Mood sombre

This is not my first blip of faeces and probably will not be the last.

It's the calling card that was left in the duck house last night when two of my ducks were killed and the third badly injured by a night visitor that ripped their throats open and sucked their blood. Not a vampire as such but a mustelid: from the size of the scat most probably a mink, that wormed its way through the stone wall or crevice under the door. (They can get through an aperture the size of a 50p coin apparently and are notoriously aggressive when they encounter prey.)

Mink are not native to the British Isles but were brought in from North America for fur farming in the late 1920s. Inevitably some escaped or were released and by the 50s they had established themselves in the wild; later in the century many were 'liberated' by animal rights activists who appeared to believe that foreign mink reared in captivity (where they were supplied with food and shelter) were entitled to go free and devastate indigenous populations of small mammals, song and sea birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians (not to mention poultry). In particular mink have been held responsible for the collapse of the water vole population - the species is highly endangered and has disappeared from many rivers. Mink have no natural predators here, they are elusive and hard to catch.

It's easy to demonize animals we don't like. I eat meat too but I usually leave the killing of it to other people and trust the process it isn't too brutal. I'm also descended from a long line of furriers who made hats to keep my Russian ancestors' heads warm. The mink's reputation as an opportunistic and wasteful killer that destroys far more than it can consume is ill-founded: in their native Canada they can kill large quantities of prey and store it in the frozen ground to eat later. Mink evolved to be efficient predators, we took them for our own purposes and the result is that they have exploited an ecological niche where they don't belong.

Nevertheless I was fond of my ducks and will miss their gentle quacking and waddling, and their eggs. They didn't stand a chance against a mink.
I gave them a sea burial and as their bodies tumbled down the cliff a few white feathers caught the wind and floated up into the air.