The mink is one of my favorite animals, so I’m always happy to find tracks like these, from a Tracking Club outing a few weeks ago. The marks made by the toes (5 on both front and rear feet) are small and oval or tear-drop shaped, and they form lopsided crescents around the middle pads. The claws may show as tiny pricks or as pointed extensions of the toes. The smallest toe lies on the inside of the track and farther back than the other toes, and it doesn’t always show. The mink that left these impressions was fidgeting around on a patch of stream side mud (the water is visible at the upper left) and the clear prints are mostly from the front feet.
But the beauty of mink tracks goes beyond the delicacy of individual prints–the trails that these animals make are equally fascinating. 
Here are the two front and two rear tracks of a mink arranged in a pattern often seen in mink trails. The first track at the lower right is the right front, and the last one at the upper left is the left rear. In the center of the photo the left front is on the left and the right rear is on the right. The animal was loping from the lower right to the upper left, and the order of footfalls was right front, left front, right rear, left rear. 
A mink traveling 
on stream ice a few winters ago left a string of similar four-print patterns. In the center of each grouping the left front print is slightly behind instead of ahead of the right rear, but otherwise they’re a good match with the previous photo, with the same direction of travel and order of footfalls. Notice how the four-print groupings are separated by spaces with no tracks–a characteristic of lopes and gallops. When I see trails like this I can picture the mink doing its easy, ground-covering lope, its spine curving and extending with each landing and take-off. I couldn’t find a video of a loping mink that I liked, but I did find one of a fisher (closely related to the mink) doing the same gait. Watch it here.
Stream edges are great 
places for finding mink tracks, especially if there are roots or debris piles where prey animals can hide. The patch of sand visible in the center of this photo captured the tracks of a mink that was hunting in the surrounding tangle of logs and branches, deposited by a big flood several years ago.
But minks are resourceful when it comes to finding food. Last spring I was walking by an old log landing and I noticed a drying mud puddle. I’m always interested in mud so I went over to take a look, and to my surprise found mink tracks around the edges. There was a small pond nearby, but otherwise not much water, and I didn’t understand why this place–just a big area of bared mineral soil with a few mud puddles–would interest a mink. 
But the tracks were plentiful and very clearly mink. In the photo on the right the mink tracks run from lower left to upper right, and the big prints in the middle belong to my dog. As I moved around the edge and pondered, the mystery resolved itself. 
A leopard frog leaped from a grass clump into the water, then another one jumped, and then several more. Some enterprising mink had discovered the puddle, perhaps just as the tadpoles were transforming into frogs, and made use of the easy dinner. There were still plenty of frogs left to spend their summer feeding in the surrounding forest, overwinter deep in the soil, and then mate and lay eggs in the puddle next spring.