ThePineMartenblog

Pine marten conservation is set to gain from the Great North Run on September 19th, and it appears that I’m doing all of the leg-work!

As the VWT’s Pine Marten Project Manager, I’m raising funds to provide den boxes for this charismatic and elusive species which is in dire need of our help. Pine martens used to be the commonest carnivore in Britain but, as a result of historical persecution and large-scale woodland clearance, they are now the rarest native carnivore in England and Wales. But there is a great way that you can help.

Pine marten; the rarest (and clearly the most charismatic!) carnivore in England and Wales.

Sadly, suitable natural breeding sites are now very rare due to the scarcity of old trees within woodland, that would normally provide appropriate and cosy cavities above ground, safe from the attention of their predators. But the good news is that we can do something to help out these dwindling populations. Den boxes (“bird boxes for mammals”!) are a great way to provide martens with this crucial missing resource, and they’re a very effective and popular solution with the martens too…

A female pine marten and her kit in a den box

Essentially I’m stepping out in September in the hope of stepping up our national pine marten den box scheme, and I hope that despite the obvious tough times we’re all facing, you’ll feel inspired and able to contribute to our efforts. If you can, please visit http://www.everyclick.com/vwtpinemartenconservation to sponsor me and help us to help them! Any contribution you can make to our endeavours will be a great boost to pine marten conservation here, and we’ll be extremely grateful for your support.

Suffice to say that I’m working hard to ensure I cross the line without a break. To be quite honest this will be no mean feat as I’ve never entered a race before in my life, but I’ve been pounding around the Cumbrian fells of late in preparation, determined to succeed, with the thought of pine marten kits snuggled up in one of our boxes driving me on! Please do visit my donations page if you can (http://www.everyclick.com/vwtpinemartenconservation), and also feel free to have a look around the rest of this website (www.pinemarten.info) to learn a little bit more about pine martens and our work.

Oh, and did I mention that I’ll also be doing it in fancy dress? I’ll send everyone that donates a picture of myself looking daft on the big day, but for now I’d better get on with sowing on my faux fur ears and tail…

Many thanks in advance! It really is very much appreciated.

Neil

A luxury pine marten penthouse is hoisted into position

Check out our latest Prospects for Pine Martens e-zine!

Prospects for Pine Martens e-zine Sept 2010

A “Great North Thank You” to everyone who took part in our exhaustive and exhausting series of 11 scat surveys we called the “Great North Pine Marten Pursuit”; and how great it was.

Pre-survey briefing

It was a fantastic success, most importantly because we had a great turn out of surveyors who generously gave up their time over the 11 surveys, bringing with them bucket loads of enthusiasm and commitment, and collecting a staggering total of 261 scats, many of which looked very promising to the eye (some even smelled promising to the nose). Although it’s quality not quantity that’s important, with such a huge investment it’s not improbable that we could have both; a large quantity of high quality scats, you might say…

All of us at VWT were blown away by the support and commitment shown by everyone involved, and it was great to have attracted interest from around the country, with people travelling from far and wide to get involved. Lakeland Landrover deserves another mention here again, as they provided us with the means to survey some of the more remote areas, and to transport our bulging kit about the north. Their donation of the use of a brand new Landrover defender for the duration of the trip was phenomenally generous, and we simply could not have done what we did without their support. Many thanks again to Jason Hadwin and his team at Torver.

Generously donated by Lakeland Landrover

After catching my breath, I will set about putting together a short report on the entire pursuit, including the crucial DNA results from Waterford of course, and will send this out to everyone as a pdf document. We sincerely hope you enjoyed the surveys as much as we did, and now it’s time to sit back and cross our fingers for news of some pine marten DNA… Word from the lab is that the first set of scats is already being processed, so hopefully we can report back the good news soon.

Many thanks to all who contributed!

261 scats collected overall. How many will be marten only time, and sophisticated DNA-analysis techniques, will tell… We willl keep you posted! Thanks again to everyone who contributed to the haul.

Well we didn’t expect that when we started! If you were on a rainy survey you were in a minority. 74% sunny days. Fantastic weather and fantastic fun!…

Sunshine. Glorious northern sunshine! That’s one elusive beast ticked off on the list at least…

“Oh you’re doing a pine marten scat survey. So you’re picking up bird droppings then?”…

This common misconception, repeated again today at our campsite, may well be an accurate description of our activities in Hamsterley forest this time around. Positioned as it in on the moorland fringe, Hamsterley is rather a haven for pheasants, and we were almost blown away by the abundance of suspected pheasant ‘scats’ encountered on our particular transect. The stark vacuum of predator evidence, in our particular sector at least, was also evident.

