Anyone who has been following this blog will know that I have had several encounters with martens. Most famously, the one where a marten came into my bedroom.
For a couple of weeks now, we have been noticing that we haven’t been getting any eggs from our free ranging chickens. There for a while they were laying their eggs in the dog house, but then the eggs started disappearing.
I thought the thief might be the marten, which suddenly started hanging around our house. I had a live trap that I borrowed from a friend, and so two weeks ago, I put it into the dog house with an egg in it for bait. The next morning the egg was gone, the trap was open, and overturned. I had caught something over night, but because the door mechanism was a bit wonky, the animal had struggled and managed to escape.
I worked on the trap making it more secure, re-baited, and reset it. A week and a half passed with no results, then yesterday, Joan noticed that the trap’s door had been sprung, and when I investigated I found a not too happy marten inside the trap. It snarled and hissed at me.
We drove it out to a nicely forested area down the road, and the marten didn’t even wait for me to fully open the trap’s door before it rocketed out escaping into the bush. Hopefully, that will be the end of our marten problem, but I am not so sure.
I was immediately struck at the trapped marten’s appearance when I first discovered it in the trap. It seemed like an adolescent. It was thin and long legged. The other marten I had seen appeared more bulky. Maybe the fact that it was running around in my bedroom made it appear larger. I do have a suspicion that this might be a young one recently kicked out of a family and the other was the mother. I will just have to wait and see.
I guess I will reset the trap with another egg and see if any more of these critters come in for a meal.
View my paintings at: www.davidmarchant.ca
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