It's a bird, it's a plane .... no! it's a ferret, um ... a mink? Yes, a mink.

Thursday the children saw an animal in the front yard.  Since I was at work, Lance identified it as a ferret.  We didn't see it anymore that night though so I figured it simply passing through.

Friday as we were getting ready for school we saw our ferret again.  This time he was pulling off the blades of our ornamental grasses and dragging them under the decorative pond.  We watched as he pulled mouthful after mouthful of grass down into his nest.  We worried he belonged to someone and wouldn't survive very well outside so we tried to lure him inside with pieces of chicken, which he ate from our hands. 

After taking the kids to school I again went to find him in his nest, but instead found him under our lawn mower in the garage stealing pieces of cat food by poking his nose out, grabbing a piece, and hiding again. 

By this time we were pretty worried he was being missed by some family.  He looked healthy and well taken care of and his coat was a beautiful, BEAUTIFUL, glossy black.

Knowing we needed to get him to the animal shelter so his family could claim him, I called animal control who sent an officer over.  By this time our ferret, who I now called "Sweetie", had hidden in the engine of our car.  So the officer left a cat trap with us.  About an hour later Sweetie was in the trap and I moved him and the trap inside to the kitchen so he could be warm.  I also gave him a bowl of water which he immediately slurpped up.  Ferrets don't drink like a cat or dog lapping with their tongues, but slurp like a child.   

Knowing that my kids and the neighbor kids and Lance wanted to try and play with the ferret I put off calling the city for a while.  Worried that Sweetie was stressed out, I put a couple of towels in the cage for him to lay on as well as a blanket over the cage to create a dark, secure shelter for our guest.

Several things did bother me in the back of my mind.
First - the animal shelter reported that no one had called looking for their ferret.  He was so beautiful and tame, how come no one was missing him?
Second - there wasn't a single picture on the entire internet of a solid black ferret.  I figured he was a very rare ferret but this led me back to problem one, why was no one looking for a gorgeous, rare, all black ferret?

Third - tame ferrets don't survive well in the wild.  This ferret had found a den, built a nest with grass, and was stealing cat food in a garage that housed 4 cats.  Sweetie was a really smart and rare ferret.

Well, the kids came home and renamed him Blackie.  He petted him through the cage and fed him more chicken from our fingers.  We admired him, he was the most beautiful animal I'd ever seen.

Lance came home and tried to hold him.  Blackie didn't like this as much and nipped at the leather gloves he was wearing.  We talked with our brother-in-law Jeff who told us if it was solid black it wasn't a ferret, it was a mink.  We were pampering a wild (or maybe escaped from a farm?) mink.  We all now started calling him "Minky" and started the process of explaining to the kids that minks aren't pets (we'd thought about adopting him out of the shelter if his owners couldn't be found) and Minky would be released back into the hills. 

We wanted to keep him overnight but figured that would be too stressful for Minky and cause too much attachment by all of us, so we bit the bullet and called the city officer back.  He came and agreed with us, that we indeed had a mink.

No wonder he was so beautiful and soft.  I even have pictures to prove this story is true. I never did take pictures of the nest of starlings we raised in our barbecue grill last summer so I was sure to document this event properly.