Following in the footsteps of forest animals
The pine marten gave its name to a large group of forest animals - the mustelidae family.
She is a typical representative of this family. Her elongated body exudes flexibility and mobility. With equal agility, the animal moves on the ground and along tree branches. The marten is found throughout the forest and forest-steppe European part of the country, in the mountain forests of the Western Caucasus and in small numbers in the taiga of the Trans-Urals, east to the Ob. The size of the marten, compared with those of other representatives of the mustelidae family, is average. Body length 40-58, tail 20-26 centimeters, weight 1200-800 grams; the female is somewhat smaller. The lush and soft fur of the animal has been famous since time immemorial. The general tone of its winter color is dark brown, more intense on the upper part of the body and lighter, with a fawn tint, on the belly. On the throat, in the lower surface of the neck, there is a light (yellow, orange or brown) spot, which sometimes extends to the chest. Because of this spot, the pine marten was previously called the yellow marten, in contrast to the white marten, a stone marten that lives in the southern regions of our country. In areas of the European North, martens prefer to settle in spruce forests. In pine forests there is always less of it, since there the number of mouse-like rodents, the main food of this predator, changes more sharply than in spruce forests. Within its range, the marten is distributed unevenly. This is due to the degree of forest cover in a particular area, the feeding capacity of the land, the availability of food in different seasons and the presence of nesting conditions. In those places where the animal is not persecuted, it easily gets along in the immediate vicinity of populated areas, easily tolerates even an anthropogenic landscape and can stay in a small forest island with an area of several hundred hectares. The number of martens varies slightly over the years. This is explained by its polyphagous nature and the ability to switch from one food to another, i.e., to compensate for the lack of main food at the expense of secondary ones. The food range of this predator is large and extremely varied. Its main food is forest voles and forest birds, mainly hazel grouse. The marten also eats squirrels, small birds and their eggs, frogs, lizards, insects and their larvae, and is very fond of honey. Her plant food consists of various berries, primarily rowan. In the southern part of its range, the animal also eats the fruits of wild fruit trees and grapes. Males are capable of attacking such relatively large animals as the white hare and wood grouse, but this is a rather rare prey for a predator. In general, the male’s food range is noticeably more varied than the female’s. In the Arkhangelsk region, for example, in the diet of a male there are 11 food items in winter and 14 in summer, while a female has 6 food items in winter and 9 in summer. than males, they eat small birds, insects, shrews, as well as plant foods. Males with greater physical strength and, in particular, stronger jaw muscles, make fuller use of the potential food supply. The difference in nutrition between males and females is beneficial for the species, as it leads to a more rational use of food reserves in nature when obtaining food. The marten's stomach holds 130-150 grams of food - this is the optimal daily requirement. Typically, the stomach of a hunted marten contains from 60 to 90 grams of food. The marten provides itself with food and does not follow in the footsteps of other predators. At the same time, its reserves and scraps are picked up by such “freeloaders” as the fox, ermine, and in the northern part of the range, wolverine. The best shelter for this predator is the hollow of an old tree. In spruce-broad-leaved and mixed forests there are many hollows, and their presence does not limit the distribution of martens. In clean spruce forests there are fewer of them, and here the predator often uses a squirrel’s nest for housing. The marten's rut occurs in July-August. Pregnancy lasts 230-275 days. The development of embryos is delayed at an early stage and resumes only at the end of winter, and therefore during the fishing period it is impossible to distinguish a pregnant female from a barren female by its internal organs without special research. In April-May, the female gives birth to three to four blind cubs, which gain their sight at the age of one month. In the fall, the brood disintegrates, and by the fishing season, the young of the year are almost no different in growth from adult animals. The marten’s entire life takes place within a fairly clearly defined area of the forest - this is its individual habitat. In males and females, the areas are most often adjacent, and sometimes partially coincide. The growing young remain on the mother's site until autumn, and disperse in late autumn or early winter. At this time, traces of martens appear in areas where they were not previously present. If the young of the year do not find free areas in the depths of the forest, they move to the edges, small forests, young plantations, forest islands among clearings and burnt areas, and generally to lands of poorer quality. Most of the young animals in these lands are hunted in the first season by hunters. The sizes of individual marten areas vary. In the northern part of the range, where food is scarce, they are extensive; in the southern regions, richer in food, they are smaller. For example, on the Kola Peninsula, marten hunts in an area of up to 50 square kilometers, in the middle zone - 5-6, and in the Caucasus, often less than one square kilometer.
