Earth Almanac: January/February 2005

Comeback Trail

They are still grievously depressed in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and the eastern United States, but pine martens are slowly recovering in boreal forests throughout most of their range. Maybe you've seen one and not known what it was—that catlike, cat-size creature with the sharp face and rounded ears that wrapped its long body and bushy tail behind a spruce or fir bough and fixed you with big eyes. Martens don't hibernate but deal with extreme cold by tunneling into snow, where temperatures can't get much below freezing. The best chance of encountering these cousins of the otter, fisher, and mink, or at least of seeing where they have been, is in winter, when other animal activity wanes in the north woods and when the marten's passage is written on new snow. Tracks reveal a bounding, 20-inch stride with five-toed footprints between 1.5 and 2.5 inches wide and 3 to 4 inches long. Our lust for the glossy brown fur of the species almost did it in. By the mid-19th century the Hudson's Bay Company was trading about 180,000 marten pelts a year, and by the 1940s a pelt was fetching as much as $100.