fierce small  furry animals helping protect the wild forest

About the size of a housecat the marten is a small, dark member of the weasel family. The marten dens in mature maple and yellow birch trees. By the nineteen twenties the creature was almost destroyed by trapping and logging. But since marten indicate a healthy forest… the US Forest Service and Wisconsin DNR, over the past thirty years,  re-introduced several hundred animals to the Nicolet/Chequemegon  forest. But marten are declining and a biologist and technician from the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission think they know why.  Nick Vander Puy from the Superior Broadcast Network accompanies Dr. Jonathan Gilbert and Ron Pariesin (Pah-rhees-in) on a live trapping expedition to find marten and a healthy forest. to listen to the radio story click here

martens are the only endangered mammals listed in Wisconsin

 

Up in the old Penokee Mountain range, around Mellen, Wisconsin Dr. Jonathan Gilbert cruises the backroads with a  radio tracking device.  He’s trying to locate a marten. Gilbert says, “She’s  straight ahead of us.  We should be able to walk in and find her.  But sometimes you can listen to the beep, but if it’s strong and continuous and the same strength, then we think she’s resting, and if it changes, hear how it’s getting fainter, we think she’s moving. The beep changes, sometimes it’s louder, sometimes it’s fainter, there we think she’s moving around. That’s what that tells me.  So we might not  be able to find a den, but we can almost certainly find her tracks and see what she’s been doing.”

 

            The marten we’re looking for is a three year old female.  She’s called Edith. Gilbert trapped her two years ago fitting her with a radio collar.  Last year she gave birth. Using the radio collar Gilbert found her den site.

 

            Did Edith’s young survive? Maybe today we’ll find a young one in the live trap. 

 

            Walking down the trail, we meet Ron Pariesin in the woods. He’s a technician with the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission.  Pariesin checks the live trap next to a yellow birch.  The trap is empty.  The men confer.  “Everytime we walk in on her we come across fisher tracks. You know. There’s  fisher tracks here and fisher tracks there. There’s fisher tracks on both sides. Maybe that’s why they’re not here.  But we had fisher come into that den once when we had a camera on the marten den.”

 

            The fisher, a larger, ferocious weasel, along with hawks and owls, often kill marten, especially where there are few denning trees for protection. The fisher is known as ojiig.

 

            Gilbert and Pariesin have been monitoring Marten for fifteen years. Known as wabishezhii to the Anishinaabe, the marten is the totem for the warrior clan. They’re concerned marten are in steep decline.  Fewer than fifty animals remain in the Chequemegon Forest.  Almost no young are showing up.

 

            Pariesin points towards logging practices as the cause for the marten’s decline.  Pariesin says, “If you got people coming out here just taking big trees and then you’re not leaving nothing for marten  to den in.  Fisher seem to use the same kind of trees, too. The fisher and marten , we had a lot of fishers denning up in those trees, too.  All these animals gotta compete for some kind of home.  And if there taking all the big trees they’re not leaving nothing for’em.”

 

            We resume looking for Edith and her young. The signal from the radio transmitter gets louder.  Trying to find where the marten rests, where they eat, and where they find shelter. Letting the animals teach us what they need.

 

            A cold, crisp, January day. This is big timber country. Hemlock, maple, and yellow birch. Gilbert points out the terrain. “Blow down, logs on the ground, complex structure, closed canopy, big trees, and we got a marten living here.  That’s kind of the scenario we’re looking for.”

 

            Well, that kind of scenario is getting harder and harder to find in Wisconsin’s north woods. More and more waabizheshi (marten) denning trees yellow birch and maple are getting cut down and shipped to the mills. The US Forest Service here practices short rotation logging , boosting deer populations.  The deer browse the white pine, cedar, maple, and yellow birch seedlings. The forest in Wisconsin is becoming less diverse. In Minnesota, where there’s far  less logging there are almost ten thousand marten in the woods.

 

            But in northwestern Wisconsin there’s still some attractive marten cover on the ground.  Gilbert points some  out. “Can you notice what’s kind of different about this spot? With all these dead trees, all these downed trees.  When you start paying attention to it becomes very remarkable. That they(the marten)  zero right in on these things.

 

            Soon we find some marten tracks.  We only got four tracks though. She was apparently up in a tree somewhere, hop, hop, hop. We see some sraped off tree bark on the snow. So she hit this big tree.

            Marten have retractable claws.  They can climb and jump high up in the canopy

Marten have retractable claws. They can climb and jump high up in the canopy. Gilbert observes, “ It  looks like she was checking out this old dead tree here. Old tracks from last night or yesterday, coming right out of this  old sugar maple.  Really a big old snag about thirty feet tall. Twenty four inches in diameter. Complex, physical structure they call it.”

 

            According to Gilbert  a forest up here isn’t a healthy forest unless it has enough marten. “If they’re (the marten  doing well, thriving, producing well we’ve got a high quality forest, integrating all those requirements that species has.”

 

            We end up taking a break, marveling at this beautiful complex forest. Big trees yellow birch and sugar maple still standing. Tip over trees on the ground provide  coarse, woody debris for marten cover and prey.

 

             During this time the pine marten moves off. We decide to stop pursuing her, uselessly using up her energy and pushing her out of her home range. Gilbert says, “I really try not to do that too much.  So we’ll just let her go, let her be.  She’ll be here for another day, and find her then.”

 

            Marten are the only endangered mammals in Wisconsin.

 

            During the summer of 2005 federal Judge Lyn Adelman decided the US Forest Service violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by failing to consider the cumulative impacts when it approved several timber sales near Clam Lake.  The suit was brought by the Habitat Education Center (HEC)  from Madison.  According to HEC President Ricardo Jomarron, "This is a great day for brook trout and other fish that depend on McCarthy Creek, Edies Creek and the Iron River. The tiny feeder streams and perched wetlands that feed these streams won't, for now, be run over by heavy equipment damaging springs and adding suffocating dirt to their clean water. It's also a great day for Wisconsin's only state endangered mammal the pine marten. About half of the declining marten's den trees are yellow birch, a tree species having difficulty reproducing and regenerating in Wisconsin. Many yellow birch are marked to be cut down in this critical habitat- further endangering the future of the marten."

 

            Timber sales in the territory are pending.

 

To learn more about the marten and the Habitat Education Center click here

 

To learn more about Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission's work click here

 

web design by Sandy Lyon

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