Weasel and Marten, take 2

For the next few months, I’m maintaining wolverine traps and baited camera stations in the North Cascades of Washington. It sounds glorious… news of my duties prompted a friend to write “I hate you Dan.” And it is. And it is also tiring and hard work. I spend my days shoveling the traps out, and pulling and tugging on stuck snowmobiles. Still, on nice days, i sometimes feel guilty for being paid to be out there.

But to get to the point… i wrote a bit ago about the difference between weasel and marten tracks, and to close a circle–in the last two days i have laid eyes on both creatures. Yesterday a beautiful weasel–white save for a black-tipped tail, was started by our passing snowmobiles, and after scrambling across the snow surface for twenty feet or so, decided to duck his body below the snow to hide. His head popped out for a peek a few seconds later. His motion seemed slow, but at the same time was much faster than any of us could have managed in the foot or so of powder he was skipping over.

And today the phone rang at 7 am (the horror!) with the message that our boss had traps giving the “closed” signal on radio telemetry and he needed people to go check them. Admittedly, i don’t have much of a social life, so i had no other plans for a saturday and soon found myself on a snowmobile headed to check two traps. We’re trying to catch wolverines, but they are rare to catch. More often, it is martens (American pine marten?) that trigger the trap. They sit in there and chew away contentedly on the provided deer or beaver and patiently wait for a biologist to come and open the door for them. Sure enough, that’s what we got. Good picture, though. Cute critter.

So from paired tracks to paired animals. Life is good.

A few days later we found the same marten in the trap again. This short video is a bit amusing:

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Weasel and Marten

Took some photos a few weeks back while snowshoeing, and thought maybe i should share them for anyone interested in snow tracking and telling the members of the weasel family apart. I will soon be doing some winter work with wolverines, so hopefully i’ll be able to add some wolverine track photos later on.

The photos are particularly useful (i think) because i found a spot where weasel and marten crossed paths, so a comparison was particularly easy.

But first the weasel solo — the leatherman measures 4″ long, to give you a sense of scale:

Halfpenny calls this type of track “2x bounding”… each set of tracks here is actually four footprints–the front feet land, but then are already in the air when the rear feet touch down in the tracks left by the front feet. If you want to hear about measurements, check out Halfpenny or Rezendes (both excellent books with a slightly different approach). For me, though, notice the width of the track in comparison to the length of the bound–you can see that it is a long bounding pattern. If you are to follow a weasel track, you’ll also note an erratic trail–these guys tend to zig and zag and are unafraid of going under the snow for a bit.

And now the marten:

You can tell that the track size is much, much bigger compared to the length of the bound. These trails tend to be more steady, too, and it is common to see the tracks lead to a tree trunk and disappear as the marten goes up a tree searching for squirrels.

And a few pictures of both together:

Hopefully these are helpful.

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