Kinda figured that, but at least you can reuse.

Yup...bait a wee bit too close to the trap.

But fur is fur

The bait is often gone after a catch,I always carry a bucket of bait chunks when I have a lot of sets out to check.
In winter I also put fresh bait every two weeks or so,and collect the old bait (if any left)and dump at a jackpot. Some years bait doesnt last long with all the shrews and mice eating on it steady..

He's A Pharaoh wanted to bring the bait to the Afterlife

Shrews and voles are climbing the tree and eating the bait?

Yes they feast on it.They can clean out a fist sized chunk of frozen beavermeat in one to two week.
Often when I shake the snow out of an upright box with the axe several will scurry out of the box.
Their activity at the bait box is a major attraction for marten.
Same as bird and other animal activity at a jackpot.

Often greenhorns will just drive their snowmachine past their boxes in the bush and if there is no catch and the 120 is still set they drive on,never actually checking the sets close up.

They will check empty traps for a month before they find out there is no bait left.LOL.

Confirmed-another juvenile male marten.


Full pods on this one.

Boco.i was wondering...when running your wilderness line for marten, how often do you check your sets?

I start setting up longer lines for marten once the weather gets and stays below freezing-thatd be mid november here.
I like to check each line once every 5 days.
When season starts oct 25 it is too warm to run any kind of longer line,since marten taint quickly in warm weather,so have to check each day.
If I am doing some trailwork,daily early in the season I might set up a couple marten boxes along the trail.
if I am at the cabin early I set up a box or two that I can check every day.
If you check marten traps every day you will be checking a lot of empty traps in winter.
You gotta give the traps time to work for you.

I know. We figured every 5 days.

Where Jerry is since he's only there 3 weeks, he has 2 lines, o e had 60 traps and one has 50.

He checks traps everyday,alternating lines.

Do you suspend your marten to keep them from being eaten since you have more time between checks?

Once they are frozen solid in the cold,there is a lot less chance of them getting eaten.
The problem with marten on the ground is shrews voles mice and squirrels clipping the fur for nests on the longer(5-7 day) checks.
Its weird but I never see lynx or fox dead on the ground in snares ever getting clipped.
Marten on the ground here are like a magnet for those little rodents.

Picked up a marten today in a set I made on the beaver trail the other day.Picked up another beaver there also.Forgot to bring the camera though.
I suspect the marten is a juvenile female.i will confirm it later after skinning by looking at the uterine horns.
The temporal muscle coalescence on the top of the head is much less accurate on female marten even though it is 100% on males.The muscles on top of the head on female marten dont close until they are fairly old-a few years after they have first bred.
It is easy to tell an adult female marten from a juvenile by looking at the uterine horns.On a juvenile the uterine horns are threadlike,on an adult female they are noticeably thicker.

Juvenile female marten are good ones to catch.They are the least likely of all to survive the lean times of late winter when the land sets the carrying capacity.

OK,so skinned out this marten and definitively aged it using the uterine horns.
First off I looked at the skull to study the temporal muscles.An old adult female marten will have the muscles touching along the top of the skull like an adult male.
Problem is with females that are adults but not too old,those muscles can remain open showing the strip of bone along the top dividing the two.
With experience if you look at the very back of the skull on a female,the very young juvenile will have an eighth inch space between the temporal muscles at the very back of the skull.
As in this one.



Some juvenile marten later in the winter can have these muscles touching at the very back so not definitive.

A better way to age a female marten that is more definitive in separating juveniles from adults is to look at the uterine horns.

On a juvenile female the uterine horns are like threads,as in this picture.



On an adult female marten the uterine horns are noticeably thicker and darker and look much different than those of the juvenile.

When I catch an adult female I will add to this post and show the difference.

Isn't the horns where the eggs are until they implant in the uterus in the spring? In the adult females? Do you ever find adult females who don't have eggs?

Never looked for eggs in the tubes,strictly looking for the threadlike horns(tubes) to confirm age for ratios to properly manage the harvest.

Hey Boco, what do you think about this? In Maine we need to use lynx exclusion boxes & take in a tooth from every marten. I mostly write down the sex of every animal I catch. In the boxes (first photo) of the last 55 that I recorded 40 were males and 15 were females. With fisher I had 13 males & 19 females during that same period. Second photo shows the age of our marten.

Tooth sectioning is the standard for bios to age animals.Looks like only a bit more than half the catch was aged.With only half the catch aged I dont know how relevant that study would be.When numbers are shared with trappers managing their own animals, that can be very valuable to the trapper as a front line manager.It can verify his own numbers as to age ratios,and lethim know how accurate his own observations/statistics are.
Low numbers of adult females is good.
Something wrong with the sex ratio.
Marten sex ratio of juveniles should be 50-50.or close to it during trapping season.
If trappers are actively avoiding adult females by spacing their sets farther apart there will be a skewed ratio due to that.

My sex counts are accurate. Last two years trapped 65 marten. 40 males 15 females and 10 unknown.

Yep something wrong with the population there with those sex ratios during trapping season.
The sex ratio gets skewed toward males in late winter when the carrying capacity of the land is set.Juvenile female marten are the first to succumb at that time of year,especially after a long hard winter.
But by fall juveniles in trapping season will be 50 50 or close to it,bringing the sex ratios back.

all killed in lynx boxes in November 2020 & 2021

All trapped near logging roads traveling by truck. Could be the females don't travel as much as the males in the more open areas.