Some of our groups did report encounters with a few obvious fox scats, and also collected a number of ‘scats of interest’- scats that they could not definitely say were not deposited by a marten, which is encouraging, but we didn’t see a single one on our 4 or 5km search, which can probably be summed up as rather a pheasant fest. A number of the young birds burst out of the brush as we struggled around this predator vacuum, their immature plumage showing signs of being replaced by the beginnings of their typical adult clothes. Beautiful birds indeed, but at what cost? How compatible are pine martens (and other native predators) with these non-native but economically valuable birds? There are difficult issues and conflicting interests to balance.

Pheasant feeder in Hamsterley Forest

So far on our trip across the north we’ve seen many different areas, and it’s been extremely interesting and enlightening to see them in such quick succession. Superficially these forests can look very similar, but there are subtle and substantial factors that differ between them. How and where do martens fit in this ecological and political landscape?

Pre-walk team-talk

Again we were joined by a large number of surveyors, kindly giving up their day to join in our search (Andrey Boytsove came all the way up from London- bearing scats from the New Forest- and deserves special mention here, while Deborah Monk of Hamsterley itself to provide much-needed local knowledge!). Although multiple surveys on the bounce are clearly not affecting the enthusiasm of the volunteers (David Hardy has now done four surveys in a row, so particular thanks to him!), I however may be starting to show the signs of prolonged time spent in a tent and living out of a Landrover. In the briefing this morning, I expressed my gratitude to the many volunteers who’d turned out on such a wet Sunday, which would have been fine had it not been a sunny Saturday! Regardless of the day and the weather we really are very pleased to have had such great support, and I can’t thank everyone enough for their time and enthusiasm.  As always we await the DNA results with interest, and I’m going to have a day of R&R!..

Saturday night at the survey!

The previous night we had seen the first rain for a few days, which left us to retreat into our tent to shelter. It was with great relief that we awoke this morning to sunshine. Unfortunately our relief was short-lived and by the time we met with the surveyors in Slaley Forest the rain had started again. Despite the wet conditions, our surveyors headed off into the forest undeterred, with eyes peeled for scats. The morning was showery and by the time we reconvened after the survey the rain had become heavy. It seemed that the weather couldn’t dampen the enthusiasm of our fantastic group of surveyors and we ended the day with a good crop of scats, despite the soggy ground conditions.

After bidding goodbye to the surveyors, we hastily bundled  the scat kits and resulting paperwork in the car and drove south through the rain into County Durham to our next campsite ready for the survey tomorrow.

Bright and early this morning, we de-camped and headed into Kidland for the final time to review the cameras that we had set up last night. Unfortunately, the bait set out hadn’t been taken and the camera on the den box hadn’t been triggered. The martens were clearly camera-shy or elsewhere…

It was with a hint of sadness that we left Kidland and headed to Harwood Forest for the next survey. Although we spent 2 days and 3 nights at Kidland, it didn’t feel like we did the forest justice, as the area is so vast that it feels like there was much more we could have done, if we had the time and resources. Having said that, we were really fortunate to have had phenomenal support from the Northumberland Wildlife Trust, and we did certainly cover as much ground as we could be expected to. Kidland is certainly a fantastic place for wildlife, and sightings during our stay included many roe deer, kestrels, buzzards, a peregrine falcon, a red squirrel and a brown hare. Rather less excitingly, masses of sheep seemed to take a thrill from dodging in front of our Landrover as we passed by. Only time will tell if we will have detected a marten during our trip, as we wait for the DNA results from Waterford, and we’ll be publishing them here as soon as we hear them.

A few miles down the road we arrived at Harwood and were pleased to discover that all bar one of the day’s surveyors had been present at yesterday’s survey at Kidland and were returning for more scatological searching. This intrepid band of volunteers included our cycling scat collector whom, it transpired, was somewhat of an expert pine marten scat collector, having done daily surveys in Scotland a few years ago; a very valuable addition to the team. We were again joined by a number of volunteers from the Northumberland Wildlife Trust (Kevin O’Hara’s volunteer army), and so were again well set to cover a good amount of promising ground.

If you’ve been wading through the other posts, then you’ll be familiar with the survey format by now and so I won’t recount that here. There are only so many scatological references one can stomach after all, but we were lucky enough to have a fantastic view of a stoat hunting rabbits in the heart of the forest. Seeing a rather sleek and low-slung dark form gliding through the dappled shade (it was another glorious day!) and into a log pile, we crept forward for a closer look. A rabbit darted left, then another, and then a much smaller sleeker animal dashed from the wood pile away from us and up and over a small rocky pile, which was the remains of a partially collapsed dry stone wall. This particular individual was a rather dull brown, almost grey colour, but the black tip to the rather thin tail was immediately obvious and, along with the overall shape and size of this low-slung Mustelid, marked it out as a stoat. It was gone in a flash, along with its intended meal, and we felt a little guilty about that was we continued along our trail hunting for signs of its larger and more elusive cousin.

The end of another great survey!