Rice. 14. Imprints of the front (above) and rear blunder of a marten
Rice. 15. Marten tracks on loose snow In the snow, the predator leaves characteristic five-fingered paw prints, very large for such a relatively small animal. This is explained by the fact that in winter the soles of lal martens are overgrown with thick, hard hair and their supporting surface increases sharply, which makes it easier for the animal to move in loose snow. In this regard, the marten's tracks have soft outlines, the pads of the fingers are faintly imprinted on the snow, and the tips of the claws leave noticeable marks. They are especially clear during a thaw, on wet snow, when, as hunters say, the animal leaves a “printed” mark. Usually the marten moves by jumping - galloping, leaving paired paw prints, and placing its hind paws exactly in the prints of the front ones. When running this way, the animal, as if changing its pace, moves its right or left paw a little forward. The length of the jump depends on the speed and condition of the snow cover. At fast speeds and in dense snow it is 60-70 centimeters, on ascents, descents or at slow speeds 40-50.
Chasing a hare or escaping from enemies, the marten runs in a quarry: prints of four, less often three, paws are left on the snow, with the prints of the hind paws in front of the front ones. Hunters call such a trail “four-chet” or “three-beam.” This is a rare gait of the animal. When searching for or storing prey, the marten walks in small steps and the paw prints are located not in one line, but in a zigzag pattern, in a herringbone pattern. Deep and loose snow makes it difficult for the predator to move. despite the width of her paws. In such conditions, her jumps are short, 30-35 centimeters, and she plunges 9-10 centimeters into the snow. Marten tracks are difficult to confuse with the tracks of other animals. However, her four-bead tracks are somewhat reminiscent of the jumps of a mountain hare. They also have some similarities with sable tracks. In those places where both of these animals live, the track encountered can sometimes be perplexing: it can be difficult to find out from it whether a sable or a large marten has passed through here. Zoologist V.V. Raevsky, who worked for a long time in the Northern Urals, noticed that the sable, unlike the marten, has more elongated paw prints and shorter jumps. In addition, according to the hunters, he notes that when jumping, the sable places its paws parallel, while the marten places its paws somewhat differently: with its heels together and its toes apart. When tracking an animal, its sex can be determined not only by the size of the mark, but also by its urinary points, of which there are at least a dozen during the daily course of the marten. If a bright urine spot, standing out sharply on the white snow, is located between the elongated prints of the hind paws, it means that a female has passed through here, but if some object away from the print of the hind paws has been sprayed with urine, it is a male.
In summer, the marten leaves barely noticeable marks. However, its presence in the lands during the snow-free period can be established by excrement, which is found on stumps, wells, trunks of fallen trees, on protruding roots at the butt of a tree, on old anthills, and sometimes just on the path. Marten excrement, eight to ten in length and one to one and a half centimeters in diameter, is sausage-shaped, usually spirally twisted, and its ends are pointed and elongated. It is easy to notice in them the remains of undigested food: small bones of mouse-like rodents and birds, wool, feathers, pieces of chitin, seeds, berry shells, etc. The droppings have a musky odor that lingers for a long time. Many people believe that the marten leads a semi-arboreal lifestyle. However, the closer you get to know the life of this animal, the more convinced you are that this is not so. Tracking the marten convinced me that it is a true terrestrial predator. I walked hundreds of kilometers in marten tracks: no more than one percent of this path was on horseback. Only in order to rest, when chasing a squirrel and feeding hazel grouse, the marten of its own free will climbs a tree and moves along the branches. The marten obtains its main food on the ground. In the second half of winter, when due to the depth of the snow, she even settles down for the day in rented shelters - under heaps of brushwood, in hollows, in voids under windbreaks, hidden snow, where it is warm and safe. It’s a different matter if the marten is being pursued by enemies. Agile and agile, she rarely becomes a victim of larger predators, but she is still caught by a fox, lynx, wolf, eagle owl or golden eagle. It is in these cases that the marten uses its ability to escape in trees. Once, in the Prioksko-Terrasny Nature Reserve, I read from the tracks that a fox attacked a marten, digging out from under the snow the remains of a hare that had not been eaten by some predator. The marten jumped onto the nearest spruce and, despite the fact that the fox gave up pursuit, covered more than a hundred meters, jumping from tree to tree, before descending into the snow. A marten is riding while being pursued by a hunter with dogs. This is precisely what served as the reason to consider it a semi-arboreal animal. The nature of the marten's hunting pattern varies depending on the type of land and the prey it encounters in one place or another. On the outskirts of clearings or in sparse forests, the animal’s trail spreads in a straight line. Its main prey in such places is black grouse, white partridge, and sometimes capercaillie. These birds spend the night under the snow, and in order to find evidence of them, a predator must travel a long distance. From a distance, following the footsteps of the merchant, he notices bird feeding areas, slows down, stops and then walks around.
