We've been scouting this new area for a long time, consistently finding Pine Marten scats on the forest track but have been reluctant to put a camera out because of the walking distance involved. It's roughly an 8 mile circular walk, that's a whole afternoon... We like to keep a close eye on our cameras, partly to keep them safe from forest operations but also to see what the PM's are up to.. This location will be really challenging to monitor especially with dark winter nights rapidly approaching.
Initially we placed eggs at two locations trying to pinpoint an area to camera trap. The first location had 8 scats on the road of differing decomposition. Finding that number of scats at one location is gold dust to us... we call a spot like that 'shit corner,' It seems such a spot is a territory overlap so.. two or more pine marten's.
The second location we chose due to scat history...
The 'shit corner' location didn't disappoint.
First to appear was Twiggy, a female with a distinctive bib, she has a few blobs up the middle of her chest and a light coloured left shoulder/neck. Her behaviour is completely different to any other PM we've come across. She pulls the twigs away that forms the egg platform, (hence her name Twiggy) the eggs fall to the ground...she walks around with the branches in her mouth.. bizarre indeed.
Every other Marten we've found, picks each egg from the platform..
In this clip she actually tries to nuzzle the egg along the ground but has a twig in her mouth at the time...really unusual.
We have landed lucky with this location but, we've learned a lot over the last two years... that's allowed us to more accurately search areas and deploy cameras to best effect.
This blog is for our new PM Twiggy, but we also have a new Male, 'possibly last years Kit' from our adjacent PM territory... and maybe even a third Marten....
The second location we decided on hasn't produced any results yet. We still haven't found recent scats though... looks like the Marten movement has changed in this area... it's roughly 2 miles from location one.
When we search new locations we use less expensive 'scouting cameras'. Bad quality! Having successfully found new Marten's we'll place good quality cameras in order to get proper footage and identification.
No comments:
Post a Comment