Bog Myrtle & Peat

Having spoken to the keeper on some neighbouring ground, I picked up some worrying information about a new enemy. I was told that mink appear here and there on his moor, and given that much of the low ground on the Chayne is criss-crossed with ditches and streams, it seems more than possible that there are one or two of those vicious foreigners doing the rounds on my patch.

Having access to a well weathered Mk.6 spring trap, I set it up this afternoon in one of the main burn sides, and I spent some time camouflaging it and making it inpenetrable to anything except a mink. I know that otters pass through the ditches now and again, so extra care had to be taken to make the trap site totally secure and inaccessible to otters. The job would have been easy if I had had a spade, but for some idiotic reason I had left mine at home. As it was, I was forced to burrow an arm’s length into the river bank using only my fingers and a hammer. After half an hour’s work, I had cleared out a satisfactory ditch in the river bank, and I set the Mk. 6 well inside. Taking part of a trout fillet from the “oops” section of Tesco, I broke it into pieces and stuffed half under the trigger plate of the trap and scratched the rest into the far wall of the tunnel. Then I covered the whole thing over with a board and built stones and sods over the top to conceal the whole thing.

As an extra precaution against otters, I nailed some sturdy hazel pegs into a cross over the entrance, and set the stones so that they would collapse onto the trap and spring it if anything tried to dig in from above. In theory, any passing mink will quickly find the trap and fling themselves into it. If there are none around at the moment, it will do no harm to have it permanently set and checked so that any newcomers will receive a short, sharp shock.