Approaching three to four meters to a sleeping bird, it apparently instinctively determines the place where it is hiding under the snow and rushes towards it in sharp short leaps. In sparse stands, the animal, as if playing, often jumps three to four meters onto tree trunks while running, and then jumps onto the snow. Apparently, these jumps help navigate the terrain. When hunting in spruce forests, the marten leaves a different type of trail. Here she moves in short jumps, and sometimes in steps. Its path is winding, stretching from one windbreak to another. The predator constantly climbs under the rubble of trees, but it is not possible to trace its hunt in labyrinths or under snow-covered snags. Sometimes, if you look under a pile of dead wood, you can find the feathers of small birds: tits, woodpeckers, jays or cuckoos.
Rice. 17. Unsuccessful marten hunt: 1 - search; 2 - stacking the loot; 3 - throw at the bird; 4 - take-off of the black grouse In severe frosts, birds climb to spend the night in the voids under the rubble, and therefore become easy prey for martens. Here, in the spruce forest, while examining the rubble, the marten comes across roosting hazel grouse and catches them more successfully than other forest birds. But most often in such places the predator manages to catch voles, which serve as its main food. The trail of a marten going for the day is relatively straight; the animal does not scour from side to side, as when searching for prey. Heading to the shelter, the marten usually walks the last ten meters on horseback, even if the entrance to the hollow is located at the base of the tree. Staying hunting until dawn, which often happens, the marten may encounter a squirrel that has already gone out to feed. More than once I had to read from the tracks how a predator rushes to catch a squirrel digging a cone out from under the snow, and it usually leaves it on horseback, easily jumping from one tree to another. The fact is that a marten, much more often than a squirrel, has to jump into the snow and climb up the trunk again, since it cannot jump from a high tree to a low one, like a squirrel. This is explained by its large weight and shorter fingers, which are not typical for the poison dart frog.
Catching a squirrel is not an easy task for a marten. However, in years when squirrels are numerous, they more often become victims of predators, since sick and weak, i.e. non-viable, individuals appear in their population and it is not difficult for a marten to catch them. When the number of squirrels is low, as a result of natural selection of the first population, only healthy animals are preserved, which are much more difficult for a predator to obtain. Therefore, in years of low squirrel numbers, the marten practically stops pursuing these rodents, although on its daily search route it repeatedly crosses their tracks. The daily movement of the pine marten in the taiga of the Onega Peninsula, according to my observations, in some cases can reach 14 kilometers. On this long path, the predator goes under the rubble more than a hundred times in search of Rodents, looks through dozens of bog bird holes, makes several throws to catch a hazel grouse, before it manages to provide itself with a daily diet: approximately four to five voles. Having caught a larger prey (squirrel or upland bird), the marten remains in the nearest shelter for two or three days, content with the supply of food. Often the daily movement does not bring her luck, and she limits herself to visiting the places of previous successful hunts, where she gnaws bones and tendons again. Eating carrion by a marten also serves as an indication that this predator with a wide food specialization often experiences difficulties in obtaining food. That is why one or two animals remain near the corpse of an animal or near the entrails of an elk caught by hunters for a long time, until the supply of food by them or other predators is completely used up. The smell of carrion is very attractive to the marten. The incident convinced me of this. In the taiga of the Onega Peninsula, on the shore of a forest lake, I discovered a perennial nest of a golden eagle. On the ground under the nest and under the neighboring pine trees, which served as a perch for the bird, there was a mass of bones - the remains of the predator's victims. Among the bones belonging to hares, muskrats, hog and waterfowl, I collected parts of the skeleton and skull of ten martens. Some of them stayed here for more than five or six years. It is unlikely that a golden eagle, a large bird with a huge wingspan, can catch a marten, an agile and fast land animal that is nocturnal, among dense vegetation. The golden eagle does not hunt at night and, apparently, only the instinct to protect the chicks forces it to kill the animals that were attracted to the nest by the smell of the abundant remains of the numerous meals of this feathered predator. Many forest predators can compete with the marten for food. The main one is the fox. In the European North, this has become especially noticeable in recent decades, when, following deforestation, the fox penetrates into remote areas where it was not previously present.
