I had a trail camera set on a bait several years ago, and got a picture of what I thought looked like a Kangaroo Rat, of all things. It was snacking on salmon scraps. According to the camera, about 30 minutes later, a very large mink showed up. Didn't touch the salmon. Just sniffed around, and loped off.
I assumed it was a deer mouse?
I see small mice and shrews scamper out of my wolverine cubbies pretty regularly, but have yet to lay eyes on these other "jumpers".

Just my opinion......I have always thought that having wolves on my line benefits all creatures great & small. Even though the birds will clean up the majority of biomass on a dead moose, everything else gets a better meal at the margins. I would think that beach habitats with high fat carcasses would be utopia for furbearers

On the worms: S.bats as Gulo likes to abbreviate them.........what surprised me when removing them and counting /sexing them, was that some marten had a few, some had very high numbers but many had none at all. These were pretty much in the same habitat. I would have expected all of them to be carrying some degree of infestation.

I never took the time to correlate worm numbers with marten age. Maybe that is a factor.

Again, thanks T4E. I've never tried to correlate moon phases with marten catch ratios. I'll keep better notes on that. However, my marginal marten area down here will be pretty worthless as far as science goes, I just don't get very many here in the sagebrush. A couple pages back, I did hit on what I consider an extremely important food source in beach-killed deer in SE Alaska and the possibility of these same bonanzas in interior in the form of dead caribou/moose. I have no doubt that this food source in SE (beach-dead deer) has a great influence on neonate survival and probably lactating female survival.

alaska viking - I'm guessing your kangaroo rat was probably one of two species of jumping mice that are in Alaska. They look like a miniature version of the 'roo rats. The western jumping mouse (Zapus princeps) has been recorded fairly common in extreme southeast Alaska mainland, and as far north as Taku Inlet. The meadow jumping mouse (Zapus hudsonius) is reasonably common throughout mainland Alaska as far north as the Yukon, with a few scant records for SE as well. So one or the other of the species could be what you saw on your trail cam.

white17 - I looked extensively at more than 3000 marten stomachs trying to correlate parasite loads by sex and age. Without going into boring detail, the adult marten had higher loads than the yoy. No statistical difference between males and females in any age class.

Jack

Not to redirect this thread but I want to mention again about things like waves and vertical migrations.

In the fall of 1978 I was trapping at a spot Gulo refers to as Plastic Lake. T4E will know it as the head waters of the river he used to trap with PS.

Anyway, the place was lousy with yellow cheek voles, red fox, caribou, and a respectable marten population. There were no hares at all. UNTIL one night around mid December substantial numbers showed up at lake level. Just for grins I back tracked them a bit and they all seem to have originated at the highest terrain around.. and that wasn't all that much higher than the lake. Maybe a few hundred feet. I don't know whether it was temperature or snow depth induced.

How about the spawned out salmon carcases that get washed up over the steams banks during fall storms as protein resources.
With more work in hair DNA and food source background this should come out.

those waterfalls don't overlook what a mountain whitefish can climb to the upper reaches of that stream been my experience.

Zapus hudsonius from my experience in Manitoba is hibernating from 10 Sept to 1 May so not readily available as a food source.

Can I throw another bone out to chew on ?
You guys can deal with the internal, my focus is external parasites.
So I wash and Downey my marten in 3 cycles to get the fleas and fur mites and louse off them. This gets run through a 100 mesh/ inch screens and picked for the external parasites.
I have a source of white terry cloth towels and roll the animals up, just to look for any ticks that may become detached. ( Ixodes usually do not because they cement their mouth pieces in)
the taninc acid staining on those towels is great,
I wonder how much in colour grading goes down as there is a lighter coloured marten in the end when they are dry. Dark brown haired remain the same but only 1 in 10 in my sampling.

Gulo, the leggy mouse was about 30 miles north of Taku, so not sure. I have the pics, somewhere.
I was so interested in the worms at the time, I had a fellow trapper who trapped about 10 miles away, but across 3 large river systems do a few autopsies. Of course, he found the same infestations. But as you stated, they don't appear to be detrimental to the marten. Weird.
As for external parasites, I first started finding fleas on both marten and the odd mink about 10 years ago, here. Not loads of them, but almost always a few on marten, and occasionally on mink.

I enjoy this topic, so I don't mean to derail it.
But, regarding "jumping mice". I once saw a long-tailed jumping mouse on Adak Island. I mentioned it to the local USFWS biologist and she said that was impossible since they don't live on the island. I know exactly what I saw. But I guess she knows best, after all she is a government employee.
Those kinds of attitudes really irk me; no scientific curiousity whatsoever.

^^^^^^^
I hadn't thought of the Adak jumping mouse in years. However, just after writting the post above I came to the realization after all these years why there are probably no jumping mice on adak Island.
This was about 15 years ago, they were just starting a major Norway rat eradication/poisoning program on the island. I imagine the last thing they wanted someone to do was to discover and endemic rodent living on the island.
It wouldn't surprise me if they knew they live there.

