When he was a City of North Vancouver councillor, Bill Bell dealt with the idiotic and the despotic, but on Thursday he had a run-in with the semi-aquatic.
Bell was at the foot of Lonsdale when he spotted something furry scurry between the rocks.
"Bill! Look! Was that a rat?" his wife, Dorothy, asked.
Having played on the docks as a child, Bell had seen his share of beady-eyed cheese-eaters, and realized it may have been a mink.
"If it is a mink, North Vancouver Lower Lonsdale has really gone upscale, even for the animals," he said.
After taking out his camera, Bell moved in on the mustelid until he was about nine metres away, observing one parent and two camera-shy baby minks right underneath the docks.
"The big one just came out and started staring at me," he said.
Thanks to the mink's willingness to pose, Bell was able to snap a few pictures, but identifying the creatures still proved difficult.
"I've had three people that are absolutely sure it's a long-tailed weasel, a marten, and a mink," he said. "The only thing I'm sure about: it wasn't a Norwegian rat."
Asked if he named the animal, Bell laughed. "The people that called it a weasel were naming it local politicians, but I won't go there," he said.
The carnivorous critter, identified as a mink by both the Lynn Canyon Ecology Centre and the Wildlife Rescue Association of B.C., is commonly found around the B.C. shoreline.
Mink feast on fish, frogs, crabs and small mammals.
Reports stating the mink wandered ashore to weigh in on the LoLo vs. Lower Lonsdale controversy are unsubstantiated.