The composition of the food of these two predators in the forests of our Non-Black Earth Region is very similar: for both, the main food is voles and upland birds. These predators, one might say, “divided” the voles among themselves : the marten eats mainly red forest voles, and the fox eats more often large and less mobile gray ones, which stick to more open places. But upland birds - hazel grouse, partridge, black grouse and, to a lesser extent, capercaillie - are common food items for both predators. Watching martens in the remote taiga corners of the Onega Peninsula, where the fox had not yet penetrated, and in the Vologda forests, thinned by logging, where there are many foxes, I noticed a difference in their behavior. In the north, the marten, having caught a hazel grouse, partridge or other bird and having had enough, hides the remains of food somewhere under logs or simply buries them in the snow and returns here the next night or after an unsuccessful hunt. In the Vologda forests, all the remains of the marten’s food are found and eaten by the fox, and therefore the martens have adapted to drag them up a tree and in this way save them for themselves. The marten has an amazing ability to remember places where food remains were hidden after a successful hunt. Once I was following the trail of a marten and clearly imagined how the animal, crossing a small moss swamp, seemed to remember something: it sharply turned at a right angle to its course and in large leaps headed towards an old stump sticking out of the snow, two to three hundred paces away. aside. Near the stump there was a black hole in the snow, into which a marten climbed. The exit trail showed that it was no longer there, but in order to find out what the animal was doing there, the hole had to be dug up. Under a meter-long layer of snow and a little to the side, between the splayed roots of a stump, the remains of the marten’s former meal were discovered - bones with tendons, tail and flight feathers of a capercaillie. The marten got the bird a long time ago, maybe even before the snow fell, and feasted here, probably, for several days. Now bare frozen bones are useless to her, but she loves to visit the places of previous successful hunts and remembers them well on her site. There was a case in the Bashkir Nature Reserve that confirmed the marten’s good memory and knowledge of its area. The predator ravaged the wood grouse's nest, stole and hid the hatched eggs. Only in the middle of winter, following the tracks, it was noticed that she visited this area and dug out from under the snow an egg that had been hidden six months ago. Even before the October Revolution, the pine marten population in the European North was undermined by predatory fishing. In the vast taiga areas it was completely exterminated. Only a long ban on hunting in Soviet times restored the marten population in its former range, and currently, in all northern regions of the European part of the country, licensed fishing for this valuable fur-bearing animal is permitted.
Footprints in the snow
In winter it is much easier to see and decipher tracks than in summer. The white blanket shows prints of almost all forest inhabitants, and not only mammals. If there was no snowfall, then they are very distinct. These tracks usually lead in one of three directions: to the feeding area, to the daytime area, or to the animal’s burrow.
The trail may unexpectedly end near a tree, which means that an animal or bird has climbed a fir tree or birch tree. The specialist immediately determines whether the walker is a predator or a herbivore, an adult or a baby. Some biologists can even distinguish between the paw prints of a female and a male, a sick and a healthy animal.
To correctly determine whether a trace belongs to a specific representative of the forest fauna, you should know the habits, diet and rest regime of the inhabitants of the taiga or mixed forest, as well as the influence of weather on its life activity.
Traces of a badger, hedgehog and mole
You are unlikely to see badger tracks in the snow, since he sleeps most of the winter. In addition, this animal is very secretive and prefers to stay away from human habitation.
The hedgehog also does not walk in the snow in winter. But in summer its traces can be found on the soil quite often. Moles live completely underground and rarely come to the surface. But, who knows, maybe you will be lucky enough to find not only holes made by moles, but also the paw prints of these animals.
More photos of sable tracks:
In the comments, you can share links to your photographs of winter tracks posted on the website in the gallery of hunting photos in the “Pathfinder” section.
Traces of a wolf and a fox
If your site is located near a forest, wild “relatives” of dogs from the same family – Canidae – can secretly sneak into your area. As a rule, wolf tracks are larger than dog tracks. But you are unlikely to see them in your garden, since forest orderlies usually avoid people and their homes. But foxes are not averse to sneaking into, for example, a chicken coop and profiting there.
The tracks of a fox are easy to distinguish: on its front paws, its two middle fingers noticeably lean forward.