Oh man... Talk about overstimulation of my weak frontal lobe. I've got a list of tasks for today that is nearly a mile long, and I make the mistake of opening this thread...

I hope Rick isn't too disappointed in the way we've redirected his question....

I can't believe it took somebody from Manitoba to bring up Salmon?

Worked one fall on a salmon run on an island on the Queen Charotte's or should say Haida Gwaii on a chum salmon study. Entomologist do get around to different places.
Those costal marten there were sure different than what we have in Manitoba.
Southern/eastern Manitoba was only re-populated with marten come 1980 or so. RE-introduction into the Peace Gardens has them in western Manitoba right into eastern Sask and ND now

Jack this had been very interesting all good info they are logging like crazy here making our big forest looking more like the Dakotas every year I know that’s not helping might help with the bobcat population in a few years with the rabbits in the new growth poplar

Since you mentioned the hair mites. Why are they so thick on the legs? Or do they migrate there after the marten dies?

At the distinct risk of further derailing this train, I will put forth my recent observations concerning a "marginal" marten population I'm currently exploiting. This is mainly in an effort to highlight what T4E mentioned about us (those involved with this thread) having very diverse populations and systems in which we operate.

Currently, and for the past 13 years, I live in a desert. Somewhere around 12 inches of moisture annually. Relatively high elevation; my house is in the bottom at 5000'. Topography is relatively steep, grading up to the continental divide at 7500-10,000' only 3-5 miles to the east. Because of access, I only trap marten in the lower elevations. Consequently, it's what I would consider poor marten habitat. Actually, I wouldn't consider it marten habitat at all. Open sagebrush/bunchgrass hills. In the drainages there are willows, cottonwoods and occasional copses of Douglas fir (north slopes only). Early on, I was astounded that marten existed here at all. In 13 years, my wife and I have taken 122 marten from along these riparian corridors, surrounded by sagebrush. Many places we catch marten, one cannot see a conifer, even to the horizon. Of these 122 marten, we have caught 2 adult females. TWO! Eleven adult males, and 109 yoy (mostly males). Therefore, I'm looking at this "population" as a dispersal system only. I suspect we could take every marten out and not really affect the dynamics, very much unlike any other system I've ever seen or heard of. I'm convinced additional dispersers (from the divide higher up that is "good" marten habitat) would re-populate these stringers of habitat annually. There are good numbers of voles and mice along these riparian travel routes.

I'm pretty familiar with other marten systems (and have trapped many diverse areas throughout my life), and have never heard of anything like I have here. Anybody else have a similar anomaly?

Jack

I am really enjoying this thread. So many contributing with a lot of information.

A couple of discussions I would like to hear comments on is what effect was there on marten when we had an October 20 season start and anyone experience canabalism.

Boy your glasses are a lot better than mine and Gulo's. mites are 0.25 mm across so probably what you are seeing is lice > 1 to 1.5 mm, and if they jump when you blow some CO2 on them they are fleas. Some species of fleas are warm blooded so when the animal cools they go to the extremities. Several species of fleas are winter host fleas ( only have their generations in the winter) so they just stay inside the fur zone. They can freeze and come back to life, something is in their gene pool, few other species of insects that feed on blood can do this. And yes they move there when the marten dies and cools.

Yes Jack they can show up on the bald katush prairie and the only thing to climb is a old fence post, 30 miles from any forest, and with the way farming is going now with the big farms holdings is the 2 acre shelter belt farm steads get leveled for more crop land.

There are 3 life stages of a tick species on this marten. There is an adult in the bottom right corner, the other medium sized ones are larvae, and the small dots are the 6 legged nymphs. This tick species does not have a male described so we hope a larvae to molt to one. The bag has not been washed for any mites or lice yet since the University is closed to researchers to work due to covid. The ticks name is Ixodes gregory named after a famous tick expert in Canada

Only reason I can see them( ADFG said mites) is they migrate right out to the end of the hairs. Like somebody salted their legs.

Cannibalism is normal here. Bigger problem when it is warm and the marten easily chewed. More common, is what I call territorial biting. Neck and legs.

Speaking of Cannibalism-I see that in certain years and only when marten populations are high.A marten will only cannibalize another marten before it freezes solid is my experience.
A couple years ago I came across a marten head in the 120,and noticed marten tracks and drag marks in the snow,The cannibal had severed the body of the marten from the head in the trap and dragged the severed body about 30 meters to a hole under some blowdowns(a cache for later).marten often like to cache chunks of bait here and there so they can "hole up with a bone" when the weather gets extreme.
I may have a couple pics related.

1-Scene of the crime
2-The evidence-drag trail and tracks of the culprit.
3-Corpus delecti.





In severing the body from the head to cache,the marten actually consumed about an inch and a half of the entire neck.
When I sewed it back together the pelt looked a bit stubby.

I have seen those too but specifically on wolverine. So small that I was sure they were really there. But once the sun got to the right angle I could see the critter was covered with them, Literally thousands. No bigger than the dot at the end of this sentence. Definitely smaller than the diameter of the hair they were perched upon.

I have had a few cannibalism issues but seems like they were always early in the season and with high populations.