There is a good colony of squirrels there, and the s
  6. Minkenry
    Yep, this one was bottle raised from 36 days old. It sure does make a difference. The bottle raised ones are much more socially attached to you, and you can get away with a lot more than you can with a mink you trained from an adult. Any mink can learn to come when called, and learn cues as to where you've seen game. The difference with a baby is they actually like to be near you for more reasons than just food, and they actually enjoy being handled, as apposed to a mink you acquired as an adult who just puts up with it.
  7. Minkenry
    Ok, so my other thread "I hunt with mink" was getting really long so I thought I'd make a new one just about my hunting stories with my mink Thioⁿbasabe' (which by the way means "Black Lightening" in the Omaha Native American language). I decided to give Thioⁿba her own thread so I can use this tread to just talk about her training and hunting experiences, and reserve the other thread for basic minkenry information, questions, and such. Since this thread is all about Thioⁿbasabe', I thought I'd post some of her baby pictures, showing her development up until now. Here is Thioⁿbasabe'
  8. Minkenry
    I moved this story to "Minkenry Hunting Stories For Thioⁿbasabe"
  9. Minkenry
    I moved this story to "Minkenry Hunting Stories For Thioⁿbasabe"
  10. Minkenry
    Here's my humble opinion, mind you I've never ferreted, or even hunted rabbits with my mink. When hunting any animal, far more escape out of the hole than are ever caught in the hole. I think if you trained a ferret to cache, the ferret would spend 90% or more of it's time chasing rabbits out of the warren, unsuccessfully capturing anything, (thus fulfilling the goal of catching the rabbits with a net) and then when or if the ferret DOES catch a rabbit, it would then cache it, instead of you having to dig it out. At least that's how I would envision it. If rabbits are like any other ground dwe
  11. Minkenry
    I can't say for sure, but I would expect a mink to do the same as a ferret, just with more power and ferocity. Weather their additional strength and determination would help or not, I have no idea.
  12. Minkenry
    You know, I don't know how well my techniques would work with a ferret, since I have very limited experience training ferrets, and no real experience hunting with ferrets. Sorry
  13. Minkenry
    I would 100% agree with this statement. Without years of specialized breeding, mink will never compete with the one job a ferret as been bred to perform for over 1000 years. The point of minkenry for me is the sport of hunting with a mink, not to try and get as much game as possible. However, when hunting muskrat (something a mink will always excel at over any other creature, since that is what nature created them to do) you can have rabbit ferreting like success, if you use a gun to shoot the fleeing muskrat. This is too easy for me, and I have more fun working hard all day for one rat than I
  14. Minkenry
    That is the exact problem I have encountered with mink. Like you said, why should they move their prey when it's already in a good spot? The answer to this question is to give them a reason to move it. To put it simply I teach my mink that their prey will disappear if left in any place other than their box, and if they try to eat what they caught, where they caught it, they will loose their prey and get nothing to eat. If they move their prey to the box, then they get all they can eat in the form pre-ground up meat, and they don't have to go through the effort of chewing through the rabbit's t
  15. Minkenry
    Yes, they have no body odor at all. They have less sent to them than a dog or a cat. However, they do have musk gland that releases a nasty smell if you scare or hurt them. But this smell wears of in a matter of minutes to hours, depending on how much musk they release.
  16. Minkenry
    Here's another still of Thioⁿba. She's dragging her squirrel to the carry box like a good little girl
  17. Minkenry
    they are proper stunning creatures aren't they! I wonder how long it is before someone does the same thing over here now people have seen it can be done? Before I ever joined this forum I had a couple different people from the UK talk about wanting to do what I do. I also had some girls in France that already have pet mink that said they were going to start hunting with them like I do. They ferreted rabbits a little bit with their pet ferrets and already had their own pet mink. It's just a few more steps before they are hunting with them. But talk is cheap, and I haven't seen anyon
  18. Minkenry
    I moved this story to "Minkenry Hunting Stories For Thioⁿbasabe"
  19. Minkenry
    The video I filmed of our squirrel hunt last night didn't turn out very good, but I got a couple cool, but blurry stills from it...
  20. Minkenry
    She caught it under a barn. These squirrels are what we call Rock Squirrels (Spermophilus variegatus). They look like the invasive american grey squirrels you have in your country, but they are larger, and live underground. They can and will climb trees (one of the squirrels we were chasing yesterday climbed up a tree to escape) but they are primarily ground squirrels who dig and live in underground burrows.
  21. Minkenry
    Yes, they have semi webbed feet. Not as webbed as something like a duck or otter, but much more webbed than a ferret or stoat
  22. Minkenry
    Here's some pics of a 736 gram squirrel my mink caught last night...
  23. Minkenry
    Hey, you have the coolest profile picture I've ever seen! A fox going hunting with a stoat on a leash! That's just AWESOME!
  24. Minkenry
    Here's a video of my 5 month old mink getting a rock squirrel in a church yard by my house. http://youtu.be/WnrDEzo1B5k This was rather small for a rock squirrel, but I'm still proud of her.
  25. Minkenry
    I'd say you hit the nail right on the head! What I've done is nothing new in that it's been done before with many other creatures. The only thing you can really call "new" about what I do with mink is the exact recipe. This recipe is just a mixture of methods that were discovered by others before me, but used a little bit differently on different creatures. All I did was figure out the mixture of "ingredients" that worked well for the mink. I didn't really invent anything, just borrowed others original ideas, and customize them to fit the mink. Very very few of the things I do with my mink are
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