A little after lunchtime on Jan. 14, Brad Herrick was heading out the door to walk his dog, Ruby, when he thought he saw a dog running loose.
About 20 yards away, it was trotting down the sidewalk on East Dayton Street past Lapham Elementary School. It was skinny and its brown coat looked âdisheveled.â
Herrick, an ecologist with the UW Arboretum, did a double-take.
âThatâs a coyote,â he realized.
Karl Lang shot this photo of a coyote feasting on a rabbit from the window of his home on Waunona Way. It s wearing a radio collar researchers use to track its movement.
By Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
Jan 30, 2021 3:01 PM
By Kate Golden
For Wisconsin Watch
The first sign of trouble was that the mink stopped eating, said Hugh Hildebrandt, one of two main mink vets in Wisconsin. Next came coughing and sneezing, lethargy and labored breathing. Hildebrandt had worked with mink for 30 years. He wrote the Merck Veterinary Manual section on mink. But he had never seen anything like this.
Captive mink have a flu season in the fall, just like people they get it from us, in fact. But what appeared in the two Taylor County, Wisconsin mink farms that saw outbreaks in October was not flu, which tends to sicken the weakest animals. This took out the strongest mink, the mature adult females. Over a few days, it killed hundreds per day and about 5,500 total on the two ranches. It whipped through by coat color, light to dark: The lighter-coat mink, ranch-bred to bring out recessive genes, have long been more delicate.
Finnish auction house takes over Wisconsin mink trading hub
Chris Hubbuch
STOUGHTON, Wis. (AP) – Under the harsh light of fluorescent bulbs in an unadorned warehouse, Claudia Manzanilla picks up a stiff mink pelt and runs her fingers along the silvery fur.
In less than a second, she assesses the length of the fur, sorts it and grabs another seemingly identical pelt from a pile of stiffened animal skins.
The evaluation is one step in an elaborate process to grade the furs provided by American mink farmers before they re sold a step that almost didn t happen this year.
Last fall North American Fur Auctions, a 350-year-old Canadian company with offices in Stoughton, entered court-supervised restructuring, closing one of the primary market portals just as Wisconsin mink ranchers were beginning their harvest.