Coke is doing fine. See him in Fairbanks a few times a year. Still guiding.

Well, I know what happened to the horse he rode in on!!!

Also had a beaver hit a 330 while I still had the springs in my hands.....setting it in front of his entrance.
That was like a lightning bolt going off in my hands ![/quote]

Happened to me also. The worse part is he went out into the pound and I hand to go in after it. Was cold!

Also had a beaver hit a 330 while I still had the springs in my hands.....setting it in front of his entrance.
That was like a lightning bolt going off in my hands ![/quote]

Happened to me also. The worse part is he went out into the pond and I hand to go in after it. Was cold!

I believe he was working for the park. The park has to apply for and receive a permit from the Division of Wildlife Conservation. Which has been done annually for all the years i know of. with no denials. I do not believe Gordy ever collared a wolf (but i could be mistaken), but he tracked them and observed them.

I recognize that green sweat shirt.

GREASY green sweatshirt!

I'm not much of a trapper, just a spoilt city child, but I have a story.

I caught a fox last winter in the forest surrounding dachas (gardening communities) nearby, technically the closest place to my home where it's legal to trap. It was a silver fox and we don't have silver foxes. It was very pretty and its fur was silky rather than wooly. I showed it to a local fur buyer and he said he was positive it was an Aleutian fox. I thought perhaps it was a lost pet fox because crazy people apparently sometimes keep them as exotic pets, and tried to find a chip with the NFC scanner in my smartphone but there was no chip. Long shot, but I still decided to contact an old acquaintance, a geneticist who used to work with tame foxes in the Belyaev experiment.

She contacted the experimental farm workers but they said that all foxes were accounted for. I showed her a picture of that fox, she asked if it had worn teeth, and I said uh, yes, and she pestered the ranch workers again and they admitted they had a female fox escape from its cage, but assumed it was still milling around the sheds because it's what such runaways normally do, and there is a 10 feet tall double fence around the experimental farm, with guard dogs inbetween, going 2 feet into the ground. That fox still managed to escape, roamed around for a few weeks, traveled several miles and came to me. It was also the fattest fox I've ever seen, so it had adapted well to living in the wild. Some of these foxes have worn teeth because they play with their metal bowls from boredom. They told me the fox was from the control group, so neither an aggressive nor a friendly one. I had a fox permit so it was legally harvested, but it still felt weird.

This year, I put one bodygrip box in exactly the same spot, targeting Siberian weasel mostly, and caught the biggest sable-marten hybrid I've ever seen (and these hybrids are my special interest and I have been looking for them all over West Siberia for years), then a week later, the dumbest red fox I've seen (it climbed six feet up a willow bush and stuck its face into the box from the top), and then the prettiest dark sable I've ever seen (it would have brought me a fortune 100 years ago). We didn't even have any sable or marten here until a few years ago. That sable had Siberian pine pitch mats in its fur, meaning it had traveled at least 80 miles across multiple highways, railroads, farmland and residential areas in less than a month after molting into its winter fur, because it's how close the nearest Siberian pine forests are, as the crow flies.

The spot must be haunted or something.

Tatiana , keep up the good work on catching a nice variety of fur ! I enjoy reading your posts .

It was mid December and we had plenty of snow and cold temps I had a dead cow for a bait station with snares set all around it and had been catching a few coyotes on a regular basis as well as a bobcat as a bonus . I had walked into some rim rocks that had brush patches around it so I set some more snares on each side of a bobcat toilet .

When I returned to check them,it had snowed with even more snow in the forecast .

I got to one of the new sets leading to the bobcat toilet and the snare was stretched out towards a pile of snow that looked like a bobcat got caught !
I gave the snare cable a tug and out popped a cottontail head with the snare lock behind it's left ear and the rest of it was gone !

After resetting a snare I walked to the next snare and here was a big coyote with the snare lock behind it's left ear also and it had bunny on it's breath ! Ha ha

I also found a old wood stock tank in another coulee and as I walked down to it my foot slipped a bit and out popped a single bit axe head that at one time was used to chop ice off of the tank for the cows to get a drink !

What does that mean?

Sable-marten hybrid? Would be interested in more on that!

I stumbled on this thing on my main line in a big bay about 15 years ago. I hadn't seen it before, but a LOOONG time ago, there was a hard rock mine across the bay from my line and part of my line was used for timber at the mine. Guessing early 1900s.
Anyway, after I took this picture a huge storm rolled in, lasting about 10 days. 10' plus seas and gale force winds kept me away from the line for close to 2 weeks, and when I got back that track was nowhere to be found. A year or two later, again after a big storm, I spotted just the top of part of the track. The first gale and surf had buried it in sand and cobble. The second storm was powerful enough to partially expose it. Over the years it would get covered again, and again partially re-appear, but I will never forget stumbling onto that chunk of extremely heavy steel and then find it missing!

I don't want to hijack a big scary Alaskan thread

Some theory is explained here, this research hasn't been published officially yet... sometime soon...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.01.668050v1.full.pdf

They are two good distinct species that used to be separated by big glaciers but their current ranges overlap (not by big parts of their respective ranges), so there are F1 hybrids as well as mixed blood individuals, with different proportions.
The same is currently happening with your American and Pacific marten, but less dramatically.

visually, it's interesting... it's a bit like human face/trait recognition, when you've seen plenty of marten and sable you can point out hybrids and individuals with admixtures, some features are subtle but it's usually a combination of several features that gives them away. Tail length, fur length and texture, colors, throat patch size and shape, fuzz on the feet, face shape (if you're dealing with whole animals, not just skins). Some hybrids are a beautiful 50/50 combo of features, but not necessarily the same features in different individuals. I hoard interesting skins, to understand it better, and sample them all for genetic studies

Many thanks for your fascinating info , Tatiana. My mind's eye went crazy trying to visualize that hybrid cross. I would love to see more photos of such animals , close up. If that isn't possible, I will just keep using my artist's imagination

If you don't want to hijack the thread, start another one here. I'm sure plenty of us would be interested. I'm not even really sure on the difference between sable and marten, until reading some of your stuff the last year or two, I thought sable was just the fur industry term for marten, much like lynx cat is the fur industry's term for high quality bobcats.

Never caught a bobcat but what I have seen there is no comparison to a lynx! Correct me.